Spoofed Number SMS Spam

I give up.

For the past two years now I've been getting 5 to 15 spam texts a month always from spoofed numbers. Often times including a hyperlink.

I get phone calls too. About twice as many. Also from spoofed numbers.

I installed the paid version of Robocall a few months ago

I frequently re register on the do not call registry.

I even spent a lot of time reporting the spam on the dnc website.

I want to learn how they are spoofing numbers and how they are making money.

Maybe if I understand how they're doing this I can feel a little less bothered by these incessant interruptions.

3 comments

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nyolfen 6y ago ↗

i’m afraid i don’t have a lot of insight into the workings of spammers, but if you have at&t they offer a free app that uses crowdsourced blacklists to block then:

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1147710

it has cut out about 2/3 of my spam calls (i don’t get many texts)

qplex 6y ago ↗

Here is one recent example of a failed attempt to scam money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348721

toast0 6y ago ↗

For voice calls, most high volume VOIP services simply let the customer pick the caller ID. This is/was common for T1 based calling as well. There's lots of valid reasons for the customer to set something, so they just let anything through because it's easier; shaken/stir is supposed to change this over time.

To some degree this is true for SMS as well, but in the US, it's less so. Mostly you have to send from a number associated with your account, so you get 'random' number messages: the SMS aggregator has a ton of phone numbers, and picks one at random to send from. SMS spam is much rarer in my experience.

If you're in the mood, you can probably get most of the spammed links taken down by reporting to the providers; or if it's phishing, by reporting to the people being forged (who may have better connections; credit unions seem to know how to get things taken down real quick)