Government agencies and telecommunication corporations have long promised to curb the proliferation of spam messages, but their efforts have so far proved fruitless.

According to a recent report, cellphone users in China received more than 300 billion spam messages in 2013, with Beijing cellphone users the worst hit, receiving 2.22 junk messages each day on average.

A comment in People's Daily says the only way to root out the problem is to cut the profit chain.