21–30 of 386 posts
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”?
Replying STOP sends a clear signal that this number is being used by a real person.
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…
Speaking mostly for the US here. 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+…
My understanding is that they will pretend it's a wrong number, but then make a joke or talk about some innocuous hobby and try to build up trust over weeks/months to eventually phish or scam you. I forget where I read it (maybe reddit?) but there was a poster who mentioned a personal experience with one such scam, basically a fake romance scam that led to them losing tens of thousands of dollars wiring money to a fake person who pretended to have fallen in love with them over weeks of back and forth texting.
It doesn't have to work on everyone to be profitable, just the once-in-a-while lonely pensioner!
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/05/why-its-not...
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.
I gave a few small donations and foolishly didn’t use a disposable email address. That was over four years ago and I’m still getting over a dozen spam emails a day from candidates I have never even heard of.
Maybe there is some central actblue list I can opt out of but I don’t even think I created an account with them
Never donated a penny since
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…
You can play wack-a-mole with uBlock, but it's wack-a-mole, and poor bandaid over our government agencies not doing the job they're supposed to be doing. You'll never get them all; AFAICT recently, my own state government sold my information to private corporations.
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…
There are short codes that are dedicated to OTP. Replying STOP to this number should not affect the ability for you to receive OTP for a different company login.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking mostly for the US here. 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+…
> 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? My understanding is that they will pretend it's a wrong number, but then make a joke or talk about some innocuous hobby and try to build up trust over weeks/months to eventually phish or scam you. I forget where I read i…
No. Reacting to any unwanted contact just moves you further into their funnel. Ideally don’t even open the text.
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.
I've been interested in donating before, but this is actually the main thing holding me back. I get so little spam and unwanted messages (email and text), and I am trying extremely hard to keep it that way. So thanks for validating my decision :)
I wish we had something similar for phone numbers
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…
I receive, however, a fair measure of suspicious SMS, real-estate scams, political campaigns both legit and sus, and some pretty slick "USPS shipping" RCS phishing messages.
Now my Pixel Pro has a lot of spam protections and I need to leave them all completely disabled, because I routinely need to answer inbound voice calls from sketchy numbers, time-sensitive, because they could be a delivery driver or a taxi service. I just never know. The app does tag known spammer numbers, which sometimes turn out legit after all?
I consider SMS the worst mode of communication bar-none. It's locked to a single device with a single SIM. They can't be categorized, organized, tagged, forwarded, managed en masse, exported, or anything. To me it's a single-stream jumble of electronic jerks demanding my immediate attention and reactions over a most impersonal medium. I likewise disdain voice calls in many cases, so don't get me started.