Who are you”, “Who is this” texts
I've been getting these kinds of texts more often. They are probably scams or phishing, but It got me thinking, If your phone or the cellular phone network was inadvertently making extra copies of texts and sending them to the wrong people, how would you ever know?
The correct response to this is always, “I told you to use a burner! The feds know about this number!”
You're overthinking it. It's almost always a foot in the door tactic to begin a conversation. The "mystery" of wondering why someone would text "who is this" to a random phone number is more disarming than "hey" or launching directly into the scam. Sure, it's not a very good strategy but since these messages are sent automatically at massive scale, it only has to be marginally better to be a worthwhile strategy.
> If your phone or the cellular phone network was inadvertently making extra copies of texts and sending them to the wrong people, how would you ever know?
Timing of the texts, contents of the messages.
If I text my friend "I'll be there tonight," and then I get a strange text within an hour saying "Who is this?" then I would raise an eyebrow, but likely not engage.
If I text my friend "sounds good" and then I get a "Who are you" text an hour later, that's not as relevant to what I wrote, so not worth a second thought.
If I text my friend "Hey, Lisa says she lost your number, is it cool if I give it to her?" and then I get a text a day later saying "Who is Lisa," I'd be very concerned.
I've seen an increase in strangers messaging me on WhatsApp. When I ask them how we know each other, they tell me a friend passed on my details and said I was a good person to know, they're new to the city etc. If I press on the details, they eventually say something along the lines of "Oh, I mistyped the number I was given - I was meant to text someone else" (in some scenarios they go straight to this line when I ask how we know each other). Invariably they then say "you sound like a nice person, let's chat". Classic scam setup.
Almost certainly romance scams.
Some people would invariably reply with screenshots and resolve the confusion and then take it up with their carriers. For instance, how sometimes you realize a text didn't get sent at all. Makes me wonder which all other ones didn't.
Of course the carriers and co have reasons galore to prevent and test these properties themselves.
Also don't use SMS.
Hook it to chatgpt and let them both have an endless conversation :)
Scammers could probably using random numbers to call/text potential victims, and the RNG has ended up generating your phone number. Or the scammer might not even be using an RNG.
Could spammer be spoofing random people's numbers?
Signal to noise. If it’s important, then they’ll call.