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Ask HN: Recent uptick in spam emails and text messages?

17 points by meken ↗ HN
Has anyone noticed an uptick in spam emails and text messages the past few months?

I’ve consistently been getting ~1-2 spam emails per day and ~1 bogus text message.

The spam all seem to be imitating retail stores, offering some promo.

I use gmail and iOS.

18 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] thread
permo-w
I’ve gotten a text saying:

“Hi mum I'm texting you off a friends phone I've smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number 07—————- please x”

3 days in a row from 3 different numbers. god knows what scam lies on the other end of that number

JoshAtticus
I've been getting a LOT of emails about my Apple ID being logged into an iPhone X from Indonesia, when I don't even have one. I also keep getting texts saying your twitter account was locked when I don't have a twitter account either.
augustuspolius
I don't get any spam texts but saw an uptick about a month ago in fake emails from a range of retailers. Always an order confirmation for some expensive gadget with a message prompting me to call a fake number if I have any questions. I am using Startmail and they seem to have caught up on this scam.
kaveet
On iOS I’ve been using Bouncer to filter out SMS and iMessage spam using regexes. It’s been surprisingly effective to filter out messages that contain non-https URLs:

https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer

highwayman47
Yes, last 4 months: I am getting 100+ spam emails a day, filtering catches about 90% but still that's 10 that get through EACH DAY. It used to be NONE! I now get 3-4 spam texts per week, previously it would be about 3-4 a year.
faebi
Oh, I‘m not alone! It‘s completely out of control for me. My email has been exposed for 1.5 decades now, but the last few months have been on another level. Maybe we are targeted as good value victims ?
api
I get heaps more marketing emails than usual and many read like the products of a GPT-3 type system. They probably are.

AI generated “personalized” spam is probably hard to filter.

MerelyMortal
Not really.

Fastmail. Unique emails for businesses, a personal email that was leaked a while back, and a gmail with a somewhat common name that's about 18 years old.

Android.

doktorhladnjak
I’m definitely getting spam texts out of nowhere after not really getting these in the past. They’re mostly of the sexual performance, obvious scam with misspellings variety. Like spam email at its zenith in the early oughts.
mrWiz
That matches my experience to a T. For years I was getting a spam SMS once a month, at most. Recently I've started getting a few per day, mostly for dick pills.
winrid
More very obvious spam has been making it through the Gmail filters lately.

Also past few months I've been getting a few spam texts a week in Chinese (although native Chinese people tell me they're Taiwanese scammers... :) ).

They're not bots, either. I just reply with funny pictures.

modeopfer
Funny, I just wanted to post an Ask HN to inquire how businesses deal with the increasing amount of spam.

At my place of work, we currently get around 40 spam messages per outwards-facing email.

How do you deal with that? What software solutions exist to filter spam that work well with Microsoft Exchange?

Rebelgecko
I've been getting a ton of spam texts, almost daily over the last 3 months. It's a mix of housing speculators, political donation requests, and sex stuff.
the_only_law
I have noticed a ton of spam slipping through gmail as of recent. Same exact format as you describe. For some reason they appear to mostly be related to airlines or tools.
bluedino
Election spam text time in the USA