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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 think you got lucky the first time. 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: https://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.
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.
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.
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.
The spam continued long after that particular election was over. I don't remember how long it took to clean it up, exactly, just that each campaign who got my number did in fact respect the END/STOP request, and I was eventually able to get ahead of the viral spread.
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.
You'll just end up on another list for the next election cycle. It's marketers - no one is forcing them to respect STOP replies, and a STOP reply is just another data point.
Not even the next cycle, as far as I can tell if you say stop or unsubscribe, the political spam mailing list system adds a new candidate to the ~8-10 candidates they keep you loaded with
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.
What jurisdiction are you in? Legit companies respect unsubscribe links eg Eventbrite because there's actual fines associated with not respecting unsubscribes. Also, buy a domain name and use per-vendor emails with a salt. Eventbrite@solyin.com is guessable by spammers, eventbrite_1243@solyin.com is not. So then you have easy signal for what's definitely spam.
GMail and many other web clients do the unsubscribe request for you if List-Unsubscribe is present. That doesn't leak your information but still shows that you care and is signal for spam.
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.
This is what it feels like. I went from high performer to barely getting in touch with people in the last year and those are warm leads not cold-calling. Time for a new gig...
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 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 = sign of life, your number is marked as “someone alive on the other end” and gets resold to 20 new lists.
My father once accidentally auto-completed my phone number when he donated to a democrat. This led to over a decade of messages addressed to him from candidates from his state. Everyone time you ask to be removed, they remove it from their own list, not the list from which they cloned. I had to call so many people to find the office responsible for holding the canonical list of numbers which everyone was cloning. After talking with a few people there over multiple years, I finally got to someone that cared enough to remove me and not just hang up the phone. Political calls and texts are treated special under the law and aren't subject to most of the protections that the USA has over this sort of thing.
If you're going to donate to a political party or politician, do it anonymously.
> I had to call so many people to find the office responsible for holding the canonical list of numbers which everyone was cloning. After talking with a few people there over multiple years, I finally got to someone that cared enough to remove me and not just hang up the phone.
In Australia I ONCE donated to a charity... and learnt that charities can spam "in case of emergency". Which is all the time, for charities. Only changed when I became a EU citizen again and could threaten them, which, surprisingly, worked.
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.
I learned a couple of days ago that the rise of spam texts is in part due to a 2021 Supreme Court decision that narrowed TCPA's definition of an 'autodialer'.
Previously it had been interpreted as: "the Congressional intent of the TCPA was "to ban dialing from a database"". In contrast to the new ruling: "Sotomayor wrote that "Congress’ chosen definition of an autodialer requires that the equipment in question must use a random or sequential number generator."
Congress is going to get right on that though:
"Senator Ed Markey, one of the authors of the TCPA ... announced the same day of the decision [2021] that they would be looking to introduce amended legislation to address the Court's decision."
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'm wondering if we could create one-off phone numbers similar to one-off credit cards when we have to give a number to a service we don't want to be regularly receiving messages from.
On a given day people from USA usually criticize EU for regulatory stuff. But on the contrary regulation is what you need here. The fine to spam people even though they have opted-out is so huge that pretty much nobody spams in EU
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.
If you're on Android, I highly recommend: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. It works so well, it gave me my phone back. It has all the granularity you wish texting and phone apps had.
The only slight neg is all that flexibility can make first-time set up a bit tricky, just LLM it.
I'm a little surprised by this. Due to the prevalence of spam, I favor private third-party messaging applications (slack, discord). Text messaging is about 50% garbage for me, and the majority I leave unread. Though contrary to the experience of a lot of others, I almost never get spam phone calls (probably <10 in the last two years), so that remains my highest signal channel.
Spam texts? What about spam calls? AT&T flags spam calls as such, and yet my phone rings. I am dumbfounded that iOS doesn't have an option for saying if the network identifies a call as likely spam, do not ring the phone, send it to voice mail directly. Actually, iOS does have an option for this... it just doesn't seem to work.
