SMS spam

Hangar Flying
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I’ve finally reached my limit with this. I get it multiple times daily from political parties, financial advisors, realtors, hackers, and religious organizations, to name a few. None of which I have the bandwidth to consider. Flooding email and social media is not enough. “If you’re not consuming, then I demand your attention. To hell with sleep.”

I don’t accept that there isn’t a technical solution. The only reason that it exists is because our politicians won’t pass legislation to force service providers to block it.

Thinking about the best strategy, including changing my number every year. I’ve had the same one for 28 years. It would be a PIA to change it, but I’ve gotten to the point where it’s worth the effort.

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So most mobile phone spam is initiated via an auto dialler (predictive), usually the spammers have a sim farm they use to make the texts/calls. The way the auto dialler works is they pick a block of numbers to auto dial and send out their SMS’s/calls.

In the UK, this sms auto diallers are now regulated to use for SMS messages. This has had a dramatic impact in the last few years. Not sure about the US.

Using SIMs to send out the volume they do is usually against the t’s and c’s of the service providers. Most use a PAYG SIM as its throw away. The provider I worked for (the red branded one) used to have automatic disabling of SIMs working to monitor bulk SMS sending.

Blocking locally is difficult because they use multiple SIMs. I’d say the only option is turning off notifications.

SMS usage now in the UK has plummeted since WhatsApp, so I rarely look at them.

Not really sure this helps you.

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Thanks for that explanation keets. But given that mess that you aptly described, couldn’t there be a system that filters SMS senders, either at the carrier or on my phone, that doesn’t accept SMS, unless the sender is approved by me? I’m not sure how they could deal with spoofed numbers, but there are easily big enough brains to solved this issue. I guess that the world needs a different messaging service. One that’s hard to crack, but easy enough for grandparents to use. Perhaps that is WhatsApp. FWIW, we use Signal at work.

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Android does a pretty decent job of screening spam callers and texts. I believe there is a whitelist option that uses your contacts only.

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Most two-factor use cases can be moved over to an authenticator app. This removed my need for SMS by a large amount.

So basically anything received via that legacy technology channel can be ignored.

That said there‘s only two or three messages each month here, so it‘s easy for me to say.

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Most modern phones do have this, blocking locally, however it won’t help with Spam SMS because the senders are forever swapping SIMs (source numbers). They burn through thousands of SIMs each run.

If you block a number when you receive a spam SMS, within a day or two the source number will have changed. Think whackamole.

As I said above, the carrier doesn’t know it’s spam until they see a large volume of SMS’s being sent. They have to block based on the volume of SMS’s being sent in a short space of time. This is the throttling I described.

It’s been a real problem for carriers in the UK for the last 20 or so years since the invention of PAYG SIMs and unlimited SMS bundles. Prior to that, it wasn’t cost effective.

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I get absolutely bombarded with calls around lunchtime most days.
I wear an earbud so don’t always look at my phone as its in the van so quite a few get through

Its easy to tell, there is always a 1 or 2 second pause before you get “good morning sir, how are you today” in a thick accent.

My customers must think i have tourettes. Or sometimes i screech down the phone as loud as i can.

I detest cold calling.

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And here is me thinking. FFS we finally get a cell tower in range and it is with a rival telco… Oh well, at least we can make emergency calls now.

I think I am actually the lucky one here?

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Smartphones in general start to feel like a spiral down into the pits of madness.

It‘s like crack but everybody‘s on it.

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Android is doing something useful with AI, screening the texts based on the content if it’s from a number not in your contacts already. It flags them as potential spam. If they clone a number that’s already in your contacts it will slip through, but it will do that on a whitelist approach as well.

It works pretty well for me, I usually only get 1-2 spam texts a month it doesn’t pickup and flag automatically.

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