Somebody please stop the spam texts
notes.npilk.com149 points by npilk 2 days ago
149 points by npilk 2 days ago
Unfortunately pretty much any surface to contact you will be abused to try to sell you something. It started with phone calls and text messages, but quickly in recent years it's been happening to smart phone notifications.
For example, for DoorDash, I should just receive order status notifications but they ping me every few days to try out a local restaurant. They want to remind me that their app exists on my phone and I can spend money with them.
Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.
It makes me realize that email is a much better system for this. You have an entire archive of every email you receive, with the ability to search, filter, forward, and even set up custom rules to delete items containing certain text, for example.
Yes it's a hassle to manage an email inbox, but this kind of flexibility gives users a lot of power that phone, sms, or native notifications lack.
I gate all my scammy SaaS apps behind Hail: https://github.com/aistra0528/Hail
It unfreezes doordash (or any app) when you explicitly open it, and freezes it again after you don't use the app for an hour.
You can't get spam notifications if the app isn't even allowed to run.
DoorDash is both better & worse (mostly worse with the slimmest silver lining) than you’ve portrayed. Inside the app settings you can turn off all the marketing notifications. They’ll even mostly respect that setting with the following caveats:
1) they will give you a recurring pop up banner when you open the app to turn on all notifications, making it sound like it’s just for delivery notifications, even if you already have those turned on. You have to ignore it.
2) at least once recently, they just toggled them all on, on my behalf, anyway. I found out after receiving a random marketing notification. Then I turned them back off & it hasn’t happened since.
3) there have been occasions where even with granular controls, I don’t receive the delivery notifications if I have the marketing ones turned off. Hasn’t happened in a while, but now I always keep that in mind that it’s a possibility.
> Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.
Even if they _do_ offer that sort of granularity, these apps introduce a new 'category' of notification everyday, and the new category is always opt-out, so there will always be a small stream of notifications leaking through.
On my iPhone I use a “focus” that just rejects communication from a set of bad actors. If I order a pizza or something I disable the focus ND RE-enable it when the pizza arrives.
If you send me one spam sms or notification you go immediately on the list.
Works fine except the notification identifier is different for ipad and phone so I have to add those apps twice.
On an Android phone, put corporate apps like food delivery (or supermarket customer cards etc.) that you don't want to think about except when you are actually using them, in a separate user profile. Then they will stay out of sight and out of mind.
I think in the future you’ll just have a local AI model determine if any message is an advert or a genuine communication and it just filters the ads out for you.
I’ve noticed lately that both Walmart _and_ Amazon use push notifications for advertisements right next to order updates. Both allow you to turn off the advertising (I think), but opt everyone in by default.
iOS has gotten reasonably good about tracking packages in wallet outside of any other app, but then again, wallet has sent advertisements about other Apple things.
I got really surprised when Wolt suddenly gave me a notification on iPhone that said "Welcome to Germany! Discover all the places you can order from". How on earth would it know I had crossed the border? I hadn't interacted with the app for several days and the iOS location services setting is explicitly set to "While Using". That must mean Wolt is actively telling iOS it's being "in use" even though it's not. Really really scummy behavior that should be illegal.
What hasn't worked for me: forwarding the spam messages to 7726 (standard U.S. spam detection number) and clicking "Delete and report spam" on the iPhone. I continue to get word-for-word identical [and clearly spam] messages.
What has worked for me:
- For humans pitching a politician / political party: threats that would hurt their cause.
After receiving non-stop phone calls from my local political party's office - and repeatedly telling them to stop calling me - I resorted to "the only people I hate more than {the other political party} are spammers. If you call me one more time I will vote for {the other political party}". I never received another call.
After the last election cycle I was left with a bloody battlefield of torn vote-for-me signs that I didn't consent to being outside my house. Recently I've had three local politicians knock on my door and ask to put their signs up. My response was "if you put a sign outside my house I will put up my own sign that reads "don't vote for anyone who has a sign outside my house". No signs so far.
- For spam calls on the iPhone: Settings -> Apps -> Phone -> Screen Unknown Callers -> Ask Reason for Calling. No spammer will bother, at least in my experience.
- For spam texts on the iPhone: Settings -> Apps -> Messages -> Unknown Senders -> Screen Unknown Senders.
Yes, it takes discipline early on. That "1" new Unknown Senders message notification on your Messages app is just screaming at you to pay attention to it. Don't go there - it's just more spam. If it's not then they'll call you and go through your reason-for-calling filter.
If you reply STOP, you just let them know you read their text and it's a number that will respond with an actual person behind it. I would not reply to it. It's very unlikely to do anything but make the problem worse.
After I once made the mistake of donating money to a political campaign, I actually was able to free myself from the torrent of spam by replying END and STOP over and over. It took months, but the messages did stop.
Someone managed to connect my phone number to my voter registration during my recent move, so the spam is back. This time, I am replying END or STOP and then blocking the number & reporting spam, just in case that creates more friction for them.
