Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) -- China's government said it stepped up monitoring of short messages sent between the nation's 383 million mobile-phone users to prevent fraudsters, pornographers and other ``unhealthy elements'' from exploiting the technology.

Police found 107,000 illegal short messages and shut down 9,700 cell-phone accounts since the start of November, Wu Heping, vice minister of the Ministry of Public Security, said at a briefing in Beijing today that was broadcast on the Internet.

China is using filtering software to combat a proliferation of scams encouraged by a text-message market that's growing at more than 50 percent a year. The government is also using the technology to control news and information, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based advocacy group.

``There are many scam artists trying to use short messages to get banking data and swindle people,'' said Edward Yu, chief executive of Beijing-based technology market research company Analysys International. ``This crackdown is a long time coming.''

Banking frauds accounted for 44 percent of the messages tracked by police, followed by advertisements for illegal lotteries, prostitution or pornography services, and illicit requests for financial information, according to the public security ministry's Wu. The remaining 26 percent related to ``other crimes,'' he said, without elaborating.

Mobile-phone subscribers in China sent 217.76 billion text messages last year, a 58.8 percent increase from 2003, according to the U.S.-based Mobile Data Association. China is the world's biggest mobile-phone market by users.

Surveillance Centers

The public security ministry has upgraded its filtering system over the past few years to catch criminals, Wu said. That's not the only motive, according to Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for press freedom.

China has 2,800 surveillance centers that monitor text message traffic for political comments as well as illegal activities, the group said in a July 2004 report that cited a press release by Beijing-based Venus Info Tech Ltd.

Venus Info Tech received permission from the public security ministry to market a surveillance system that allows authorities to filter messages for ``false political rumors'' and ``reactionary remarks,'' the Paris-based group said. The system generates automatic alerts to police and saves information about suspect texts for 60 days, it said.

The crackdown on short-message services mirrors a tightening of rules on Internet content announced in September. Under the rules, Web sites that post materials that ``threaten national security'' can be fined, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Banking Scams

``We are enforcing the national short messaging law and we are taking our jobs seriously,'' Vice Minister Wu said at today's briefing.

Nine groups of fraudsters tricked people out of more than 1 million yuan ($124,000) by persuading them to give their bank account numbers and automatic teller machine passwords, the Ministry of Information Industry said in a release on Nov. 2.

The fraudsters send text messages that purport to come from customers' banks and ask them to participate in a bank program that requires them to reveal their personal information, according to the ministry's Wu.

So far, officials have frozen 108 bank accounts belonging to criminal organizations in cooperation with the China Banking Regulatory Commission, Wu said. The ministry didn't disclose the number of people arrested.

Police tracked 47,000 messages related to such banking scams since the start of November, the ministry said. Illegal lotteries accounted for 14,000, or 13 percent, of the total messages tracked. Advertisements for prostitution or pornography-related services accounted for 7,062, or 7 percent. A further 11,000, or 10 percent, were sent by groups soliciting fake receipts or other financial information, according to the ministry.

China Mobile (Hong Kong) Ltd., the nation's biggest cellular operator, said on Oct. 20 that its 196.7 million subscribers sent 178.5 billion short messages in the first nine months of this year, up from 109.8 billion a year ago.

To contact the reporter on this story: Allen T. Cheng in Beijing at Acheng13@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 6, 2005 05:39 EST