Frustratingly they will send from new numbers each time, so just 'unsubscribing' from one will not really do anything. They will use websites/domains that don't respond to anything unless they have the path in the text message too. It's maddening. Here in Ohio I am getting nearly 100 a day recently. I would like to block unknown numbers, but I have kids and I certainly don't want to miss an emergency message.
I need a tool to mass-dial back the toll-free numbers they tell you to call back on. I wonder how many inbound calls their trunk can hold at once waiting for an agent and what their pay-per-minute inbound rate is. I'm sure it'd be easy to start making them pay.
If anybody needs to get in touch with me, they physically have to show up (or write a letter).
----
This is seemingly "impossible" for most people to attempt, but is worthwhile. May I encourage anybody reading this to step away from phones/emails for just 24 hours, to start.
I've had my phone number for 20 years and I get maybe one or two a month. Are you guys reading or responding to them? I just archive them when I see them. I don't know what I'm doing right, but it's just never been a problem for me and I'm not sure why. I'm not particularly careful about hiding my number and have the typical grocery store rewards cards and whatnot.
Did you ever provide your phone number at voter registration? I made this mistake once and got added to dozens of text lists, Democratic and Republican. Never had a problem from the usual leaks.
I don't know what happened, but this got INTENSELY worse for me in the last ~6 months. I never respond to them and mark as spam and move on, but I get multiple calls and texts from unknown numbers every day. Sometimes it's the "hey, I'm sorry to hear about that thing that happened to you" kind of bait, but lately a vast majority of them are trying to offer me business funds or loans or whatever.
I have no idea if my number made its way onto new lists or if the problem just got worse in general, but it's making my phone borderline unusable. I miss any calls from legitimate unknown numbers because of it (delivery people, etc). I've also had my phone number for > 20 years at this point and I can't stand the thought of changing it.
It depends on what you get picked up by. My ancient email address picks up all kinds of spam. I'm not sure where the Korean comes from at all. Nor am I sure why this particular woodworker thinks I am certain to buy their woodworking plans on the 842nd email when the first 841 haven't worked. I am a rather classical nerd on this point... not completely incompetent when it comes to home repair, but certainly not doing woodworking for fun on the weekends, and have no idea what signal I showed at any point that convinced someone the contrary might be true.
And then my wife has a completely different spray of spam. The amusing thing to me is that for both of us, while some of it is clearly a matter of what we're doing, she also has weird random stuff on those occasions I am tasked to find what happened to some email, and it's completely different weird random stuff.
I don't know what I did, but this election I've also been getting hammered by spam texts. I hadn't before. Not only that, it is as the author of this piece mentions, rather widely targeted. Messages that are clearly sent from the presumption that I agree with their politics despite very much not doing so... you know, the scare texts where they send "If you don't donate to us immediately the opponent is going to DO X IMMEDIATELY" and you're all like, my gosh, we should be so lucky that X would actually happen immediately but no, that's not actually going to happen. Clearly completely mistargeted. Which leads me to think even the ones I nominally wouldn't hate could well just be random luck too. And for me at least, this was a single change... from nothing last election to every single side and every shuckster trying to push poll me from every direction at once.
My text inbox went into nuclear meltdown shortly after giving my number in a donation to a local charity. I hear that political donations have the same effect, so I haven't done any of those, but in any case there doesn't seem to be any political will to punish these bad actors so better filters are probably the ticket. "Don't donate to charity/politics" is probably not a solution we want to collectively promote.
If you reply STOP, you just let them know you read their text and it's a number that will respond with an actual person behind it. I would not reply to it. It's very unlikely to do anything but make the problem worse.
I have replied STOP a lot and the political texts do, in fact, stop - at least from that particular number (see my other comment for a rant about this). Of course if you do this to a scammer it is as you say.
I wonder if 'STOP or I will vote for your opponent' might work. Then again, if that worked, you might just start receiving messages asking you to vote for their opponent instead.
STOP to a 10DLC number should block further texts from that specific number at a carrier level, regardless of whether the campaign honors its 10DLC requirements. At least, until it’s recycled to a new campaign.
I tell my friends and family to never use "unsubscribe" links unless they have a close relationship with the sender. How folks decided directing people to click links in spam email is beyond me.
