Thousands of children vulnerable to phone filth

THE RECENT conviction of Royce Roberts from Caernarfon in Wales for sending indecent pictures of himself to children's mobile phones exposes how the UK's mobile networks are vulnerable to this kind of attack.

The scandal is that such events are entirely avoidable. Firms like Ace*comm have already supplied systems in the USA which can prevent children receiving calls and messages from unknown parties.

In fact, operators wouldn't even require specialist software if they implemented networks based on the latest technology - such as IMS.

According to Steve Edwards, chief marketing officer with Sonus networks, "With the development of next generation (NG) networks worldwide we're seeing great interest in innovative services like parental controls.

At the GlobalComm tradeshow we demonstrated parental controls based on our IMX applications platform that would enable parents to apply filters to their child's phone usage. These filters could have blocked messages from any unregistered user such as those this case [Royce Roberts]."

It's a big problem because more than one million children under 10 years old currently have mobiles in the UK, according to the consultancy, DhaliwalBrown.

As Jock Percy, a senior analyst with Ace*comm. Put it, "Parents need to protect their children and stop them being able to receive distressing communication of this kind. Many are now well aware of the threats that lurk on the internet, and the need to supervise children's surfing and chat room habits, but they seem much less aware of the need for similar protection on mobiles."

Royce's methods weren't even sophisticated. He simply ran up a £25,000 phone bill sending the indecent images to random phone numbers.

Evidence provided to the court showed that it was impossible to estimate how many children had received the indecent messages but it could have affected thousands.

Percy added, " Service providers in the UK should wake up to the demand that parents would have for this [kind of protection]." µ