However, if they're using some other carrier or rolling their own VOIP setup, etc., or sending from a toll-free number instead of a shortcode, there's no guarantee that their particular platform will honor STOP. And there's no way for you, as a recipient, to know which is which.
Generally I will reply STOP if it's something I know I signed up for but no longer want. Things I never signed up for just get reported as spam and I don't reply.
After over a month of troubleshooting, it turns out that I had sent "STOP" to that number years ago on a different device (no longer visible in chat history) and now had to send "UNSTOP" in order to receive the phone verification SMS required to sign up for the service. It was a shared number between multiple apps.
- stalkers and trolls live off reactions, both positive and negative ones
- spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side
- colleagues and friends will hate you because everybody thinks they're important
Replying only has negative effects. Use client-side filtering, kill files, blocking functions, or ignore the text - whichever fits best.
It’s the same with texts. They could filter these in a more useful way. Also, IMO, I shouldn’t see a counter bubble if I filtered out/missed a call that went to voicemail. I’m an inbox zero type and having bubbles means there’s something that needs attention. Spam doesn’t need attention.
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 the customer who was sending the messages. I then contacted that company and got them to blacklist my number (they were a company for sending political sms only, I have no worries about needing to get an sms they would send).
I now get 1-2 political spam messages a month, if that, and I’ve been too lazy to hunt down the source of the few remaining spammers. It went from 2-3 a day to 1-2 a month, huge relief.
It uses iOS’s SMS Filtering framework, which does the filtering in a privacy-preserving way: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sms_and_call_repor...
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.
1) Turn on filtered view on iMessage
2) Actually report the abuse to carriers. iOS makes it easy, but it seems pretty ineffective because the abusers can just use another number. But if you complain to the carrier directly, then they can (hopefully) remove you entirely for that shady customer (and possibly kick them off). Here's what I do
a) Go to https://www.ipqualityscore.com/free-carrier-lookup (or whatever site you like, that's just the one I found)
b) Type in the spam number
c) Find the carrier name
d) Google the carrier, go their site, and find "Report abuse" or something similar
e) Fill out the form. Include your contact info so you actually know whether something is done or not.
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.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/report-suspicious-emails-websites-phishin...
Enable "Do Not Disturb" or its equivalent with your provider to make contacting you costlier and reduce spam. Then, manually block every number that contacts you.
The fact that I'm not replying even after your second attempt should be a strong indicator that I want you to remove me. If you send me three mails, I'll mark your email as spam and block you.
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.
For federal office, I've never gotten a response. For local office, sometimes I get back, "I'm a volunteer for candidate xyz." Once or twice the reply was seemingly from the candidate themselves.
The spammer can see the read receipt, so even if you don't respond, just viewing the message itself is a "response".
Read receipts should be disabled for unknown numbers by default.
"The SMS scam filter will not block unsolicited or unwanted commercial messages or ‘spam’. To unsubscribe to legitimate business spam or marketing SMS, you can reply STOP."
https://www.telstra.com.au/cyber-security-and-safety/active-...
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.
Besides, this seems to be an US only thing so it will only work for law abiding US based spammers^H^H^Hdirect marketers. Not for spammers outside the US, US based spammers that don't care about the law or scam/phishing messages.
In case it's pertinent to why blocking doesn't work for me, my problem is mainly with SMS spam messages sent by cellular service providers in Brazil (where TIM is particularly egregious). It doesn't make sense that iOS can't block a short code. It's just a simple string match. If you blocked an SMS message from number 72404, then another message from 72404 shouldn't be displayed.
If it's a company/organization that you've done business with, and they got your phone number through legitimate means, replying STOP will unsubscribe you, just like clicking unsubscribe in the email will simply unsubscribe you.
Folks saying that the amount of political spam they got after replying STOP to a political message went up, probably submitted their phone number to more organizations than they realized.
If it's actual spam (Which in my experience, is more often email-to-sms from Gmail, not actual texting spam) then of course that doesn't work.
Unfortunately this is a situation where you just have to use your brain. Oh, and I'm not convinced "report spam" does anything.
STOP/HTTP 403/unsubscribe all tell the other end that the address has something there. You’ll end up just reinforcing your place on a list of phone numbers to pass around.
I decided to go with Twilio for this purpose, solely for SMS 2FA, but twilio is entirely geared to supporting businesses with marketing campaigns and I cannot seem to get my number verified to be able to send SMS messages for a website that doesn't yet exist.
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://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.
I don't bother responding STOP to the obvious scams. They're already so crooked I doubt they're going to pay attention to SMS niceties when messaging me from Romania about my USPS package.
PS: never ever give your phone number or email address to any political candidate. Mailing address is required in the US but no other contact info.
The extra text really bugged me at the moment. Using iMessage through my desktop, I spammed "STOP" texts to the number as fast as possible, receiving the same auto-reply each time.
I wanted to see if it would hit some limit, and after about 200 texts, I stopped receiving a reply.
I don't see any point in replying STOP to an unsolicited message, if they cared about your consent they wouldn't have sent it unsolicited in the first place.
I use Google Fi which marks most of them as spam anyway, and the ones it doesn't I flag as spam so presumably other Fi users will automatically have them routed to spam.
Spam should never be in the "better ask for forgiveness than ask for permission" bucket.
I still get the texts, although not as much, but they have a different domain, so that's...something I guess?
If anyone legitimate gets caught up in that, I’m not sorry, blame the spammers for ruining it for everyone.
If you think a bad actor is targeting you, DO NOT REPLY.
They will not honor your opt out request but they may use your number in the future as you’ve confirmed there’s a human behind it. They may even sell lists of repliers to other bad actors.
Once you've done that, they have 31 days to comply. There's plenty of legal entities that still will call you. If you answer, be polite, play the dope a bit to get the necessary unfortunately, ask how they got the number, then request a manager (yes, they have one, they will tell you they don't. Be polite but insist). When you get the manager politely ask for the company details, then tell them to immediately remove you from their list. Their business can be shut down for violations so once they know you know, they take you seriously (FCC takes reports more seriously when more detailed). They'll probably hang up on you, this is okay. Report them anyways (do this legal or not. They can get their voip removed and whatever shell they're using. It's still annoying for them and they might remove you because you're not worth it)
Second, don't answer phone calls. It is a practice to call, listen for a voice, then log that number as active.
Text messages are more difficult. It depends on the service but you can probably text stop. The difficulty of blocking is that legit services will use the same number to text you verification codes (can we fucking kill sms 2FA‽)
You can also sign up for a relay service (I use Firefox, but use whatever). I do this for email and every website has a unique email. Things like + for Gmail don't work and are filtered. You can also do this for phone numbers but it's more expensive.
Fourth, aggressively unsubscribe, report to FCC, change settings on devices, and so on. Do this for your non-tech savvy friends and family. Get them to use services like signal that are privacy preserving, don't leak metadata, AND is easy enough Grandma can use. Install ublock origin into their browsers and some other privacy preserving stuff and edit settings. Get them to use Firefox instead of Chrome if you can.
You need to do this to others because they will leak your information (most of my information leak comes from my parents. I even get emails in their names...)
If you want to take a step further, get a scrubbing service like optery. There's a lot of shady shit so be careful who you pick.
Edit: you can do a similar thing for mail. There is a $5 processing fee. Sucks, but sadly it's junk mail that keeps the post office alive (do not put "return to sender" unless it's prepaid. You need to give a reason otherwise your postal worker is just being nice and throwing it away for you. Don't create more work for them)
plus mains & MVNOs checked DO NOT CALL / DO NOT TEXT registry before letting known spam accounts through etc