For the last twenty years most of our inboxes have been flooded with “friendly” letters from spammers, taking up to 70% of all email traffic globally. Even social networking and instant messaging platforms, that stormed into our daily lives a decade ago, were no exception. Despite the effort most service providers have been putting into preventing users from receiving junk messages, SPAM is still an issue.

Business representatives who use instant messengers for fast and cheap means of communication are at the top of spammers target list. The information shared by them is highly sensitive - it literally can cost millions for businesses. Believing that 3rd parties will never access your data, these days, is far fetched. And, just like to the rest of the world, SPAM is annoying to business leaders as well. But it is not the case for Sergey Kravtsov, the CEO of 4talk Global, developer of a cloud messaging app. Despite his personal contact details widely available online, Sergey claims that he hasn’t received a single unsolicited message since switching to 4talk. Can you imagine a year without SPAM?

Social networks and instant messaging services are one of the most effective and easiest ways to deliver SPAM, or so called SPIM – spam for instant messaging to unaware users. Attacking messaging platforms that have an open chat feature is a common practice among spammers because users can be easily searched and contacted. In most cases active chat users are barely 18. In 2013 in UK alone 91% of respondents aged 16 to 24 reported to have used instant messaging apps (source: statista.com). The danger lies in high probability of underaged kids receiving phishy links to inappropriate adult content while innocently chatting with friends about Bieber and Gomez on-and-off relationship.

“When we started thinking about a new IM, safety was one of the most important aspects. Even I was already tired of receiving endless amounts of spam everyday. The solution eventually evolved into 4talk. It’s an app that meets all IM requirements and is a real headache for spammers ” says Sergey.

4talk IM service uses phone number for user registration and identification. Once set up, any devices can be bundled to the same account. Phone number as the main form of registration gives users full control over who is trustworthy enough to be on the contacts list. Connections are made only via personal invitation. Definitely no “xxx15” user can contact or send a message without a permission, which makes 4talk a very safe communication platform for digital audience.

In an unfortunate event when a device is lost any user would want to protect his personal information. It can simply be done with 4talk just by deactivating that device, so all conversation history along with the files would not be available on the lost device anymore. All files and late night chats are stored in the cloud so they are available on the remaining devices.

Sergey stresses that, “Safety is something we must think prior to fun stuff. It’s not an option to have a SPAM attack and only then think of preventing repeated ones. We are pretty confident we have eliminated every security loophole at 4talk. However, we will keep on introducing new obstacles to prevent future malicious attacks so its not the best news for spammers.”


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Laura Vaitkevice