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If anyone legitimate gets caught up in that, I’m not sorry, blame the spammers for ruining it for everyone.
No. Reacting to any unwanted contact just moves you further into their funnel. Ideally don’t even open the text.
Once you've done that, they have 31 days to comply. There's plenty of legal entities that still will call you. If you answer, be polite, play the dope a bit to get the necessary unfortunately, ask how they got the number, then request a manager (yes, they have one, they will tell you they don't. Be polite but insist). When you get the manager politely ask for the company details, then tell them to immediately remove you from their list. Their business can be shut down for violations so once they know you know, they take you seriously (FCC takes reports more seriously when more detailed). They'll probably hang up on you, this is okay. Report them anyways (do this legal or not. They can get their voip removed and whatever shell they're using. It's still annoying for them and they might remove you because you're not worth it)
Second, don't answer phone calls. It is a practice to call, listen for a voice, then log that number as active.
Text messages are more difficult. It depends on the service but you can probably text stop. The difficulty of blocking is that legit services will use the same number to text you verification codes (can we fucking kill sms 2FA‽)
You can also sign up for a relay service (I use Firefox, but use whatever). I do this for email and every website has a unique email. Things like + for Gmail don't work and are filtered. You can also do this for phone numbers but it's more expensive.
Fourth, aggressively unsubscribe, report to FCC, change settings on devices, and so on. Do this for your non-tech savvy friends and family. Get them to use services like signal that are privacy preserving, don't leak metadata, AND is easy enough Grandma can use. Install ublock origin into their browsers and some other privacy preserving stuff and edit settings. Get them to use Firefox instead of Chrome if you can.
You need to do this to others because they will leak your information (most of my information leak comes from my parents. I even get emails in their names...)
If you want to take a step further, get a scrubbing service like optery. There's a lot of shady shit so be careful who you pick.
Edit: you can do a similar thing for mail. There is a $5 processing fee. Sucks, but sadly it's junk mail that keeps the post office alive (do not put "return to sender" unless it's prepaid. You need to give a reason otherwise your postal worker is just being nice and throwing it away for you. Don't create more work for them)
It kinda depends on which platform handles their bulk messages. For example, if they are messaging you through Twilio, replying with "STOP" will cause Twilio itself to opt you out of messages ( https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-fo... ), and the sender can't disable that ( https://help.twilio.com/articles/360034798533-Getting-Starte... ). It's kinda like how Mailchimp handles unsubscriptions fo…
The STOP keyword is mandated as unsubscribe at the carrier level (Verizon, ATT, TMo) not just the vendor level. So if you reply STOP, it's very likely that you will not receive another message from that number.
This will be true for any programmatic SMS vendor. There could be smaller scale & more manual approaches, but that would be rare.
There has been a big effort in the last year+ to clean up the space and require consent before any SMS is sent.
FWIW, somewhat surprisingly, my google pixel has an amazing spam filter for SMS and I rarely get SMS that I don't want.
What I want to know is, what's the purpose of those random texts that just say something like, "How's it been?" from a number that I've never communicated with? What's the angle there? Anyone know?
No. Reacting to any unwanted contact just moves you further into their funnel. Ideally don’t even open the text.
How does one “open a text”?
First off, add yourself to the FCC's do not call list: https://www.donotcall.gov/ Once you've done that, they have 31 days to comply. There's plenty of legal entities that still will call you. If you answer, be polite, play the dope a bit to get the necessary unfortunately, ask how they got the number, then request a manager (yes, they have one, they will tell you they don't. Be polite but insist). When you get the m…
If you work somewhere that is spamming and enshitified, the way to convince your boss is to show them that their domains are being blocked and that leads to less money. That's the language they understand. They don't understand metrics (that's how we got here in the first place. So don't get technical!)
In my experience it doesn't do much. For example, I made the mistake of contributing to the campaign of a politician. Now I get texts from candidates all over the country. If I reply STOP to one, I just get sent more texts from another number, for another candidate in another state. I just got tired of replying with STOP after the 20th time. This just guarantees I'm never giving any money to any candidate ever again.
So thanks for validating my decision :)