I think you got lucky the first time. Traditional political candidate campaigns and mainstream parties are supposed to comply with some FEC regs about respecting unsub replies (I think it's tied to getting broad access lists and maybe reduced rates for campaigns), however a LOT of texts and robo-calls (whether supporting candidates or initiatives) are now funded by PACs who seem to have no issue using spammer SIM farms and AFAIC are under no regs.
Since there's no way to tell PAC texts from actual candidate-funded texts, and the PACs seem to now be the vast majority, I always hit the checkbox to block and report as SPAM to my telco. Not that it'll help much but if it's an actual candidate, the telcos whitelist them anyway (because of course politicians passed a law that requires them to), and if it's a PAC maybe it'll burn their SIM farm number pool a little faster, costing them more.
If you're on Android, I highly recommend: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. The UX is a little obtuse to set up the first time (ask your LLM) but once set up it works great.
The secret they use is that the company with the list NEVER sends anything, it simply sells the list to a campaign or PAC or whomever, and THAT group DOES remove you, but the moment a new campaign or PAC or whomever springs up, they buy the same list again.
This is why every campaign is a new legal entity each time around.
Indeed, My 90 year-old, deeply religious mother sent a televangelist $10 one time. A year later when she was in the hospital for a few weeks. I picked up her mail once a week and quickly found out I had to bring a large sack for one week of mail. For every actual bill she got, there were over a hundred pieces of physical spam mail from every kind of religious and political cause, candidate and prophet imaginable - usually in large four-color, glossy envelopes.
It's not just offshore call center con artists preying on the elderly. There's a huge, highly profitable, legal-but-scummy onshore industry too. It was obvious that 'nice Reverend on TV' sold her out to anyone who'd pay - and then they sold it and so on... Even though I'm an atheist, these assholes make me wish there was actually a hell full of fire and brimstone awaiting them.
I use NoMoRobo Max for this stuff. For what it is, it works pretty well, IMO.
Sadly, each time they use a different number, so my list of blocked numbers is huge and getting more massive by the day. Sooner or later, I will have blocked every possible phone number in existence.
SpamBlocker lets you put numbers into groups like those in your contacts, those you've ever called, and those in your area code or prefix. Then each group is tested against a content whitelist and blacklist based on words, length, formatting, even Regex. And it's not binary, each list hit has a numeric weight and when a text falls below a certain score without being 'saved' by any 'always keep' whitelist terms (like the name of my HMO, my wife's name, etc) it gets either silenced, reduced to vibrate-only or trashed.
Last time I checked NoMo nor anything else has that level of granularity. All the other spam blocker tools prioritize "one-click simple" which means all their scoring is generic and opaque. At most they let users add binary black and whitelist terms. I haven't seen any that let users weight their own terms.
> then blocking the number & reporting spam
I think it's also helpful to be prompt if you'd like to help others; A campaign will use e.g. twilio numbers leased for a matter of hour, then release it. If you wait too long to report spam, you damage the number's reputation without actually punishing the hyperactive spammer.
If twilio does not want its numbers to be marked as spam then it needs to do a better job of not being used to send spam.
Isn't Twilio complicit? and isn't it deserved that random Twilio customers, who are funding an illegal organization, get banned? If there is no consequence, Twilio will continue. I'd happily fund a campaign to drive Twilio to bankruptcy.
I got a text from a political party recently (not one of the major ones, just trying to get me to put in a vote for the same candidate that a third party nominated as well, after I had already mailed in my ballot) that said to send STOP to stop receiving messages or SKIP to "opt out entirely". I still have no clue what the distinction is supposed to be between those.
So funny how fairly annoying it was to sign up for a phone number for a chatbot for my company going through the 10DLC campaign verification, being rejected like 3 times because I kept missing something and yet...none of it clearly really matters.
Did the deluge stop because you replied "STOP" or simply because the election period was over? If it took several months I'd assume it was the latter.
The spam continued long after that particular election was over. I don't remember how long it took to clean it up, exactly, just that each campaign who got my number did in fact respect the END/STOP request, and I was eventually able to get ahead of the viral spread.
i've been taking to responding "fuck off" instead of "stop" and then blocking and reporting.
they do at least enough sentiment analysis so that "fuck off" behaves like "stop" and they respond that they're removing you from their list and won't contact you again.
I have replied STOP a lot and the political texts do, in fact, stop - at least from that particular number (see my other comment for a rant about this). Of course if you do this to a scammer it is as you say.
STOP to a 10DLC number should block further texts from that specific number at a carrier level, regardless of whether the campaign honors its 10DLC requirements. At least, until it’s recycled to a new campaign.
I wonder if 'STOP or I will vote for your opponent' might work. Then again, if that worked, you might just start receiving messages asking you to vote for their opponent instead.
You'll just end up on another list for the next election cycle. It's marketers - no one is forcing them to respect STOP replies, and a STOP reply is just another data point.
