The government will take punitive action against marketers sending unwanted text messages or phone calls without the consent of the recipients beginning March 31. The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) said March 29 that it will launch the "opt-in formula" for advertising through fixed-line phones, mobile handsets and faxes. Under the new scheme, marketers will be prohibited from placing promotional calls with the dialing prefix of 060 or sending advertisements to users who do not give their permission. Furthermore, marketers must obtain an additional endorsement for mobile messages between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. Violators will be subject to a maximum of 30 million won in fine. The MIC said the ministry would show no mercy in imposing the highest fine in extreme cases. It has never levied a fine of more than 10 million won on illegal spammers, even though the ceiling was raised to 30 million won in January 2004 from the previous 10 million won. "Those who receive spam messages or phone calls without their explicit agreement can report them to an anti-spam center at the Korea Information Security Agency," MIC director Jang Seok-young said. Jang added that people could report the telephone numbers of unlawful spammers and the time that the advertisements arrived to the center at 02-1336 or at www.spamcop.or.kr. To facilitate the permission-based marketing programs in a full-fledged manner, the MIC more than quadrupled the daily call capacity of the anti-spam center to about 7,000 calls from 1,700. Jang said it would focus on three types of 060 calls or messages: those which typically carry sexual contents, plus promotions for car loans or realty transactions. Mobile spam has surfaced as a gadfly to wireless users as shown by a recent survey by Cetizen, an Internet site for cell phone subscribers. The survey found up to 94.9 percent of 1,840 respondents had received unwanted messages or calls through their handsets. "Almost 90 percent of mobile spam is composed of 060 calls or messages about loan or realty ads accounting for the remainder. We expect the new opt-in policy to bring the problem under control," Jang said. It will also be illegal to send messages or make calls to sign people up for giving consent for spam. Despite the upbeat expectation of the government, however, some experts remained concerned that the government policy may only trigger mobile marketers' migration to cyberspace. They have good cause to be concerned because the opt-out policy will be applied afterward to e-mail, unlike mobile or fixed-line calls. In other words, online mass-mailers don't need consent from recipients as long as they specify whether the e-mails are advertisements in the subject line and recipients can reject such bulk messages. "The MIC's new plan might end up increasing spam e-mail at worst. The government needs to find measures to reduce the amount of overall spam both online and through mobile phones," a Seoul analyst said.