After I once made the mistake of donating money to a political campaign, I actually was able to free myself from the torrent of spam by replying END and STOP over and over. It took months, but the messages did stop.
Someone managed to connect my phone number to my voter registration during my recent move, so the spam is back. This time, I am replying END or STOP and then blocking the number & reporting spam, just in case that creates more friction for them.
I got a text from a political party recently (not one of the major ones, just trying to get me to put in a vote for the same candidate that a third party nominated as well, after I had already mailed in my ballot) that said to send STOP to stop receiving messages or SKIP to "opt out entirely". I still have no clue what the distinction is supposed to be between those.
I think it's also helpful to be prompt if you'd like to help others; A campaign will use e.g. twilio numbers leased for a matter of hour, then release it. If you wait too long to report spam, you damage the number's reputation without actually punishing the hyperactive spammer.
Isn't Twilio complicit? and isn't it deserved that random Twilio customers, who are funding an illegal organization, get banned? If there is no consequence, Twilio will continue. I'd happily fund a campaign to drive Twilio to bankruptcy.
So funny how fairly annoying it was to sign up for a phone number for a chatbot for my company going through the 10DLC campaign verification, being rejected like 3 times because I kept missing something and yet...none of it clearly really matters.
I think you got lucky. Traditional political candidate campaigns and mainstream parties are supposed to comply with some FEC regs about respecting unsub replies (I think it's tied to getting broad access lists and maybe reduced rates for campaigns), however a LOT of texts and robo-calls (whether supporting candidates or initiatives) are now funded by PACs who seem to have no issue using spammer SIM farms and AFAIC are under no regs.
Since there's no way to tell PAC texts from actual candidate-funded texts, and the PACs seem to now be the vast majority, I always hit the checkbox to block and report as SPAM to my telco. Not that it'll help much but if it's an actual candidate, the telcos whitelist them anyway (because of course politicians passed a law that requires them to), and if it's a PAC maybe it'll burn their SIM farm number pool a little faster, costing them more.
If you're on Android, I highly recommend: www.github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. The UX is a little obtuse to set up the first time (ask your LLM) but once set up it works great.
The secret they use is that the company with the list NEVER sends anything, it simply sells the list to a campaign or PAC or whomever, and THAT group DOES remove you, but the moment a new campaign or PAC or whomever springs up, they buy the same list again.
This is why every campaign is a new legal entity each time around.
Indeed, My 90 year-old, deeply religious mother sent a televangelist $10 one time. A year later when she was in the hospital for a few weeks. I picked up her mail once a week and quickly found out I had to bring a large sack for one week of mail. For every actual bill she got, there were over a hundred pieces of physical spam mail from every kind of religious and political cause, candidate and prophet imaginable - usually in large four-color, glossy envelopes.
It's not just offshore call center con artists preying on the elderly. There's a huge, highly profitable, legal-but-scummy onshore industry too. It was obvious that 'nice Reverend on TV' sold her out to anyone who'd pay - and then they sold it and so on... Even though I'm an atheist, these assholes make me wish there was actually a hell full of fire and brimstone awaiting them.
I use NoMoRobo Max for this stuff. For what it is, it works pretty well, IMO.
Sadly, each time they use a different number, so my list of blocked numbers is huge and getting more massive by the day. Sooner or later, I will have blocked every possible phone number in existence.
SpamBlocker lets you put numbers into groups like those in your contacts, those you've ever called, and those in your area code or prefix. Then each group is tested against a content whitelist and blacklist based on words, length, formatting, even Regex. And it's not binary, each list hit has a weight from -100 to +100 and when a text falls below a certain score without any being 'saved' by any whitelist +100 terms (like the name of my HMO, my wife's name, etc) it gets either silenced, reduced to vibrate-only or trashed.
i've been taking to responding "fuck off" instead of "stop" and then blocking and reporting.
they do at least enough sentiment analysis so that "fuck off" behaves like "stop" and they respond that they're removing you from their list and won't contact you again.
I forget where, but I remember reading somewhere about how STOP is meant to actually be handled at the carrier level and do something to not allow future messages at all from the sender? Though maybe I’m misremembering?