There is in fact quite a bit of FCC regulation around texts; see e.g. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-24A1.txt
Note that regulation differs quite a bit from enforcement. People sometimes confuse the former for the latter.
N. B. In the US, you can actually report this to the FCC. Look at unwanted texts at the bottom of this page: https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/1150022...
I don't fault your cynicism. There has been a lot of "looking the other way" lately.
Not even the next cycle, as far as I can tell if you say stop or unsubscribe, the political spam mailing list system adds a new candidate to the ~8-10 candidates they keep you loaded with
It's so bizarre, to get political texts via SMS. Here in Europe, I have got 0 (zero) political texts in my life.
I am not even really in a place with any close or important races and I'm getting 10+ a day, as a data point for you.
I tell my friends and family to never use "unsubscribe" links unless they have a close relationship with the sender. How folks decided directing people to click links in spam email is beyond me.
What jurisdiction are you in? Legit companies respect unsubscribe links eg Eventbrite because there's actual fines associated with not respecting unsubscribes. Also, buy a domain name and use per-vendor emails with a salt. Eventbrite@solyin.com is guessable by spammers, eventbrite_1243@solyin.com is not. So then you have easy signal for what's definitely spam.
GMail and many other web clients do the unsubscribe request for you if List-Unsubscribe is present. That doesn't leak your information but still shows that you care and is signal for spam.
Gmail will helpfully suggest unsubscribing from obvious spam that contains an unsubscribe link ...
Except then it doesn't shitcan it to the spam folder. It archives it in All Mail.
There's no "Unsubscribe and report as spam", just "unsubscribe" and "report spam".
You only unsubscribe from legit senders, never click on a true spam unsubscribe link.
If it's a regular email that you vindicatively want to classify as spam, do that and don't unsubscribe. It will go directly to your spam folder in the future, and it will hurt a tiny bit their standing with Google.
I forget where, but I remember reading somewhere about how STOP is meant to actually be handled at the carrier level and do something to not allow future messages at all from the sender? Though maybe I’m misremembering?
At least in my experience, it's enforced at the sender/platform level. I can confirm that from working with Twilio and Amazon SNS. They suppress messages to opted-out recipients. Though the exact implementation varies by provider. For example supported keywords might be different(we have our internal list of opted out keywords).
I've found a lot of the traffic may be originating from resume sites..
The minute I unpublished my phone number from job recruiting sites, my spam calls declined by 60-70%. Apparently these career sites don't make enough money of job connections alone.
I now just ask for an email as a first point of contact from potential recruiters.
No, STOP is a keyword that the carrier intercepts. The recipient never sees it. The carrier will ensure that you don't get any messages on that number anymore. The business behind the number can (sometimes, depending on the platform they're using) set a custom reply to STOP, which is what makes it seem like they're getting the message, but they aren't.
Of course, it only applies to that phone number, so they can still spam you from another number in their rotation.
+1 on sending “STOP”. Telecoms have detection for this keyword and punish the sender/number if two or more people send it to a number in a ~2 month period. The above comment should be the top comment.
Christ... on the opposite end.. I'm in sales. I wish that people would just make their intentions clear. They submit a lead and I can't even get a STOP response anymore.
Outbound is over. RIP
This is what it feels like. I went from high performer to barely getting in touch with people in the last year and those are warm leads not cold-calling. Time for a new gig...
Perhaps replying with a message that looks similarly automated would work better. Make it look like they accidentally contacted GameStop chat support or something.
If you reply STOP, you just let them know you read their text and it's a number that will respond with an actual person behind it.
You're thinking about e-mail unsubscribe links.
It's my understanding that, in the United States anyway, if you reply STOP, the phone number is blocked at the carrier level.
Exactly right, better to cut your losses and just hit "block and report as spam".
The problem is that SPAMing works for US politicians, so they include exceptions in various anti-spam legislation for political calls / texts, and survey calls / texts.
The solution is to recognize that our legislators have a severe conflict of interest, and instead ban these via ballot initiatives. Of course the politicians will whine and complain, but once the voters speak, they will comply.
It doesn't need to work, it might even NOT work, may even be counterproductive; it just needs to be protected and they think it works.
I have set up a Siri Shortcut on my iPhone using the Shortcuts app. It relies on political campaign and super-PAC texts containing the key phrase "Stop2End" or "End2End"
The shortcut runs on any incoming message
First it checks to see if "Stop2End" is in the body of the message
It checks to see if the sender is in my contacts
If the sender is not in my contacts then it replies with "STOP"
This opts me out of about 3-5 lists per day
The other change I made was to sign up for the Do Not Call registry on the FCC website
I have no faith that this would have any impact whatsoever. The thing is, it also isn't my problem. It has absolutely ruined outbound sales. I'll never answer my phone or accept a text from anyone not in my contacts. I basically don't read email. I'm unreachable to people who I'm not expecting outreach from. And I'm fine with it, only because I'm not the one trying to make a living cold calling people.
