It's the day many of us wireless industry insiders have been waiting for, the day mobile marketing spam finally hits North American shores. And it appears mobile spam may be here to stay.Here is a glimpse at the new problem:

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More than 200 consumers complained in Illinois alone after receiving the advertisements in October and November 2006 which read "We have someone interested in buying or renting your Time Share" and encouraged recipients to visit two internet websites.

It seems mobile and spam are matching up in two ways. The obvious is through the previous example, i.e. spammers are now targeting cell phones as these evil people embrace the third screen.

The second is that spammers are also using SMS systems to send spam to convential desktop email addresses. A clever mix-up that has helped add to the overall growth in spam over the last six months.

What can you do to protect your cell phone? Well, if you have a smartphone, there are some solutions out there designed to help you. But, be warned, mobile spam protection is very much in its infancy, so these solutions are still in their infancy.

And if you're just an average cell phone user with a feature-rich handset (i.e. you don't have a fancy smartphone, just a regular cell phone that gets text messages), there isn't much out there to help. So, for the time being, beware of strange text messages.