At least in my experience, it's enforced at the sender/platform level. I can confirm that from working with Twilio and Amazon SNS. They suppress messages to opted-out recipients. Though the exact implementation varies by provider. For example supported keywords might be different(we have our internal list of opted out keywords).
I've found a lot of the traffic may be originating from resume sites..
The minute I unpublished my phone number from job recruiting sites, my spam calls declined by 60-70%. Apparently these career sites don't make enough money of job connections alone.
I now just ask for an email as a first point of contact from potential recruiters.
Christ... on the opposite end.. I'm in sales. I wish that people would just make their intentions clear. They submit a lead and I can't even get a STOP response anymore.
Perhaps replying with a message that looks similarly automated would work better. Make it look like they accidentally contacted GameStop chat support or something.
+1 on sending “STOP”. Telecoms have detection for this keyword and punish the sender/number if two or more people send it to a number in a ~2 month period. The above comment should be the top comment.
I get a lot of those in Germany. The countries they originate from change. A few months ago it was random numbers in the US. Then it switched to the UK. The last few weeks it's from some random numbers in Germany. The numbers rotate and I never get more than one or two calls from the same number. I always block them but it seems these guys have an endless supply of random numbers to switch to. I had four of them today. I just bulk block them every few days. I don't think anyone cares.
No idea what kind of scams they are pushing but it seems very cheap and easy to abuse the system like this. I wish we could escalate this to operators and force them to deal with abusive customers properly like they clearly can't be bothered to do right now. Some countries probably have rules and regulations. Like Germany probably has. And yet, I get spam calls from German numbers on my own German number. So, clearly whatever there is, isn't working all that well.
Screen unknown senders. Any text that comes from a number that is not in your contacts will be stashed away in the unknown senders bin without any notification. Problem solved.
That's exactly it. I donated to a candidate once (literally once, ever) and the party basically passes my phone number around to every PAC and campaign organization under the sun.
This stuff must be effective or else they wouldn't do it. On the other hand, it seems like a good way to discourage repeat donors. Why would I donate any money if the result is going to be endless texts and emails?
Heck, maybe they should offer a "premium donation" where you pay extra to not get on these lists, analogous to a no-ads streaming plan.
Any communication channel that doesn't involve a whitelist (e.g. invite/approve) will have this problem. Email. Phones. Text messages.
If you want to fix this, the protocol must ensure the recipient first agrees to communicate with you. Until they do, all messages to them will be automatically blocked.
This solution works. Yes, there are always ways to get around it, but in practice, it cuts the nonsense by well over 90%.
I had exactly the same thought around Apple’s “report spam”. I have marked hundreds of text messages as spam. There is enough training data in there for even a dumb classifier to filter some of this stuff out. But next day, there are half a dozen more, nearly identical spam msgs sitting unread in the inbox.
I have also found that replying STOP = sing of life, your number is marked as “someone alive on the other end” and gets resold to 20 new lists.
That's what I love the EU GDPR for. By law no one is allowed to use my number without explicit consent in the first place. And if someone spammed me, they have to tell where they got my data from and have to delete it upon request. Love it!
I get spam texts almost daily. I too wish this would stop and I've tried most of the things the OP has as well. I see this as analogous to being inundated with spam email and we solved the problem for email with regulation[0] and we need to do the same for SMS. The bad news is that it is also likely to get much worse before it gets better[1].
Email is tolerable because gmail and others implemented software spam filters. Gmail did so because they were in competition with other email providers and it was a way to get users. The incumbent phone carriers have no incentive to compete here.
Other platforms did better solving the spam problem, so most people simply don't use SMS/MMS anymore. The kids and young adults all moved to Telegram, Discord, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc.
I've used CAN-SPAM many times to enforce spam marketing from businesses plenty of times.
Further, it has required unsubscribe links to be included which allow you to opt out of any further communication. That is invaluable because you can't do that now with SMS.
I'm not discounting spam filters. They have certainly made life easier, but for things that _aren't_ caught by spam, I have at least some recourse by unsubscribing.
The problem is that SPAMing works for US politicians, so they include exceptions in various anti-spam legislation for political calls / texts, and survey calls / texts.
