There is a law in Israel preventing spam telephone calls and SMS texts, but the law does not include election ads. One may file a complaint with authorities if one receives spam messages, and the sender may be fined NIS 1,000. However, this does not pertain to election ads. There are probably few in Israel who are not receiving SMS text messages for one political party or another these days, with less than a month to the elections for the 21st Knesset.

Many or most of the messages include clicking on the “click to remove” or “remove” option, leading one to believe one will not receive additional unwanted messages. However, according to the experts, many hackers are using bogus election messages to gain access to phones, and by clicking “remove”, one opens one’s phone to hackers.

This is particularly troublesome as the text messages have become an increasingly popular method of reaching the voting public, especially with an ability to reach thousands or tens of thousands of persons with a single click of a mouse. It appears the hackers have come to the same realization, that they too can reach tens of thousands of phones with the single click of a mouse. The advice given is for a recipient to simply block the messages from the sender’s number.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)