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Ask HN: How do I stop political SMS spam?

47 points by datadrivenangel ↗ HN
I'm getting like 10 sms texts a day for the previous owner of my phone number, who hasn't had the number in a long time. Is there a way to stop this? I tried responding to opt out a few times but just kept getting new texts from new numbers.

66 comments

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heartag
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...

nullindividual
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.

eureka-belief
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)

jonathanlb
Regrettably, SMS campaigning appears to be the new norm, as both major political parties are utilizing it. The calculation seems to be that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. Therefore, I don't believe a bad actor would utilize it to potentially help their opponent.

From personal experience, while the constant messaging can be irritating, I've learned to reply STOP and move on with my life. it won't deter me from voting. I mean, this tactic is part of broader campaign strategies rather than a reflection of any candidate's merits.

Froedlich
We had a local election back in 2004, where Candidate A unleashed a spam tsunami at text and voice numbers. Enough that it angered enough people to turn the election to Candidate B. (best as we could tell after the fact)

Candidate B, it eventually came out, was the one who was running a sock puppet "Vote for A!" campaign.

al_borland
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.
quickthrowman
> 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.

I used a similar tactic against a city council candidate that was spamming me.

I called the number that was sending the texts and told them if I received one more text about supporting their candidate in the primary, I would run against them myself in the next election and make my entire candidacy about their spam texts.

That was the last text I received from that candidate.

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SaberTail
When I did SMS-banking for a candidate, there was always a real person behind the messages. However, that consisted of queuing up a big list of numbers and a templated message and clicking "send". Likewise, if someone responded, the software only let us pick from a handful of pre-canned responses. We did have a button to remove people from the list, and were supposed to use it for anything that sounded like a request to stop contacting them (your message would count).
al_borland
I’ve had various degrees of engagement. Some send a canned message that I’ll be removed. Others respond and engage a bit more. Some of that likely also depends on how I frame my first reply.
lapcat
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.

phone_book
Same thing happens to me except it's Sophia (I am a dude)
wiredfool
Surely you must be joking.
datadrivenangel
I'm serious and don't call me shirley.

I get messages for Katherine, who has not had this phone number in at least 15 years.

TrueGeek
Every October I get a hundred or so calls and texts for someone named Eileen reminding her it's open enrollment time for Obamacare. It started suddenly a few years ago so I think the real Eileen just entered the wrong number by mistake but I have no idea how to make it stop.
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JohnFen
What I do is be very quick to block any number that sends me spam of any sort.
nonameiguess
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.

mixologic
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.

kazinator
You realize you're going against the rule "never respond to spam".
reidjs
You're validating that there is a human on the other end, though, that's dangerous.
btgeekboy
No, that’s not the only way. “STOP” is a keyword that most carriers/providers will respect and handle automatically. “You have the wrong number” requires all that human involvement.
ranger_danger
What about the people who argue that replying to any message just signals that there is a real person on the other end, causing them to now send even more messages?
somedude895
I think that rule applies mainly to scamming and hacking attempts by shadowy, foreign-based criminal entities.

In this case it's probably a US company that has an interest in staying on the good side of the law.

l8nite
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...

robomartin
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

joeyphoen
Similarly, I run my own email domain where all addresses go to the same inbox, so I can give all entities their own email address (e.g. hyatt@myemail.com, dmv@myemail.com). So far every single political email has come to the address that I ONLY gave the CA DMV.
datadrivenangel
I do this with fastmail. The aliasing has gotten really good.
itsdrewmiller
Did you register to vote through the DMV? Doing so might have gotten your email into their publicly accessible voter file (although I have no idea whether CA actually includes email on their voter file).
jck
I wonder why the organizations doing shady stuff like this respect plus addressing. Seems like they could just strip out the + addressed stuff?
paulschreiber
How are you answering? Is responding with STOP not working?
hnrodey
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.
js2
This works for me too with Verizon. And on iOS, under Settings > Messages, I enable "Filter Unknown Senders".
teeray
For political messages, this doesn’t work—they ignore it. It just validates that you saw the message (and rewards the behavior).
TheBigSalad
If the messages are automated this works and is legally required. Many political messages may be a template but come from real humans. It's a way around the law.
datadrivenangel
Human pushes the button so it's not a machine.