I am desperate for something like this on Android and cannot for the life of me fathom why the messages app does not have a simple keyword-based filter.
I am going to attempt to wire something up with Tasker because it is getting too bad to cope with.
First it checks to see if "Stop2End" is in the body of the message
It checks to see if the sender is in my contacts
There's a chance someone in your contacts would send you a message with "Stop2End" in it? You must have curious friends.
In programming if you have an easy edge case you can control for you might as well take it. It doesn't really matter that the probability is low.
I personally add a handful of automated systems to my contacts (appointments, time sheet reminders, bills, etc.)
I learned a couple of days ago that the rise of spam texts is in part due to a 2021 Supreme Court decision that narrowed TCPA's definition of an 'autodialer'.
Previously it had been interpreted as: "the Congressional intent of the TCPA was "to ban dialing from a database"". In contrast to the new ruling: "Sotomayor wrote that "Congress’ chosen definition of an autodialer requires that the equipment in question must use a random or sequential number generator."
Congress is going to get right on that though: "Senator Ed Markey, one of the authors of the TCPA ... announced the same day of the decision [2021] that they would be looking to introduce amended legislation to address the Court's decision."
I had exactly the same thought around Apple’s “report spam”. I have marked hundreds of text messages as spam. There is enough training data in there for even a dumb classifier to filter some of this stuff out. But next day, there are half a dozen more, nearly identical spam msgs sitting unread in the inbox.
I have also found that replying STOP = sign of life, your number is marked as “someone alive on the other end” and gets resold to 20 new lists.
This was one of the reasons I switched from iPhone to Google Pixel.
Getting less spam was one of my biggest hallelujah moments after switching.
The Pixel has never (AFAICT) mistakenly marked a text as spam, although it has mistakenly declined a few legit phone calls.
It's not perfect but I am a less angry person now.
I have a Google Pixel phone and I have been overwhelmed with text messages related to the current election.
At least the phone calls are handled properly...
These and the loan calls are making the medium useless
We're going to have to go to double-opt-in just to communicate.
I no longer own a cell phone.
My landline does not ring.
Stopped using email almost a decade ago.
If anybody needs to get in touch with me, they physically have to show up (or write a letter).
----
This is seemingly "impossible" for most people to attempt, but is worthwhile. May I encourage anybody reading this to step away from phones/emails for just 24 hours, to start.
Loan calls have filled out my voicemail inbox to full. I get anywhere from 1-5 a day. I've considered disconnecting my phone service at this point.
I send any calls that aren’t in my contact list direct to voicemail and then read the live transcription to decide if I’ll pick up
I always wondered if these text messages are extremely cheap or free for these spammers to send? In my experience, sending texts costs around 0.5 to 1 cent so are they hoping after spending a few bucks in spend, they'd get a sucker?
I used to have an auto-expanding snippet that would insert the entire wikipedia entry for the Tiananmen Square massacre and then I'd never hear back from them. This was mostly when the Chinese bots were doing the pig butchering scam.
for political ones they often get volunteers who are just pushing a send button nonstop...
Frustratingly they will send from new numbers each time, so just 'unsubscribing' from one will not really do anything. They will use websites/domains that don't respond to anything unless they have the path in the text message too. It's maddening. Here in Ohio I am getting nearly 100 a day recently. I would like to block unknown numbers, but I have kids and I certainly don't want to miss an emergency message.
Spam texts? What about spam calls? AT&T flags spam calls as such, and yet my phone rings. I am dumbfounded that iOS doesn't have an option for saying if the network identifies a call as likely spam, do not ring the phone, send it to voice mail directly. Actually, iOS does have an option for this... it just doesn't seem to work.
My father once accidentally auto-completed my phone number when he donated to a democrat. This led to over a decade of messages addressed to him from candidates from his state. Everyone time you ask to be removed, they remove it from their own list, not the list from which they cloned. I had to call so many people to find the office responsible for holding the canonical list of numbers which everyone was cloning. After talking with a few people there over multiple years, I finally got to someone that cared enough to remove me and not just hang up the phone. Political calls and texts are treated special under the law and aren't subject to most of the protections that the USA has over this sort of thing.
If you're going to donate to a political party or politician, do it anonymously.
> I had to call so many people to find the office responsible for holding the canonical list of numbers which everyone was cloning. After talking with a few people there over multiple years, I finally got to someone that cared enough to remove me and not just hang up the phone.
Who was responsible?
In Australia I ONCE donated to a charity... and learnt that charities can spam "in case of emergency". Which is all the time, for charities. Only changed when I became a EU citizen again and could threaten them, which, surprisingly, worked.
Maybe tell them you're a Netherlands citizen.
I simply want a whitelist. If you aren’t on it, you cannot text or call me.
iOS has that for calls but they still leave a notification you have to manually clear. I wish for an option to just not tell me at all.
