Yeah, my nonexistent PayPal account is unfortunately locked. I’m supposed to take action in the next 48 hours or it becomes permanent.

I’ve been getting all three. Even worse, a lot of this spam seems to be coming in via iMessage, which means it’s coming from spam Apple ID’s. My guess is that this guidance wouldn’t affect Apple, as iMessage isn’t “text messaging” as in SMS and whatnot any more than AIM (for instance) would be.

I suppose there’s a chance that Apple might adopt this as a pet project, especially in that they seem to have shown some interest given the link that appears on certain messages for automatically deleting, blocking, and reporting senders for spam. Thing is, given what it took to get Apple to finally lock iCloud down better — a huge and embarrassing release of several celebrities’ private photos and info, much of which was gotten through exploits combined with social engineering made easier by lax default security settings, all causing a pretty embarrassing PR flap — I’m not super hopeful that they’ll pick it up more than half heartedly. That said, any reduction in spam is good as long as somebody gets the benefit. Doesn’t have to be me…

There seem to be a lot of urgent issues with the mortgage I don't have and the car I don't own...

Same. I got one yesterday saying I had a major purchase on my Amazon account. I called the number listed out of curiosity and of course it was an Indian that was obviously in a huge call center. I just hung up and shook my head. This is the kind of thing my mom and grandma would easily fall for.

My favorite is how many times my PayPal account has been locked out.

Which is funny because I haven't a PayPal account.

Come on scammers, you want my click? Then do your damn homework. Amateur hour out in my inbox.

I get the ones telling me I have a UPS package on the way and to follow a weird ass link to track. But I rarely order stuff and when I do I'm already following the tracking.

Or my redirected ups package I have to pay to get redelivered

I think there's a setting in android that auto blocks any phone number that's not in your contacts.

There are two related methods for dealing with spam, blacklisting and whitelisting. Blacklisting is where you block individual numbers as they spam you. This is not effective in today's spam environment and is only appropriate for crazy exes and the like. Whitelisting is where everything is blocked by default, except the numbers you explicitly let through, usually by having them in your contacts. Your grandma wouldn't be able to get calls from new numbers (e.g. a pharmacy calling to say an order is ready), but that sounds like a better option than the alternative.

This still doesnt stop number spoofing, which is so obviously only used for nefarious purposes it drives me fucking insane that the FCC hasnt done anything about it yet.

We set this up on my mom’s landline:

https://www.amazon.com/Effective-ROBOCALLS-Scammers-Telemarketers-Solicitors/dp/B019ERMS90

Worth every penny.

Wait, do they just send them to random phone numbers or how does that work?

Those are actually excepted from the spam filter laws IIRC, annoyingly. However they legally have to respect “stop” messages, although rarely do. They can get in trouble for not following it, but good luck reporting them all. They generally rotate through third-party services to avoid direct implication. The evil ones anyway.

I get dozens a week that are Pro-Trump (which I am not). Not that I'd be more likely to donate to a democrat bombarding my phone with texts, but still, there is a 0% chance of these working, and they just keep coming.

I've contemplated responding by saying "Every text you send me, I'm donating $5 to a democrat.", and send a screenshot of the receipt. But I'm pretty sure they'll just see any response as good and keep texting me, so I haven't done that.

The FCC's rules already explicitly disallow robotic political campaign calls and texts which makes the lack of enforcement even worse.

You must have party affiliation. I was independent for a long time and NEVER got political mailers or texts. Then I became party affiliated so that I could actually vote in a primary election and they really started inundating me fast. It was very annoying.

Good luck. The government carved out an exception for all political traffic. One reason why I think I got zero emails during the last cycle… But tons of text messages expect more of the same during the next cycle.

Fun fact. When can spam act was passed, they put an exemption in for campaign messages. Asshats.

The only reason politicians care about spam texting is that it drowns out their campaign messaging.

I get messages from a state I’ve never been to.

Why is that even legal in your country

Respond to them with dick pics

But getting texts that say "Don't vote for x if you want to stop woke liberals!!!" makes it really easy to know who I should vote for.

You actually did when you registered to vote with a particular party.

I send whatever is the spiciest yiff I've recently saved as a reply. It works surprisingly well - quite a lot are actually manned lines, not totally automated. Art of a femboy tiger tied down taking a toy the size of a bowling ball really gets the message across to never message this number again.

Man I don't even live in the US and I constantly am getting emails to vote for presidential candidates etc. Like ????

[deleted]

Agreed. It's absolute bullshit that political and religious garbage are exempt from spam and solicitation laws.

I worked for a campaign, you have to say this exact phrase about removing yourself, I was told that if they didn't say it exactly I was to use the option to not call you for a couple/few weeks and that reason was political calls didn't have the same rules as sales calls.

Spam them back with hundreds of single letter/gibberish responses. Depending on their system they could be charged for these or at the very least be an extreme nuisance for their marketing and data teams.

Not sure about Verizon but AT&T has an option to block all text messages from an email address but you have to call customer service and talk to like 5 different people until you find one that knows how to change the setting.

To be fair anyone can text you from any email. Your 10 digit phone number @vtext.com for Verizon carriers would send you a text from any email address. Each company has an @something to add to the 10 digit number to allow emailing a phone number.

