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Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

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Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#211

Post by Scoundreller »

otterley wrote: post #106
dotancohen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So reply asking if they want you to notify authorities in their city. I doubt that the kidnappers are reading every message. And even if they are, better to let the kidnappers know that they are being encroached upon.

These outfits are often working under the protection of the local authorities thanks to rampant bribery.

> These outfits are often working under the protection of the local authorities thanks to rampant bribery.

I don’t think I’ll ever visit Cambodia and I can call Cambodia for a few cents a minute as well as their embassies.

Their local authorities can’t block us all!

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#212

Post by upwardbound »

adastra22 wrote: post #97
jonathanstrange wrote: post #69

A Golden Rule of the internet says that you should never reply to unwanted texts on any medium: - stalkers and trolls live off reactions, both positive and negative ones - spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side - colleagues and friends will hate you because everybody thinks they're important Replying only has negative effects. Use client-side filtering, kill files, blocking functions…

Except that STOP is handled at the carrier level and isn't even returned to the sender. It's effectively a mandated block command.

That's not true at least in the USA on my carrier. Some spammers just ignore the STOP and continue messaging anyways.

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#213

Post by iamthepieman »

no_op wrote: post #186
sim7c00 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it such a weird thing, maybe it's nice in some cases, but really this is a weird mechanism. Phone numbers are exchanged a lot and repurposed. Most providers/carriers will likely have a do-not-use-for-x-amount-of-time bin to put newly reclaimed numbers in, but after a while, it will always be re-used. hence this kind of issue can happen. In my country there's a place to register to disallow unsolicited marketin…

The US has a 'Do Not Call' registry for unsolicited phone calls, but technically doesn't need one for texts because it's illegal to send marketing texts without prior consent in the first place. Thing is, 'consent' often just means failing to notice a checkbox during a signup flow or something, so people end up getting junk anyway. Even more annoyingly, politicians wrote in an exception for themselves. In combination…

Even worse if someone else signs up somehow using your contact info. I got signed up (via email thankfully) for a political party in another country and no amount of "mark as spam", unsubscribe or replying would get me off the list. Eventually I just had to create a filter that dumps those messages in the trash.

It must be something with non-U.S. English speaking countries because I get numerous semi-spam messages in email and text for services in Australia and the U.K. casinos with account numbers or PINs, two step notifications for national car registries, banking, contractors asking about work or sending invoices. Maybe it's just English speaking countries have a lot of people named "iamthepieman"

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#214

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

coldpie wrote: post #205
ryandrake wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for semi-legitimate spam like real businesses and political fundraising I don’t distinguish anymore. There is no such thing as a legitimate spammer. If you contact me without my consent, you are at best a nuisance and at worst a threat. You get marked as spam if E-mail, and blocked+trashed otherwise. I really wish SMS and iMessage had a way to mark senders as spammers.

Okay. But if your goal is to reduce the amount of spam you receive, and if one group of senders responds to opt-out signals as an indicator to send more spam while the other group responds to opt-out signals as an indicator to send less spam, then the distinction matters, regardless of how you feel about it. > I really wish SMS and iMessage had a way to mark senders as spammers. On my iOS phone in the US, there is a…

That report junk feature doesn’t do anything much. It only sends Apple the report, not your carrier. You will notice it also only appears on some messages - I think contacts that have not messaged you before.

To report people properly and actually improve the messaging experience for everyone, you have to follow the steps I mentioned in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41704119

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#215

Post by [deleted] »

senojsitruc wrote: post #125

I tried that recently with some political texts. I do not recommend. It could be coincidental, but I suddenly started receiving a lot more political texts. It might be true that I stopped receiving texts FROM THAT NUMBER, it's clearly the same organization spamming me from other numbers. Whatever. I'd rather get spam texts than robocalls.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#216

Post by joshstrange »

I often use the “Report junk” button on iOS but after spending years being bombarded with political SMS messages that I didn’t sign up for (always addressed me by the wrong name, and I’ve had my number for well over 20 years) I finally got relief.

I found out which provider was sending the SMS and contact their abuse line (I would reply STOP but they would just send from a different phone number) and got the name of the customer who was sending the messages. I then contacted that company and got them to blacklist my number (they were a company for sending political sms only, I have no worries about needing to get an sms they would send).

I now get 1-2 political spam messages a month, if that, and I’ve been too lazy to hunt down the source of the few remaining spammers. It went from 2-3 a day to 1-2 a month, huge relief.

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#217

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

senojsitruc wrote: post #125

I tried that recently with some political texts. I do not recommend. It could be coincidental, but I suddenly started receiving a lot more political texts. It might be true that I stopped receiving texts FROM THAT NUMBER, it's clearly the same organization spamming me from other numbers. Whatever. I'd rather get spam texts than robocalls.

Don’t reply to them. See what I said in my other comment ok. How to report spam and actually make an impact on this problem:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41704119

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#218

Post by zaik »

Scoundreller wrote: post #210
solardev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor is dirt cheap in some parts of the world, especially compared to the tens of thousands of dollars American retirees might have access to!

My deep and probably founded fear is that I’m on a list of people to scam in 40 years when I’ll be at least mildly demented. Hopefully my efforts to waste scammers time instead of “just hang up” has got me removed from a few high-value lists.

You think scammers 40 years in the future will use a target list of phone numbers from today?

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#219

Post by aftbit »

solardev wrote: post #23
mikesabat wrote: post #17

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…

I have gotten three kinds of those:

1. Someone texting the previous owner of my number (John). I got all kinds of traffic for him, including debt collectors, friends, ex-girlfriends, employers, etc. I gather John ran into a spot of financial trouble, dropped his phone-number, and skipped town.

2. An old high-school classmate trying to find my mom found my number on one of those people search sites, probably associated with her address.

3. A random girl who just wanted to chat. I talked to her for a few messages, but didn't progress to a romance scam. She seemed real to me, but who knows?

Re: Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

#220

Post by PaulMest »

joshstrange wrote: post #216

I often use the “Report junk” button on iOS but after spending years being bombarded with political SMS messages that I didn’t sign up for (always addressed me by the wrong name, and I’ve had my number for well over 20 years) I finally got relief. I found out which provider was sending the SMS and contact their abuse line (I would reply STOP but they would just send from a different phone number) and got the name of…

This sounds like my exact scenario. Can you outline in a bit more detail how you traced it back to the origin to ask to be put on a blacklist?
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