I'm wondering if we could create one-off phone numbers similar to one-off credit cards when we have to give a number to a service we don't want to be regularly receiving messages from.
The TCPA was supposed to stop all spam calls. But we just decided to never enforce it.
Performative politics at work.
I have been having this exact same issue lately.
My solution was to use an sms app from f-droid called quik-sms. https://github.com/quik-sms/quik https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=dev.octoshrimpy....
You can create a filters based on message content, to block the message. It seems to work.
I just have the block message filters working on messages only from phone numbers that are not in my contact list, and put filters like "STOP2END", "donation", etc.
Unfortunately there's no blocked/"spam" folder. If there was a "spam" folder for sms apps based on message content filters, that would probably be an almost 100% complete solution.
Having been involved in the telecoms industry and in particular the sms industry for a number of years I can tell you that it is very much a game of cat + mouse for most legit bulk sms providers, aggregators telcos (the cat) and the illegit mice (the spammers). Unortunately spammers will always be around whether or not they use SMS or VOIP or in the old days snail mail (anyone remember the 100's of unsolicited advertising envelopes the poor old postman used to deliver?). Telcos have been trying to block it for years (since sms took off) with sophisticated spam filters plugged in to their networks as well as DND (Do Not Disturb) etc etc etc. This costs big numbers to integrate and works well till the spammers find a work around. Sim farms with thousands of rotaing sim cards look like P2P (Person to Person) legit texts plus numerous other ways including modems and the list goes on and on of circumventing even the best deterrents. Ultimately the only safe way to avoid sms spam or voip spam or nucience calls is not to have a phone at all.
If you're on Android, I highly recommend: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. It works so well, it gave me my phone back. It has all the granularity you wish texting and phone apps had.
The only slight neg is all that flexibility can make first-time set up a bit tricky, just LLM it.
I get spam texts almost daily. I too wish this would stop and I've tried most of the things the OP has as well. I see this as analogous to being inundated with spam email and we solved the problem for email with regulation[0] and we need to do the same for SMS. The bad news is that it is also likely to get much worse before it gets better[1].
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... [1] https://www.npr.org/2026/07/12/nx-s1-5867763/ai-artificial-i...
We did not solve email with legislation. CAN-SPAM is a joke, and you as an individual have no recourse when you get spammed: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/inbox/can-spam_and_consumer_...
Email is tolerable because gmail and others implemented software spam filters. Gmail did so because they were in competition with other email providers and it was a way to get users. The incumbent phone carriers have no incentive to compete here.
Other platforms did better solving the spam problem, so most people simply don't use SMS/MMS anymore. The kids and young adults all moved to Telegram, Discord, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc.
I've used CAN-SPAM many times to enforce spam marketing from businesses plenty of times.
Further, it has required unsubscribe links to be included which allow you to opt out of any further communication. That is invaluable because you can't do that now with SMS.
I'm not discounting spam filters. They have certainly made life easier, but for things that _aren't_ caught by spam, I have at least some recourse by unsubscribing.
How do you tell the difference between political spam text and scammer spam text...
that's the neat part, you don't.
Google and every one of its apps and services sucks now except for Fi, which has been life changing for me with regards to spam.
There's a setting that only allows calls and texts from your own contacts, period. (Though anyone you've texted or called recently is allowed for a month.) Prior to enabling this I had all the usual stuff like Call Screening and even though it caught most spam I still was annoyed at seeing the silent notification that meant is was in the middle of getting a call, and honestly even the few junk calls that made it through just irritated me to no end.
I have replied STOP to many of these and it has reduced the flood, but I still get several a day. The bot's reply to "stop" is always some variant of:
> You have successfully been unsubscribed. You will not receive any more messages from this number.
"From this number" is clearly a legalese parsing of some law or regulation and the end result is that you cannot truly opt out. Infuriating.
I think the more reasonable explanation is that there actually are hundreds of independent entities sending this sort of political spam.
That's exactly it. I donated to a candidate once (literally once, ever) and the party basically passes my phone number around to every PAC and campaign organization under the sun.
This stuff must be effective or else they wouldn't do it. On the other hand, it seems like a good way to discourage repeat donors. Why would I donate any money if the result is going to be endless texts and emails?
Heck, maybe they should offer a "premium donation" where you pay extra to not get on these lists, analogous to a no-ads streaming plan.
I'm pretty sure by responding you're just letting them know it's an active number. Could be wrong though.
For commercial and political texters in the U.S. there is quite a bit of FCC regulation. For scammers, obviously that doesn't matter. Probably a sign of the times that people can't tell the difference anymore, though
STOP has worked more for me with Dem begging texts, less so with Repub, but not completely with either. I've switched to sending them troll like messages back, which also results in the same unsubscribed message, but perhaps makes it clear I will not give money to politicians.
