How do I stop political SMS spam?

If you're in the USA, don't donate more than $200 to any political campaign. If you donate more than $200, then those contributions have to be reported to the FEC (Federal Election Commission). Those reports are publicly available, and include your email address and phone number. Other campaigns, then, harvest that information to build their own list.

$0 might be a better number, since campaigns will also sell their donor lists to other campaigns, but having your information out there in public means anyone running for dog catcher anywhere in the country can reach out to you to beg for money.

Always respond with "You have the wrong number". This is the only way to actually get removed from these lists. It will take a while, because most of the people reaching out to you have paid a data broker for a list, and they get refunds/discounts for bad data, so they will report it back up to the data broker who will remove it. But this takes a while, and that number has already been sold multiple times to various campaigns, and also, its probably on more than one broker's list, so it takes a while to get it removed from all the brokers.

But it has worked for me:

I gave 10$ to a candidate once, and started getting texts every year for four years from multitudes of like-minded campaigns. I just told them wrong number every time and eventually, now, I get no more political spam texts.

https://www.fcc.gov/rules-political-campaign-calls-and-texts

Unfortunately, they're exempt from most anti-spam laws, but they're not allowed to use autodialing to send calls or texts to mobile phones. So if you can prove that's happening, go ahead and report it. But once you're in a database that's been shared with every candidate who is ever going to run, stopping one will never stop them all. You can use configurations to silence the receipt and you can respond and ask to be removed hoping there is a human paying attention at the other end, but that's about it.

Well over 15 years ago someone somewhere mis-entered information and associated my phone number with my grandmother, and still to this day I get texts from GOP candidates about races and issues in Nevada. I'm not conservative, haven't voted in 20 years, and have never lived in Nevada and couldn't vote there if I wanted to. They don't care. They're just blind copying numbers out of a database that has already been copied and distributed thousands of times, and deleting it from one copy won't do anything to the thousands of other copies. My grandmother is fast approaching 90, just had a stroke, and probably isn't going to live a whole lot longer. I'm sure I'll be getting texts from Nikki Haley and what not 30 years from now still addressed to her.

At least it's only during election years. Try owning a house. Your phone will become worthless as 95% of all communication comes from property speculators who simply canvas public records and beg you to sell. Or don't even own a house. I also get offers for my grandmother's old house all the time. She didn't even own that one and the guy who did own it died five years ago.

In the US, for SMS messages I reply "STOP" (without quotes) and that seems to do something (at the carrier level?) to block future messages.

On iOS I've been using "Bouncer" for the past several months to filter messages using regular expressions. It's been doing a great job so far for me.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bouncer-private-sms-blocker/id...

Oy, I keep getting political messages for "Keith" (I'm not Keith), despite the fact that I've had the same phone number for decades.

Their databases are so bad.

When it seems like there is a real person behind it, I respond and tell them if they keep sending me messages I’m going to vote for their opponent out of pure spite. There are multiple lists floating around, so this isn’t one and done, but I haven’t been contacted in months, and it used to be quite frequent, so I think it’s helped.

CTIA is a trade association representing the wireless communications industry in the US. They offer a short code to which you can forward spam SMS messages: 7726 (which spells “SPAM”) and it will supposedly help train telecom network SMS filters: https://www.ctia.org/consumer-resources/protecting-yourself-...

They also have resources for blocking robocalls: https://www.ctia.org/consumer-resources/how-to-stop-robocall...

In the US, the only way to achieve what you want is to not use SMS and disable it with your carrier.

Political speech in the US has the least restriction possible. It’s exempt from the laws around unsolicited calls, political ads can be complete fabrications without consequence (you might say, “but what about news coverage?” forgetting that in many ways, the most consequential elections are small local affairs where even if there is a local press, the press may not have the ability to fact check abuses or respond in a timely fashion—in my childhood hometown, an attorney in the next town over made an attempt to take over the library board by (a) getting the candidates that weren’t his delegates removed from the ballot and (2) doing door-to-door flyers the weekend before the election which included a number of completely fabricated charges against the current members of the library board. With the latter, because the local paper comes out weekly and on Wednesday, they were unable to cover this before the election.)

So, other than trying to respond to the texts with STOP, you’re mostly out of luck. I know with an iPhone and iMessage, it’s possible to block texts from junk callers, but that doesn’t help with the profusion of numbers nor does responding with STOP.

I ran an experiment years ago. I used a throw-away email along with plus-addressing [0] to register and receive updates from democrat, republican and a handful of media organizations. I knew what the results would be: Unmitigated mayhem. And that's exactly what I got. It was interesting to watch for a few months.

