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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…
If you don’t, block and report the number. Otherwise you indicate to the spammer that you’re a bonafide human, and they’ll even sell that information to others.
This applies to picking up calls from numbers you don’t know. Sometimes you’ll hear silence while you repeat “Hello?” and the call drops. That’s just a machine testing to see if you’re a worthwhile target.
Instead, let unknown calls go to voicemail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that US law has carve outs for politicians and their campaigns. They are exempt on both email and phone spam as I recall.
These people are terrorists to my email filters, what can I do to make their behavior really hurt?
For email spam: you can use your email provider’s report spam feature so more of their emails end up in spam folders and their money is wasted. You can look at the email headers to figure out which platform sent the email (like Mailgun or Sendgrid or whatever) and report the email to them, which may cause their account to be shut down and then to be banned as a business from that platform. You can use the FTC and FCC reporting websites from my other comment. You could also report each incident to your state’s authorities like your attorney general’s office, by saying you suspect potential fraudulent practices or abusive practices or violation of privacy or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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
But in my experience, they do actually slow down if you reply STOP on all of 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…
There is a tiny bit of vetting involved and you've got to be a slightly larger account, but it is possible, so it's not safe to assume that if the message is coming from Twilio that STOP will block them at the platform level.
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…
I’m not saying that’s your problem, but it’s worth checking.
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…
Well, whats the company?!
If you ever get a suspicious/spam text, looking up the carrier is a good first step. Most of the garbage I get comes from VoIP numbers because they can easily spin up disposable numbers from places like Telnyx or Bandwidth.com. That's not to say someone can't be using an actual mobile phone, but usually it's coming from some VoIP system.
But generally, when I was using a Pixel I made extensive use of Google's SMS spam blocker and reported all of the random political texts that kept using different names. (And eventually Google's filter learned)
Now on iPhone (outside the US), there's no junk detection and I don't trust any app to not keep my texts. But I found that blocking a bunch of shady shortener domains + WhatsApp links with an app like Blocky[1] catches like 95% of them.
1: A power user app that lets you make your own wildcard & regex filters for texts. Offline and open source. Looks like it's delisted by now, but this was the link to it: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blocky-sms-filter/id1535374786 . Maybe I'll make one to replace it when I get a Mac.