For commercial and political texters in the U.S. there is quite a bit of FCC regulation. For scammers, obviously that doesn't matter. Probably a sign of the times that people can't tell the difference anymore, though
STOP has worked more for me with Dem begging texts, less so with Repub, but not completely with either. I've switched to sending them troll like messages back, which also results in the same unsubscribed message, but perhaps makes it clear I will not give money to politicians.
Calls too. My local cleaning business has been getting hammered with automated "your Google listing..." spam for weeks (virtual number w/ routing to our cells) now. Already hung up on 3-4 this morning/afternoon.
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.
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.
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 have never provided my phone number at voter registration. In any case, all the texts to me are marked with "Hello Louella". I have also been "Brenda".
I am not a Louella or a Brenda, more of a "Joe" or "Frank".
I am quite sure that ActBlue just creates a list of names, then create a wardial list and assign those names to a number.
Asking them to stop just confirms your number to work. And yes, it's ActBlue because they have specifically identified themselves as such more than once.
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.
I get four per line per day and have two lines on my phone. They all follow the same script with slight variations and the voicemails are all ai that often get confused and repeat things.
the red icon for all the voicemails drives me nuts. I had a long wait for my kid's dr appt a few weeks ago, and I went through to delete/report spam each one. I just checked, and I have 30 new ones now :(
never had this issue on my personal android device, just my work iphone.
I had (still have but they don't send as much lately) a similar problem but with email and Outlook.
I get like 10 spam emails in my Junk folder every day from the same domain but with different subdomains, which would be fine if I could define a rule to delete all emails with the matching root domain BUT rules don't work on the Junk folder (facepalm).
I can't fathom why are they not blocking the root domain outright, I'm pretty sure it's just for spam. It got so bad that, at some point I wrote a script that deletes these emails periodically - but getting that was not easy since I needed to use OAuth to get an token.
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.
I have a long email ready to send to ACTBLUE right after the midterms. It threatens informing the FTC, which might do something since they are Republican controlled atm, which I would simply have done automatically if I weren't sympathetic. It asks, again, to be removed from all of their affiliates. I imagine I won't be successful. Totally agree that it shouldn't be up to me to somehow succeed at whack-a-mole and finally send STOP to every last spam I receive. I use 'END', 'STOP', and 'Delete and mark as spam'. I do all three. STOP and END do work, but I am being asked to fund every single campaign regardless of U.S. region.
Not an excuse, but keep in mind that this is an absolute minefield for any company. If there is even a hint that the filtering is disproportionately one party, the media will run wild with it. There is nothing more that journalists love to write about than a "conspiracy" to influence elections, real or imagined.
It’s extremely annoying, but political organizations and politicians are not subject to any spam or telemarketing laws. If I had known prior, I would have never made political contributions or used a real email for voting. The naivety of youth
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!
That is the law in the usa also. Any cell contact, from a business to an individual, without a preexisting business relationship, is illegal via the TCPA. But that's never actually enforced, so...
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%.
Nope. Just like anyone else, they get your permission to communicate, and you get their notifications.
Right now, a lot of orgs will send you a text message when you initiate business with them, and the first message always informs you how to get off their list. If you do nothing, you remain on the list. With my way, they just send a "special" message asking to connect with you. If you do nothing, you don't hear from them.
The difference between a whitelist and a blacklist (current approach) is you don't have to do the work to keep getting off people's list. They do the work to get on your list.
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.
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.
> 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 gate all my scammy SaaS apps behind Hail: https://github.com/aistra0528/Hail
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.
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.
https://paulgraham.com/spam.html
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.
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.
Has there ever been a "Stop political texts" ballot initiative?
It doesn't need to work, it might even NOT work, may even be counterproductive; it just needs to be protected and they think it works.
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.
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 think you got lucky the first time. 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: https://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.
> then blocking the number & reporting spam
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.
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.
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.