Does it still count if a human is supervising an autoclicker?

Froedlich
Call from another jurisdiction, and good luck trying to enforce any laws.

Back in the old days spam call centers were often in the Caribbean for that reason, but now that phone calls are so cheap, they might be anywhere.

interbased
This is why I don’t answer any calls from a number I don’t know. It just validates to a potential spam system that my number belongs to a real person.
Froedlich
Exactly. Which I have tried to explain (unsuccessfully, alas) too many times. We only answer calls from numbers we recognize.

This has caused some interesting issues, though. My wife answered one of the unknown-callers on her cellphone anyway, and it turned out to be from her doctor's office. Who couldn't (or wouldn't) explain why the clerk was using per personal cellphone to call patients, or how they got the number. We still maintain a land line, and only eight individuals have my cellular number, only five have hers. Yet somewhere a dataset was purchased, and both our cellular numbers have propagated throughout the Electronic Medical Records system, often as the only contact number.

colinbartlett
For me this works only to stop future messages from that campaign. All the campaigns seem to buy and sell lists so I just get a different message from a different campaign at a different number. Here are the most recent offenders:

  Katrina Christiansen
  Harry Dunn
  Arizona for Abortion Access 
  Turnout PAC
  Yvette Clarke
  Josh Stein
  Ty Pinkins
  Democratic Majority
  Tammy Baldwin
  Democrats United
gretch
Yes this was my experience too. It was like a hydra. Say no to 1 campaign, get 2 more new campaigns tomorrow
SaberTail
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.

JohnFen
Yes, I learned the hard way to never donate to political campaigns, and be very, very cautious about donating to any other nonprofit, unless you are giving the money truly anonymously. Giving to these groups means that you're going to be hounded incessantly by other organizations.
browningstreet
I keep a Google Voice number for this purpose. It's still free, and it's the only thing I enter online. My cell goes to humans I know.

I don't really care how much spam I get to GV. I only check it weekly or so.

iak8god
ActBlue and WinRed are now used by Democrats and Republicans respectively for fundraising at just about every level, even pretty local races, and they're clearly selling access to their lists.

I donated a small amount to a Democratic candidate for a legislature race in my state (via ActBlue) and spent the next year unsubscribing from mailing lists that sending me hyperbolic nonsense about national races.

I donated a small amount to a Republican presidential primary candidate (via WinRed) and got signed up for campaign spam from Republicans running tight races all over the country, as well as like fifteen subscriptions to different mailing lists run by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times.

itsdrewmiller
ActBlue doesn't sell data, but they do pass your email and phone number to the people you are donating to - they are the ones who are likely selling it.
jasode
>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

You may get on additional spam lists if you donate but that's not what happened to my friend that's now getting multiple campaign messages every single day.

She never donated to anybody. She simply registered to vote. Even though she avoided putting her cellphone # on the registration form, the voters registrations are public information and the databrokers hired by political campaigns cross-referenced her name & address to find her cellphone #.

Replying with STOP doesn't help. The endless SMS texts have gotten so bad that she's giving up her phone number that she's had for 25 years and switching to a new # to get her privacy back.

itsdrewmiller
The FEC reports don't include your email address or phone number - but unscrupulous actors may use the PII from the report to try to match against another data set of emails or phones.
Joel_Mckay
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, =)

cglong
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 :)
signal_space
I always use the option to report them as spam that pops up in iMessage.
thinkcomp
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

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

dhosek
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.

itsdrewmiller
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.
jaredsohn
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.
joshstrange
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.