All of these organizations shared (definitely) or sold (assumption) the customized email addresses far and wide. The only other possible explanations for what happened with these email addresses might be that they were stolen during a breach or that a bad actor with internal access shared or sold them. OK, I can buy either of these for one organization here or there, sure. When it happens across all organizations? No, the sharing or selling had to be intentional.

There was no effective way to stop the stream of emails that resulted from a handful of registrations. From my perspective, clicking on "unsubscribe" only served to confirm the email address was good. In other words, perhaps it did unsubscribe you from that specific organization, yet, what you actually accomplished was to provide them with a validated "live target" email they could sell or provide to another organization.

The result was an almost exponential growth of emails. Registering to, if I remember correctly, approximately six organizations led to a constant daily stream of emails form hundreds (did not count them) of groups. Crazy.

I never set out to quantify any of this or run study, so I don't have hard numbers to offer. All I can say is that the explosion of emails was universal across political alignment. Private media organizations also seemed to share email addresses with political party groups and candidates. In other words, I got emails from candidates and campaigns using email addresses I only provided to news organizations (identifiable through plus-addressing).

It didn't take long for me to kill the account and conclude that the iconic "The only winning move is not to play" [1] insight applies.

[0] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpmGXeAtWUw

1. Temporarily deactivate the number for 30 days. Most spam engines will flag the number as offline, and actually remove you from the primary lead list they sell to marketers. Simply turning off data/mms/rcs formats can also be effective against some spam sources.

2. Make sure your telecom is not selling your contact details. Often this costs up to $2.53 a month per number to opt-out.

3. Set anyone not on your contact list to be redirected to voicemail. Notify callers there will be a $500 processing fee for leaving unsolicited commercial messages on your service, and get your lawyer to invoice them directly.

Have fun, =)

Back in ancient times - the 1980s - one of the DAK-style electronic toys mail-order places sold an interesting box. It worked like this:

1) pick up line

2) play a pre-recorded message (default: "Please enter your extension.")

3) wait for the touch-tone sounds (or rotary clicks, those still being a thing)

4) when the correct three-digit code was entered, your phone would ring.

No code, no ring. Simple. (and no voicemail, either!)

And if "extension 123" got compromised, you could just change it to "456" and let people know.

These are driving me nuts as well. When they do include a name it’s “Chris”, my name is not Chris, has never been Chris, and I’ve had my number for well over 2 decades.

Every SMS comes from a new number so “STOP” has zero effect. I’ve sent it more times than I can count. Now I just report it as spam/junk and slowly add more words to Bouncer to catch these spam messages.

On Android, 'SMS Organizer' [0], by Microsoft, has been a godsend for me. All the cappy marketing SMSes are cleanly filtered out. It also extracts all the bank, credit cards and other info and shows it cleanly in a separate tab.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

If you have Android, I've had good success with Google Messages. I reported one of them as spam, and now all of them go to the Spam folder automatically :)

How are you answering? Is responding with STOP not working?

In my country anti-spam regulations are very strict and politicians cannot bother us with massive advertising. I understand that it is a matter of regulations that govern and stop these types of practices.

Your best bet is to try to contact as many companies that send text messages on behalf of campaigns as possible (like Tatango, though there are probably a half dozen big ones), and threaten them with legal action if they don't completely block your number.

What I do is be very quick to block any number that sends me spam of any sort.

Don’t the senders of these messages understand the risk of alienating the people they are trying to mobilize?

(My conspiratorial side wonders what’s stopping political opponents from spamming “black flag” messages… ie to reduce the turnout of a political cause they don’t like)

Reply stop, etc. You will get more and the only other thing you can do is get an SMS filter but I wouldn’t want my msgs going through a 3rd party…

Unless they’re robotexts, which they’re most likely not, they’re not illegal.

Say "I am a foreigner; please don't waste your money on ads that I can't even act upon."

They don't have your identity, so they deserve a fake one.

On iOS, I installed VeroSMS and it lets me enter a bunch of block words such that when they are found messages go to Junk.

I always use the option to report them as spam that pops up in iMessage.

If you're on Android with f-droid, the Silence app[1] has solved this exact problem for me. Numbers that I haven't called before and aren't in my contacts can still leave a voicemail but not ring the phone.

*Edit, you said sms, not calls. I take screenshots and report them with the resources on FTC's website[2]. I'm not sure if it's effective, but the texts did stop for me.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.lucky.silence/

[2] https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-recognize-and-report-s...

I've been getting an enormous amount of right-wing political spam lately (which continues today). I made a video about tracing its origin. I wonder if your text messages are in any way related. Monument & Cathedral seems to be pursuing multi-modal communications, so it wouldn't surprise me if they have an active SMS campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap9PNXE2gFs