For folks on iOS, you can install a spam filter for text messages. i.e. https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer
Like the OP, I've received multiple "You haven't voted yet!" messages from a state I no longer live in. I also received two messages today saying "Can you please rush in even just $1 right this second to help us get voters to the polls?"
Are these messages effective on a significant enough portion of the population to be worth sending? It feels like it would have the opposite effect and piss people off. Who gets a text like this and goes "Oh wow yes I better send this person a dollar right away!"
There has been some good investigative reporting on this.
The answer is yes, they do make a lot of money off of this. But the details are awful. Only like 12% of the revenue actually makes its way to productive campaigning. Donors are older on average than the average voter. And they hit whales. There are elderly people who donate many times a day. These are basically the same kinds of texts that scammers send and they catch people in almost exactly the same way.
Donations to democratic candidates by young people are down compared to prior elections while donations by the elderly are way up. Politicians are making these spam companies rich while they bleed their elderly voters dry and aggravate their future electorate. Idiocy.
Anyone got links to said reporting so I can convince my mom not to engage?
https://electionlawblog.org/2026/must-read-adam-bonica-hook-... is Adam Bonica's work on the topic.
I don't know I should feel good or bad, but I have not received a single political campaign message over the past few election cycles. Never.
Says something about the political climate of where I live.
I never did until some asshole randomly wrote my number down, now I get political messages addressed to him.
> text is my highest-signal communication channel
I'm a little surprised by this. Due to the prevalence of spam, I favor private third-party messaging applications (slack, discord). Text messaging is about 50% garbage for me, and the majority I leave unread. Though contrary to the experience of a lot of others, I almost never get spam phone calls (probably <10 in the last two years), so that remains my highest signal channel.
I was thinking about the possibility of getting an international phone number and using it domestically. The spam is really out of control in my area.
I've had my phone number for 20 years and I get maybe one or two a month. Are you guys reading or responding to them? I just archive them when I see them. I don't know what I'm doing right, but it's just never been a problem for me and I'm not sure why. I'm not particularly careful about hiding my number and have the typical grocery store rewards cards and whatnot.
It depends on what you get picked up by. My ancient email address picks up all kinds of spam. I'm not sure where the Korean comes from at all. Nor am I sure why this particular woodworker thinks I am certain to buy their woodworking plans on the 842nd email when the first 841 haven't worked. I am a rather classical nerd on this point... not completely incompetent when it comes to home repair, but certainly not doing woodworking for fun on the weekends, and have no idea what signal I showed at any point that convinced someone the contrary might be true.
And then my wife has a completely different spray of spam. The amusing thing to me is that for both of us, while some of it is clearly a matter of what we're doing, she also has weird random stuff on those occasions I am tasked to find what happened to some email, and it's completely different weird random stuff.
I don't know what I did, but this election I've also been getting hammered by spam texts. I hadn't before. Not only that, it is as the author of this piece mentions, rather widely targeted. Messages that are clearly sent from the presumption that I agree with their politics despite very much not doing so... you know, the scare texts where they send "If you don't donate to us immediately the opponent is going to DO X IMMEDIATELY" and you're all like, my gosh, we should be so lucky that X would actually happen immediately but no, that's not actually going to happen. Clearly completely mistargeted. Which leads me to think even the ones I nominally wouldn't hate could well just be random luck too. And for me at least, this was a single change... from nothing last election to every single side and every shuckster trying to push poll me from every direction at once.
I don't know what happened, but this got INTENSELY worse for me in the last ~6 months. I never respond to them and mark as spam and move on, but I get multiple calls and texts from unknown numbers every day. Sometimes it's the "hey, I'm sorry to hear about that thing that happened to you" kind of bait, but lately a vast majority of them are trying to offer me business funds or loans or whatever.
I have no idea if my number made its way onto new lists or if the problem just got worse in general, but it's making my phone borderline unusable. I miss any calls from legitimate unknown numbers because of it (delivery people, etc). I've also had my phone number for > 20 years at this point and I can't stand the thought of changing it.
My text inbox went into nuclear meltdown shortly after giving my number in a donation to a local charity. I hear that political donations have the same effect, so I haven't done any of those, but in any case there doesn't seem to be any political will to punish these bad actors so better filters are probably the ticket. "Don't donate to charity/politics" is probably not a solution we want to collectively promote.
Did you ever provide your phone number at voter registration? I made this mistake once and got added to dozens of text lists, Democratic and Republican. Never had a problem from the usual leaks.
I have never provided my phone number at voter registration. In any case, all the texts to me are marked with "Hello Louella". I have also been "Brenda".
I am not a Louella or a Brenda, more of a "Joe" or "Frank".
I am quite sure that ActBlue just creates a list of names, then create a wardial list and assign those names to a number.
Asking them to stop just confirms your number to work. And yes, it's ActBlue because they have specifically identified themselves as such more than once.
You know those data brokers and skip tracers like Acxiom and Epsilon that merge all the government databases like property records or USPS change of address notifications with private databases like all the contact lists every random app wants you to upload?