The solution is to recognize that our legislators have a severe conflict of interest, and instead ban these via ballot initiatives. Of course the politicians will whine and complain, but once the voters speak, they will comply.
I have set up a Siri Shortcut on my iPhone using the Shortcuts app.
It relies on political campaign and super-PAC texts containing the key phrase "Stop2End" or "End2End"
The shortcut runs on any incoming message
First it checks to see if "Stop2End" is in the body of the message
It checks to see if the sender is in my contacts
If the sender is not in my contacts then it replies with "STOP"
This opts me out of about 3-5 lists per day
The other change I made was to sign up for the Do Not Call registry on the FCC website
I have no faith that this would have any impact whatsoever. The thing is, it also isn't my problem. It has absolutely ruined outbound sales. I'll never answer my phone or accept a text from anyone not in my contacts. I basically don't read email. I'm unreachable to people who I'm not expecting outreach from. And I'm fine with it, only because I'm not the one trying to make a living cold calling people.
I am desperate for something like this on Android and cannot for the life of me fathom why the messages app does not have a simple keyword-based filter.
I am going to attempt to wire something up with Tasker because it is getting too bad to cope with.
I always wondered if these text messages are extremely cheap or free for these spammers to send? In my experience, sending texts costs around 0.5 to 1 cent so are they hoping after spending a few bucks in spend, they'd get a sucker?
I used to have an auto-expanding snippet that would insert the entire wikipedia entry for the Tiananmen Square massacre and then I'd never hear back from them. This was mostly when the Chinese bots were doing the pig butchering scam.
Unfortunately pretty much any surface to contact you will be abused to try to sell you something. It started with phone calls and text messages, but quickly in recent years it's been happening to smart phone notifications.
For example, for DoorDash, I should just receive order status notifications but they ping me every few days to try out a local restaurant. They want to remind me that their app exists on my phone and I can spend money with them.
Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.
It makes me realize that email is a much better system for this. You have an entire archive of every email you receive, with the ability to search, filter, forward, and even set up custom rules to delete items containing certain text, for example.
Yes it's a hassle to manage an email inbox, but this kind of flexibility gives users a lot of power that phone, sms, or native notifications lack.
I think in the future you’ll just have a local AI model determine if any message is an advert or a genuine communication and it just filters the ads out for you.
> Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.
Even if they _do_ offer that sort of granularity, these apps introduce a new 'category' of notification everyday, and the new category is always opt-out, so there will always be a small stream of notifications leaking through.
On my iPhone I use a “focus” that just rejects communication from a set of bad actors. If I order a pizza or something I disable the focus ND RE-enable it when the pizza arrives.
If you send me one spam sms or notification you go immediately on the list.
Works fine except the notification identifier is different for ipad and phone so I have to add those apps twice.
I’ve noticed lately that both Walmart _and_ Amazon use push notifications for advertisements right next to order updates. Both allow you to turn off the advertising (I think), but opt everyone in by default.
iOS has gotten reasonably good about tracking packages in wallet outside of any other app, but then again, wallet has sent advertisements about other Apple things.
On an Android phone, put corporate apps like DoorDash, that you don't want to think about except when you are actually using them, in a separate user profile. Then they are out of sight and out of mind.
Separate user accounts have been a feature in stock Android for years now, and a quick search shows that Samsung supports this same stock Android feature.
DoorDash is both better & worse (mostly worse with the slimmest silver lining) than you’ve portrayed. Inside the app settings you can turn off all the marketing notifications. They’ll even mostly respect that setting with the following caveats:
1) they will give you a recurring pop up banner when you open the app to turn on all notifications, making it sound like it’s just for delivery notifications, even if you already have those turned on. You have to ignore it.
2) at least once recently, they just toggled them all on, on my behalf, anyway. I found out after receiving a random marketing notification. Then I turned them back off & it hasn’t happened since.
3) there have been occasions where even with granular controls, I don’t receive the delivery notifications if I have the marketing ones turned off. Hasn’t happened in a while, but now I always keep that in mind that it’s a possibility.
