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There may have been times when you’ve gotten really bizarre messages on your phone advertising something strange. Chances are the number that it came from is part of an SMS server designed to send out spam text messages. There’s less of a chance that the number does exist and it is a spoofed number. This is because the knowledge of how to do this is not well known.

You may remember a few years ago that I wrote about being able to send do Google Searches via text message. I also talked about doing other things with just text messaging. If you recall alot of things I spoke about required you to know your sms & mms gateways. In that blog we used Verizon’s SMS gateway which was @vtext.com.

You may also remember I’ve written blogs about spoofing emails. Which required the use of an SMTP server. Remembering these things and knowing how to do them plays a big part in this post.

What You’ll Need

First of all we need a list of SMS gateways which we can get strait from wikipedia.
Next we will need an SMS server
Third good morals (Just because you know how to do these things doesn’t give you the right to abuse these priveldges and threaten people or spam people. Remember some people pay for each text message)

Now lets get started

We will need to first have an SMTP server. There are several ways on how to get an SMTP Server.

1. The easiest way to setup an SMTP server is to rent some hosting space. Most web hosting companies offer vanity E-Mail addresses with SMTP. Unforfortantly alot of the shared hosting accounts have restrictions that prevent you from spoofing. So you will need to pay extra for a Dedicated Server.
2. Setup your own SMTP server. This is the cheapest way to get an SMTP server. But does require more know how.

Now that you have an SMTP server you can spoof not just Text messages but E-Mails as well. Of course most email companies today block spoofed E-Mails so we will just use this for Text Messaging since cell providers still allow it. Of course you can setup another mail server to test your spoofs before actually sending them.

Now the Fun Part.

Lets start spoofing our text message.

First thing we will do is open up a connection to our mail server using telnet. To do this we will open up our terminal and type the following commands.

telnet mail.server.com 25

Obviously you would change mail.server.com to the domain of your mail server. If your mail server uses a different port other then port 25 you would change the number 25 to the number of your port. The output should look something like the following.

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to mail.server.com.
220 mail.server.com ESMTP Sendmail ?version-number?; ?date+time+gmtoffset?

Now that we are connected to the mail server we can start to spoof. We can decide where we want to send mail from. Since we are going to be sending sms messages and mms messages to cell phones we will need to send from the proper sms gateway.

Lets assume the person we are sending our spoof message to is using Verizon. We will want to use the Verizon sms gateway. Like [email protected] Now if we where sending our message to the number 800-555-1212 and we tried to make the same number appear it wont work. So the number you send the message to needs to be completely different with the same gateway.

Lets issue some more commands. Type the following.

HELO vtext.com

No the above is not a typo, it is spelled exactly as I typed it. But if your sending to phone number not on the Verizon Network then you would use a different domain name. The output for the above command should look like the following.

250 mail.server.com Hello vtext.com [loc.al.i.p], pleased to meet you

Now we need to tell the server where the message is coming from. To do this we will type the following.

MAIL FROM: [email protected]

The above should have the following output.

250 2.1.0 [email protected].. Sender ok

Now we will tell the server who to send the message to. Since in this example we are sending to a person using a Verizon cell phone. We will say the phone number of the person is 518-555-1212 which means the SMS gateway of the phone number would be [email protected] So to tell the mail server to send to that address we will type the following commands.

RCPT TO: [email protected]

The above should have the following output.

250 2.1.0 [email protected].. Recipient ok

Now lets send our message. To do this we type the following.

DATA

After you have typed DATA you will press ENTER twice. Now you start to type your message. Remember that SMS and MMS protocals usually have about 140 character limit. So you should try to keep your message short. After your done put a PERIOD on a single line then press ENTER. You should then get the following output.

250 2.0.0 ???????? Message accepted for delivery

Now you can close your connection by typing the following command.

QUIT

Tips: When sending your message you may want to send it with the first several lines like the following.

From: (800) 555-1212
To: (518) 555-1212

You may also consider putting someones name in the From: portion like the following.

From: John Doe
To: (518) 555-1212

Valuable resources.

Fone Finder (Find out the carrier of a phone number)

E-Mail Text Messages (List of SMS and MMS gateways)