Being bugged by spam? Report it now

If you live in Beijing and have bought a car or house in recent years, you should have already fallen prey to increasingly annoying and sophisticated spam text messages that dog you day and night.

A trickle of the unwanted texts started to arrive after I bought my home when I moved back to Beijing in 2005. They grew in intensity after I bought my first car a year later, bombarding me with offers from loans to sales promotions to housing advertisements.

Occasionally, the direct market is also laced with scams. Perhaps all high net-worth Chinese men, whose numbers the spammers have harvested illegally, have received texts from "college girls" who want to sell their virginity to raise money for their ailing fathers.