They probably did a fuzzy merge and your number (or a number typo'd to yours) got associated with some random old lady.
That's how I got on the lists of all the scummy PACs targeting elderly voters that Adam Bonica called out recently. I only figured it out because the cash for homes cold contacts trying to lowball his house will actually respond.
Yes and those are really the only texts I get, as a matter of fact. Various polls.
I've had my phone number for more than 20 years and I routinely get 2 or 3 a day.
You're lucky...
FWIW the iOS app JunkMan has been the only app I’ve found to correctly and consistently block political SMS spam. I get about 30 of these every day and they all go to spam with only very-rare false-positives. https://apps.apple.com/app/id1591815272
What is it about America that makes this normal/common? Here in NZ I've literally never once received a spam text.
I've had 3 so far this year in the UK - all to do with car finance overpayments (I don't have a car!). They were all marked as spam automatically, so none of them caused a notification.
I suspect this is another example of the pathetic form of American exceptionalism - "no way to prevent this, says the only country where this regularly happens".
Is there no regulator willing to step in to force the telcos to block spam and scam texts? If not, why not?
Politicians are allowed to send spam texts, emails, phone calls. They exempted themselves from all of laws prohibiting it. Just block it.
Yep, political spam, um, isn't spam.
This year has been the worst I've ever seen. Hundreds of them so far.
Germany has a lot of failings, but I hardly get any SMS spam from German numbers. This is because in order to get a number you need to provide your ID. When every spammer is easy to identify, you get much less fraud and spam via this route.
On a given day people from USA usually criticize EU for regulatory stuff. But on the contrary regulation is what you need here. The fine to spam people even though they have opted-out is so huge that pretty much nobody spams in EU
Calls too. My local cleaning business has been getting hammered with automated "your Google listing..." spam for weeks (virtual number w/ routing to our cells) now. Already hung up on 3-4 this morning/afternoon.
I paid for Robokiller and it kills 95% of spam. MalwareBytes works too.
The biggest problem is many of these are scams and they rotate phone numbers so tagging doesn’t work.
The politicians use services which also rotate phone numbers.
I still haven’t found a perfect solution.
Spam calls, at least in the US, are a much more frustrating thing for me right now
I get a lot of those in Germany. The countries they originate from change. A few months ago it was random numbers in the US. Then it switched to the UK. The last few weeks it's from some random numbers in Germany. The numbers rotate and I never get more than one or two calls from the same number. I always block them but it seems these guys have an endless supply of random numbers to switch to. I had four of them today. I just bulk block them every few days. I don't think anyone cares.
No idea what kind of scams they are pushing but it seems very cheap and easy to abuse the system like this. I wish we could escalate this to operators and force them to deal with abusive customers properly like they clearly can't be bothered to do right now. Some countries probably have rules and regulations. Like Germany probably has. And yet, I get spam calls from German numbers on my own German number. So, clearly whatever there is, isn't working all that well.
I get four per line per day and have two lines on my phone. They all follow the same script with slight variations and the voicemails are all ai that often get confused and repeat things.
Screen unknown callers. Any call that comes from a number that is not in your contacts will just be sent to voicemail or blocked entirely.
This is better than the phone ringing, certainly, but now I just get voicemail notifications and feel the need to mark the calls/voicemails as spam.
What makes this so much more frustrating is that I work in the telephony industry, and I know the hoops brands have to jump through to make calls or send SMS/MMS. I work with TCR for brand/campaign registration, I work with NetNumber and STIR/SHAKEN cert issuance for attestation levels. All of these hurdles for us, and it seemingly makes no impact in the real world for spam filtration.
the red icon for all the voicemails drives me nuts. I had a long wait for my kid's dr appt a few weeks ago, and I went through to delete/report spam each one. I just checked, and I have 30 new ones now :(
never had this issue on my personal android device, just my work iphone.
A technical fix is waiting in the new toolbox. A decision model can filter out most SMS spam with adequate accuracy, speed and cost.
Weird that vendors have this whole process that you have to fill in for new campaigns, yet somehow i still get spam all the time.
I think the only solution will be a local model on the phone that routes these to the trash
The real solution is punitive spam legislation. I can’t remember the last time I had a spam text and I’ve had the same number for 10 years.
Screen unknown senders. Any text that comes from a number that is not in your contacts will be stashed away in the unknown senders bin without any notification. Problem solved.
May work for some people, not sure if it works for most.
I'd miss all kinds of texts from my doctors which seem to come from all kinds of different numbers forcing me to browse the bin anyway.
on iOS I still get badge notifications from unknown senders. I don't think there's a way to turn this off for some reason?
That's what I love the EU GDPR for. By law no one is allowed to use my number without explicit consent in the first place. And if someone spammed me, they have to tell where they got my data from and have to delete it upon request. Love it!
