Svensson, a student at the computer science institute at the University of Oslo, has set up the web site punksms.com to allow people to use his service. By registering at the site a mobile phone user can select the phone number that should appear to send the message and then fire off an SMS.
The receiver has no way of determining that a message is false - the SMS bears a normal sender number and name and the fake sender never knows their number has been abused.
"The time is over when you could be sure of knowing a message's sender. The idea is that people can fool each other and have fun sending silly messages," Svensson told Aftenposten's Norwegian web desk.
"The possibility of forging text messages has been present for a long time. This has been used by criminals. People believe they can be 100 percent sure about the sender, but that is not true," Svensson said.
Svensson makes it clear at his site that his service is intended only for fun and should not be used to disturb or injure anyone. All information sent is logged and can be traced back to the sender. Svensson said he would not hesitate to deliver his logs to police if punksms was misused.
Svensson doesn't think the service is likely to be abused by youngsters.
"Kids are used to e-mail and chatting where you can't be sure about who the sender is. They will tackle this better than the older generation," Svensson said.
Svensson said that the GSM standard would have to be changed to stop this kind of forgery and he felt it was better that as many people as possible learned that they couldn't completely trust SMS texts.
His current project is trying to find a way to get pure phone calls to send false ID information to mobile phones so that cell users would see a sender name flashing when being rung, but with a different caller on the line.
Information chief Esben Tuman Johnsen at Telenor Mobil said that they would look into trying to find a way to prevent SMS spoofing. Information director Anne Marie Storli at the Norwegian Post and Telecommunications Authority said that there was no existing regulation that pertained to SMS forgery.