I got really surprised when Wolt suddenly gave me a notification on iPhone that said "Welcome to Germany! Discover all the places you can order from". How on earth would it know I had crossed the border? I hadn't interacted with the app for several days and the iOS location services setting is explicitly set to "While Using". That must mean Wolt is actively telling iOS it's being "in use" even though it's not. Really really scummy behavior that should be illegal.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] threadWe're going to have to go to double-opt-in just to communicate.
My landline does not ring.
Stopped using email almost a decade ago.
If anybody needs to get in touch with me, they physically have to show up (or write a letter).
----
This is seemingly "impossible" for most people to attempt, but is worthwhile. May I encourage anybody reading this to step away from phones/emails for just 24 hours, to start.
I have no idea if my number made its way onto new lists or if the problem just got worse in general, but it's making my phone borderline unusable. I miss any calls from legitimate unknown numbers because of it (delivery people, etc). I've also had my phone number for > 20 years at this point and I can't stand the thought of changing it.
You're lucky...
And then my wife has a completely different spray of spam. The amusing thing to me is that for both of us, while some of it is clearly a matter of what we're doing, she also has weird random stuff on those occasions I am tasked to find what happened to some email, and it's completely different weird random stuff.
I don't know what I did, but this election I've also been getting hammered by spam texts. I hadn't before. Not only that, it is as the author of this piece mentions, rather widely targeted. Messages that are clearly sent from the presumption that I agree with their politics despite very much not doing so... you know, the scare texts where they send "If you don't donate to us immediately the opponent is going to DO X IMMEDIATELY" and you're all like, my gosh, we should be so lucky that X would actually happen immediately but no, that's not actually going to happen. Clearly completely mistargeted. Which leads me to think even the ones I nominally wouldn't hate could well just be random luck too. And for me at least, this was a single change... from nothing last election to every single side and every shuckster trying to push poll me from every direction at once.
Someone managed to connect my phone number to my voter registration during my recent move, so the spam is back. This time, I am replying END or STOP and then blocking the number & reporting spam, just in case that creates more friction for them.
I think it's also helpful to be prompt if you'd like to help others; A campaign will use e.g. twilio numbers leased for a matter of hour, then release it. If you wait too long to report spam, you damage the number's reputation without actually punishing the hyperactive spammer.
Since there's no way to tell PAC texts from actual candidate-funded texts, and the PACs seem to now be the vast majority, I always hit the checkbox to block and report as SPAM to my telco. Not that it'll help much but if it's an actual candidate, the telcos whitelist them anyway (because of course politicians passed a law that requires them to), and if it's a PAC maybe it'll burn their SIM farm number pool a little faster, costing them more.
If you're on Android, I highly recommend: www.github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. The UX is a little obtuse to set up the first time (ask your LLM) but once set up it works great.
This is why every campaign is a new legal entity each time around.
It's not just offshore call center con artists preying on the elderly. There's a huge, highly profitable, legal-but-scummy onshore industry too. It was obvious that 'nice Reverend on TV' sold her out to anyone who'd pay - and then they sold it and so on... Even though I'm an atheist, these assholes make me wish there was actually a hell full of fire and brimstone awaiting them.
Sadly, each time they use a different number, so my list of blocked numbers is huge and getting more massive by the day. Sooner or later, I will have blocked every possible phone number in existence.
they do at least enough sentiment analysis so that "fuck off" behaves like "stop" and they respond that they're removing you from their list and won't contact you again.
The minute I unpublished my phone number from job recruiting sites, my spam calls declined by 60-70%. Apparently these career sites don't make enough money of job connections alone.
I now just ask for an email as a first point of contact from potential recruiters.
You're thinking about e-mail unsubscribe links.
It's my understanding that, in the United States anyway, if you reply STOP, the phone number is blocked at the carrier level.
This is the buried lede.
No idea what kind of scams they are pushing but it seems very cheap and easy to abuse the system like this. I wish we could escalate this to operators and force them to deal with abusive customers properly like they clearly can't be bothered to do right now. Some countries probably have rules and regulations. Like Germany probably has. And yet, I get spam calls from German numbers on my own German number. So, clearly whatever there is, isn't working all that well.
> You have successfully been unsubscribed. You will not receive any more messages from this number.
