Chinese authorities said Monday they are investigating complaints that millions of cell phone users were spammed with unwanted text messages from advertisers.

The uproar by what China’s media has dubbed “Text-message Gate” has drawn apologies from a major advertiser and the country’s biggest mobile phone carrier, China Mobile. The commercial text messages were sent to more than 200 million mobile phone users through two companies — China Mobile and its smaller rival, China Unicom.

“We urge parties concerned to beef up self-scrutiny to unmistaken their wrongdoing, which is profit-seeking in defiance of public interests,” Liu Yue, deputy head of the State Council’s Office for Rectifying Malpractice, said in a report posted on the Web site of the State Council, China’s cabinet.

Jason Jiang Nanchun, chairman of Nasdaq-traded Focus Media Holding Ltd., an advertising network operator, issued a public apology last week.

“Jiang Nanchun did confess that in public, although there was nothing pornographic in the messages, just some ads,” said

a company spokeswoman for Focus, who gave only her surname, Wu.

“But the incident violated our company’s rules and we are now working hard to fix the problem,” she said.

China Mobile said it was shutting down Focus Media’s report service port, preventing it from sending large amounts of short messages.

Both cell phone carriers plus set up hotlines to receive consumer complaints.

A spokesman for China Unicom’s Shanghai branch said the company was working hard to weed out spam messages. Violators are fined, and the worst offenders cut off from service, said the official. She, like many Chinese, refused to give her name.

Chinese cell phone users, who at more than 555 million are the biggest mobile communications market in the world, often receive unsolicited messages advertising cars, property and even fake documents.

Reports in the state media put the average received by local cell phone subscribers at eight…

Orginal post by Top Tech News