It's annoying enough to get spammed with e-mails throughout the day with information you don't want, but what about the ones going to your phone?  The term "smishing" is being used now to describe these spam text messages that people are receiving on their cell phones.  The problem is that some people are visiting the URLs that are given in the message or calling the phone number the message contains.  There are a couple of problems with this...

First, if you are visiting the listed Web site, whatever product or service listed is probably a scam.  Second, the overall goal for the person who spammed you in the first place is to get your personal information so they may have just succeeded.  If you call the phone number listed in the text message, the person on the other end is getting confirmation that the number they spammed is active so it's just better to delete it and put it out of your mind.

Unlike e-mail, cell phones don't have advanced filtering systems to weed out spam so "smishing" may see an increase in the next few months.  A good rule of thumb to follow is that if you don't recognize the number that the text message is sent from, don't open it...just delete it.