"From this number" is clearly a legalese parsing of some law or regulation and the end result is that you cannot truly opt out. Infuriating.
This stuff must be effective or else they wouldn't do it. On the other hand, it seems like a good way to discourage repeat donors. Why would I donate any money if the result is going to be endless texts and emails?
Heck, maybe they should offer a "premium donation" where you pay extra to not get on these lists, analogous to a no-ads streaming plan.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
Any communication channel that doesn't involve a whitelist (e.g. invite/approve) will have this problem. Email. Phones. Text messages.
If you want to fix this, the protocol must ensure the recipient first agrees to communicate with you. Until they do, all messages to them will be automatically blocked.
This solution works. Yes, there are always ways to get around it, but in practice, it cuts the nonsense by well over 90%.
Getting less spam was one of my biggest hallelujah moments after switching.
The Pixel has never (AFAICT) mistakenly marked a text as spam, although it has mistakenly declined a few legit phone calls.
It's not perfect but I am a less angry person now.
At least the phone calls are handled properly...
I have also found that replying STOP = sing of life, your number is marked as “someone alive on the other end” and gets resold to 20 new lists.
Performative politics at work.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... [1] https://www.npr.org/2026/07/12/nx-s1-5867763/ai-artificial-i...
Email is tolerable because gmail and others implemented software spam filters. Gmail did so because they were in competition with other email providers and it was a way to get users. The incumbent phone carriers have no incentive to compete here.
Other platforms did better solving the spam problem, so most people simply don't use SMS/MMS anymore. The kids and young adults all moved to Telegram, Discord, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc.
Further, it has required unsubscribe links to be included which allow you to opt out of any further communication. That is invaluable because you can't do that now with SMS.
I'm not discounting spam filters. They have certainly made life easier, but for things that _aren't_ caught by spam, I have at least some recourse by unsubscribing.
The solution is to recognize that our legislators have a severe conflict of interest, and instead ban these via ballot initiatives. Of course the politicians will whine and complain, but once the voters speak, they will comply.
Says something about the political climate of where I live.
The shortcut runs on any incoming message
First it checks to see if "Stop2End" is in the body of the message
It checks to see if the sender is in my contacts
If the sender is not in my contacts then it replies with "STOP"
This opts me out of about 3-5 lists per day
The other change I made was to sign up for the Do Not Call registry on the FCC website
I am going to attempt to wire something up with Tasker because it is getting too bad to cope with.
I used to have an auto-expanding snippet that would insert the entire wikipedia entry for the Tiananmen Square massacre and then I'd never hear back from them. This was mostly when the Chinese bots were doing the pig butchering scam.
that's the neat part, you don't.
For example, for DoorDash, I should just receive order status notifications but they ping me every few days to try out a local restaurant. They want to remind me that their app exists on my phone and I can spend money with them.
Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.
It makes me realize that email is a much better system for this. You have an entire archive of every email you receive, with the ability to search, filter, forward, and even set up custom rules to delete items containing certain text, for example.
Yes it's a hassle to manage an email inbox, but this kind of flexibility gives users a lot of power that phone, sms, or native notifications lack.
Even if they _do_ offer that sort of granularity, these apps introduce a new 'category' of notification everyday, and the new category is always opt-out, so there will always be a small stream of notifications leaking through.
If you send me one spam sms or notification you go immediately on the list.
Works fine except the notification identifier is different for ipad and phone so I have to add those apps twice.
It unfreezes doordash (or any app) when you explicitly open it, and freezes it again after you don't use the app for an hour.
You can't get spam notifications if the app isn't even allowed to run.
iOS has gotten reasonably good about tracking packages in wallet outside of any other app, but then again, wallet has sent advertisements about other Apple things.
1) they will give you a recurring pop up banner when you open the app to turn on all notifications, making it sound like it’s just for delivery notifications, even if you already have those turned on. You have to ignore it.
2) at least once recently, they just toggled them all on, on my behalf, anyway. I found out after receiving a random marketing notification. Then I turned them back off & it hasn’t happened since.
3) there have been occasions where even with granular controls, I don’t receive the delivery notifications if I have the marketing ones turned off. Hasn’t happened in a while, but now I always keep that in mind that it’s a possibility.