That is the law in the usa also. Any cell contact, from a business to an individual, without a preexisting business relationship, is illegal via the TCPA. But that's never actually enforced, so...
Yes it is. There's a whole industry of baiting spammers and then suing them.
And yet there's tons of people in here still getting spam calls. Maybe the fines need to be 10x, clearly it isn't enough of a deterrent.
I'm making my own list of the spammers, of which i publish updates on from time to time. Perhaps one day i'll write an apk to finally solve it once and for all. Unfortunately it looks like Verizon is on to me, and have now begun sending me their own spam telling me to upgrade from my flip-phone. Also, they only let me block like 3 numbers now, and their website has become really crummy. also, i recently found out while on a trip that they do not guarantee the functionality of their personal hot-spot feature for all locations - what?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had (still have but they don't send as much lately) a similar problem but with email and Outlook.
I get like 10 spam emails in my Junk folder every day from the same domain but with different subdomains, which would be fine if I could define a rule to delete all emails with the matching root domain BUT rules don't work on the Junk folder (facepalm).
I can't fathom why are they not blocking the root domain outright, I'm pretty sure it's just for spam. It got so bad that, at some point I wrote a script that deletes these emails periodically - but getting that was not easy since I needed to use OAuth to get an token.
I have a long email ready to send to ACTBLUE right after the midterms. It threatens informing the FTC, which might do something since they are Republican controlled atm, which I would simply have done automatically if I weren't sympathetic. It asks, again, to be removed from all of their affiliates. I imagine I won't be successful. Totally agree that it shouldn't be up to me to somehow succeed at whack-a-mole and finally send STOP to every last spam I receive. I use 'END', 'STOP', and 'Delete and mark as spam'. I do all three. STOP and END do work, but I am being asked to fund every single campaign regardless of U.S. region.
It’s extremely annoying, but political organizations and politicians are not subject to any spam or telemarketing laws. If I had known prior, I would have never made political contributions or used a real email for voting. The naivety of youth
Worst thing I ever did was donate twenty seven bucks to Bernie, RIP my SMS inbox lol. I'll never make a political contribution again.
Yes, ActBlue is one of the worse offenders of spam SMS. I wouldn't be surprised if their aggressive spamming ironically help cripple their candidates.
A use android, I built a daemon that auths to my Google messages and uses a cheap llm to read all my texts and if it judges they are spam reports and blocks them. 100% success so far. It doesn't enumerate any text from a contact. I feel like I could sell it, but I won't because it took me 6 hours to build it with DeepSeek.
How did you set up the auth? Is this a local Android app or a web service connected to the Web API of Messages?
Not an excuse, but keep in mind that this is an absolute minefield for any company. If there is even a hint that the filtering is disproportionately one party, the media will run wild with it. There is nothing more that journalists love to write about than a "conspiracy" to influence elections, real or imagined.
I've been receiving a very interesting series of spam. It's always from different numbers, in various in-state area codes, that are nevertheless far away. The format is usually the same. It thinks I have a feminine name and addresses me as "Hey <name>," and sometimes identifies itself as "Eve" or some other feminine name.
Then there's a business name, that ostensibly offers homeowner services in my metro area. And asks if I'm interested in a quote.
So the only actually correctly-targeted aspect is the service area, although when I look up the businesses, sometimes they are HQ'd out-of-state. I'm not a woman with this name, and obviously these people don't actually work for the company they're claiming. And, I'm not a homeowner anyway. I can't use any of their painting services!
Awhile ago, I looked up each of the involved businesses, and I emailed them on their official web contact form, just an "FYI, someone is using your name in vain..." but none of them have acknowledged this.
But it's always from a different number. And it just trickles in, every few weeks there's one. And I can't tell them STOP or block them. I just stare as a new one pops up, and I wonder, what's the scam behind this?
I don't remember the last time I got a spam text - but I'm in the UK, is this common in the US?
I "solved" this for email years ago (as did many before me):
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
Any communication channel that doesn't involve a whitelist (e.g. invite/approve) will have this problem. Email. Phones. Text messages.
If you want to fix this, the protocol must ensure the recipient first agrees to communicate with you. Until they do, all messages to them will be automatically blocked.
This solution works. Yes, there are always ways to get around it, but in practice, it cuts the nonsense by well over 90%.
Eh, at least for me I'd miss all kinds of text notifications from health providers if I did that.
Nope. Just like anyone else, they get your permission to communicate, and you get their notifications.
Right now, a lot of orgs will send you a text message when you initiate business with them, and the first message always informs you how to get off their list. If you do nothing, you remain on the list. With my way, they just send a "special" message asking to connect with you. If you do nothing, you don't hear from them.
The difference between a whitelist and a blacklist (current approach) is you don't have to do the work to keep getting off people's list. They do the work to get on your list.
You're confusing permission to communicate with consistent sources they communicate from.
If this were the protocol, they'd be incentivized to:
1. Make the sources consistent
2. Separating out marketing vs "serious" sources.
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