Since Japanese mobiles do not in general support Bluetooth (for example at NTT Docomo, you'll find 3 devices out of 24 that have this feature) I find the account of Bluetooth spam in Tokyo rather hard to believe. Maybe the spammers are a bit ahead of their times, here.

and if they do, they should at least know their sole language well enough to clock that they are monolinguals, not mono-linguists.

Mono-linguists would be a neologism to refer to language scholars who study only one language.

Honestly, native speakers of English...

The number of phone MODELS available with Bluetooth gives no indication of the number of Bluetooth PHONES in circulation.

Customers could be buying only the blueteeth phones and none of the others...

I live in Europe, where I have been often told that anyone can have my bank account number - the only thing they can do with it is give me money.

I understand that the sorry situation in the Land Of The Formerly Known As Free makes it so that if the Social Security Number, or the bank account number, fall into the wrong hands, the person is up the creek without a paddle, but do I risk the same thing in Europe ?

Especially given the fact that the notion of credit rating has nothing to do with what is practiced in the US, what are my risks ? Because I have been noticing that spam has increasingly been present in my native language in my mailbox. It used to be that anything in English not from a friend I knew I could confidently delete without a thought - all the important stuff I got was normally not in English.

But now my mail is polluted with spam that is not in English. Heck, I have been receiving spam in four languages now ! And that makes it a bit more tricky (not much, though) to get rid of the stuff easily.

I know this will get worse before it gets better (hmm, will it ever actually get better ?), so I am wondering : what is the risk to me ?

You will be interested in this article then...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7174760.stm

Ben

Lucky him. I get about 4 SPAMs/month via SMS here in S. Texas over Verizon. I forward them to Verizon, but get no acknowledgment of them.