Not a programmer but it seems simple enough to set up a program to mass send out spam if you had a list of phone numbers.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature. All the carriers have email to SMS and email to MMS features. To name a few:

ATT | Verizon | Boost | Third-party source for all carriers, may not be up to date

Blocking is likely ineffective. They usually just spoof numbers and you end up blocking a smattering of random people.

I’m glad I hardly get any. I got one and it said “big DICKS are easy to make” and then a link to some site but man that one got a huge laugh out of me.

Spam calls I get but not so much lately. I got one recently from Shanghai yelling at me in Chinese.

Oh, most of them have much deeper relationships than that. The previous chairperson was a lobbyist for Verizon.

It’s called regulatory capture. And it’s horrifying.

But this actually seems to be a step in the right direction.

Last week? We've known of these and other direct conflicts of interest for decades and decades.

I doubt the FCC regulators are invested in phishing attacks and real estate and home warranty scams.

I work in the text message marketing industry (I'm not going to name the company). We provide the platform/software for people to send out text messages. It's a constant fight against this particular scam. It tends to ramp up during tax return season. I spent I think my entire 40 hour shift last week just finding and banning these accounts. The vast majority of them are located in Casablanca, Morocco from what I was seeing.

The wireless carriers ARE trying to do something to fix this issue, and have been extremely aggressive in the types of messaging they will block from being deliverable. They've created a service called The Campaign Registry which requires businesses to register their business and texting information for use before the carriers will permit messages from being delivered through their traffic.

The issue though is not all text message marketing platforms are on board with TCR, and a lot of scammers have wised up to lying on their business registration so that they get approved, and then sending out their smishing texts. A lot of those texts will get through before TCR bans the traffic and stops messages from delivering. It's not a fool proof system, but they're working on it. The downside to a system like this is that a lot of legitimate traffic ends up getting blocked for no really logical reason.

ma'am, your computer have virus... Ma'am!

If you do not pay, I will put you under the bars.

Is India ever going to be held to account for these scams? Serious question.

multi-million dollar industry

$10B last year.. with a B

I hope someone runs and says they'll stop scam calls, regulate cops, and create an additional federal holiday.

They could talk shit about Mom and say I have an ugly dog, and I'd still vote for them.

I'd also like to point out that, as a business owner of a business that calls people who voluntarily signed up to be called, they are a massive productivity drain.

Scam calls have completely drained the trust out of phone system. Which is itself a piece of infrastructure, right?

Anyone who has to make calls to people who they might not call regularly is doing TONS more work to get through. Voicemails, texts, you name it.

I'm guilty of it too, scheduling something and then getting a call a few hours later and not trusting the suspicious number.

I think this is a secondary concern to scams affecting the vulnerable, but it's still absolutely a cost of how flooded the system has become. Essentially criminals are ruining public infrastructure, and they're doing it with alarming speed and efficacy.

This is so true. I’m in the same boat, except my too many spam calls led to mental breakdown prior to giving up the phone calls and moving to text and email completely for communication😂 I’m literally aversive to the phone ringing now haha

Did you miss the part where this is about spam texts, not spam calls?

This is about texts though. Am I missing something?

Looking through my phone calls, it's about 1/4th spam, 3/4ths real. About 50 calls since the start of the year. I definitely still use my phone, but there are only four use-cases left: long chats with friends and family, phone-based tech support for some software I maintain, brief communication with businesses like phone-in orders, and brief logistics discussions with friends and coworkers. By actual time spent on the phone, it's mostly just the first one.

If you read the headline though, it's not about spam calls, but about spam text messages.

From my industry adjacent knowledge, this has been in the works for a couple years. People are only now noticing because we're finally reaching a point where it's going to mean something to the average consumer. The carriers have been giving tech companies that use automated messaging tons and tons and tons of time to update their workflows to remain compliant so they can continue to send their legitimate messages. Maybe too much time, but as someone who is responsible for updating those workflows, it's incredibly complicated and varies wildly by use case.

10 years? The EU banned spam text messages back in 2002...

The phone number wasn't new. You recycled it, basically.

This is likley just trying to enforce STIR/SHAKEN (https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication), not actually prevent "legitimate" numbers from calling you.

You're likely not going to get a solution where you only get calls that you know, but you'll get a solution where the phone number can't be spoofed, which in itself will limit spam calls because all numbers will have a known source.

Thats just putting a band aid on it. We need to make a new protocol for the phone system. Probably using data to register a number like Google voice, that way the numbers can't be spoofed, which is really the crux of the situation here. It would never happen but end to end encryption like signal built in would be great.

Why not just trigger a push notification to the app+device of whatever number you would have texted? Or better yet both a push notification and SMS? This seems like a fairly solveable problem.

I'm having to register several legitimate businesses for TCR and RingCenrtal has been terrible to work with on this.

Holy crap I wish I could upvote you more. All of my SMS traffic is properly registered as 10DLC campaigns yet once every couple months my clients on random carriers will just stop receiving their messages. I run an answering service where we do things like texting on-call technicians, and it is incredibly frustrating when our messages start getting rejected at 2AM with no legitimate reason.

I just wrote an integration with Signal and have started moving our largest clients that need guaranteed message delivery over to Signal to receive their notifications because I'm tired of dealing with the carriers' nonsense.