Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

Same happened to me, I replied saying I'd vote for Trump if I got another message ... never heard from them again ;)

Carriers in the US will block further texts from the number. The problem is it’s easy to get more numbers to spam from. This unfortunately makes it super hard for legit businesses to send transactional texts. (And Google is leading the charge in marketing ‘new features’ as a ‘transactional’ emails and push notifications)

The undeniable way to stop spam texts is to litigate. You’re put onto special lists at “number reputation” “data brokers” and the texts magically stop.

At up to $1500/violation, there are a lot of lawyers out there willing to help out with this.

It's done with slave labor.

It's called pig butchering. You kidnap people, hold them in Cambodia or whatever (lots of locations where local criminal gangs rule) so the locals don't bother checking for literally kidnapped slaves.

If police stop by, pay them off and make up a story about debts and punishment.

Then you use the slaves to scam others in pig butchering scams. If the slaves refuse, you beat them until they comply.

https://www.propublica.org/article/pig-butchering-scams-raid...

Don’t reply - that can be used to confirm your number is real. That info is used and resold to spam you even more. Also the STOP keyword works only on some source phone numbers technically.

In the US you can report the spam texts by forwarding the message to 7726 (“SPAM” on your keypad) at which point your carrier will text you back and ask for the source number. This doesn’t report the message to the government agencies but just your carrier, so they can hopefully punish the platforms sending spam.

Use a site like https://www.freecarrierlookup.com/ to see which carrier or platform sent it, which is useful for the next step of reporting offenders.

Now report the incident at the FTC and FCC websites. Do this every single time so it eventually creates difficulties for the platforms enabling this. Mention the carrier or platform carrying the spam. Put in all the details correctly.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new

If it is an iMessage you should use the built in “report junk” feature.

You can also go to the website of the platform that carried the message to report things through their abuse reporting pages, but not all of them are diligent. Some are happy taking money from spammers to abuse you, and will make you keep reporting each phone number that spams you because they do nothing about it except block that one number from contacting you. They won’t fix the underlying root cause of why they have all these illegal abusers as customers.

My personal experience is that the vast majority of text spam comes from a few offending text messaging platforms - for example Sinch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinch_AB) and Bandwidth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_Inc.) for example. These are potentially seemingly commercial platforms for spammers. Note that Sinch owns Mailgun and Mailjet too and has a long documented history of legal trouble due to spamming. Businesses should avoid using these platforms because their own reputation and delivery will be affected by being mixed with spammers.

If you are in the US, reply STOP. Carriers will enforce that. If you are outside the US and don't live in a place where carriers are legally obligated to enforce that keyword don't send anything. It will let them know they found a human.