Did the deluge stop because you replied "STOP" or simply because the election period was over? If it took several months I'd assume it was the latter.
The spam continued long after that particular election was over. I don't remember how long it took to clean it up, exactly, just that each campaign who got my number did in fact respect the END/STOP request, and I was eventually able to get ahead of the viral spread.
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.
You'll just end up on another list for the next election cycle. It's marketers - no one is forcing them to respect STOP replies, and a STOP reply is just another data point.
Not even the next cycle, as far as I can tell if you say stop or unsubscribe, the political spam mailing list system adds a new candidate to the ~8-10 candidates they keep you loaded with
There is in fact quite a bit of FCC regulation around texts; see e.g. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-24A1.txt
Note that regulation differs quite a bit from enforcement. People sometimes confuse the former for the latter.
I don't fault your cynicism. There has been a lot of "looking the other way" lately.
It's so bizarre, to get political texts via SMS. Here in Europe, I have got 0 (zero) political texts in my life.
I am not even really in a place with any close or important races and I'm getting 10+ a day, as a data point for you.
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.
What jurisdiction are you in? Legit companies respect unsubscribe links eg Eventbrite because there's actual fines associated with not respecting unsubscribes. Also, buy a domain name and use per-vendor emails with a salt. Eventbrite@solyin.com is guessable by spammers, eventbrite_1243@solyin.com is not. So then you have easy signal for what's definitely spam.
GMail and many other web clients do the unsubscribe request for you if List-Unsubscribe is present. That doesn't leak your information but still shows that you care and is signal for spam.
Gmail will helpfully suggest unsubscribing from obvious spam that contains an unsubscribe link ...
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.
Outbound is over. RIP
This is what it feels like. I went from high performer to barely getting in touch with people in the last year and those are warm leads not cold-calling. Time for a new gig...
Exactly right, better to cut your losses and just hit "block and report as spam".
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.
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.
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.
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
There's a chance someone in your contacts would send you a message with "Stop2End" in it? You must have curious friends.
I personally add a handful of automated systems to my contacts (appointments, time sheet reminders, bills, etc.)
No - it means he wants to receive from some of these organizations.
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 = sign of life, your number is marked as “someone alive on the other end” and gets resold to 20 new lists.
My father once accidentally auto-completed my phone number when he donated to a democrat. This led to over a decade of messages addressed to him from candidates from his state. Everyone time you ask to be removed, they remove it from their own list, not the list from which they cloned. I had to call so many people to find the office responsible for holding the canonical list of numbers which everyone was cloning. After talking with a few people there over multiple years, I finally got to someone that cared enough to remove me and not just hang up the phone. Political calls and texts are treated special under the law and aren't subject to most of the protections that the USA has over this sort of thing.
If you're going to donate to a political party or politician, do it anonymously.
> I had to call so many people to find the office responsible for holding the canonical list of numbers which everyone was cloning. After talking with a few people there over multiple years, I finally got to someone that cared enough to remove me and not just hang up the phone.
Who was responsible?
In Australia I ONCE donated to a charity... and learnt that charities can spam "in case of emergency". Which is all the time, for charities. Only changed when I became a EU citizen again and could threaten them, which, surprisingly, worked.
Maybe tell them you're a Netherlands citizen.
A technical fix is waiting in the new toolbox. A decision model can filter out most SMS spam with adequate accuracy, speed and cost.
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.
for political ones they often get volunteers who are just pushing a send button nonstop...
I learned a couple of days ago that the rise of spam texts is in part due to a 2021 Supreme Court decision that narrowed TCPA's definition of an 'autodialer'.
Previously it had been interpreted as: "the Congressional intent of the TCPA was "to ban dialing from a database"". In contrast to the new ruling: "Sotomayor wrote that "Congress’ chosen definition of an autodialer requires that the equipment in question must use a random or sequential number generator."
Congress is going to get right on that though: "Senator Ed Markey, one of the authors of the TCPA ... announced the same day of the decision [2021] that they would be looking to introduce amended legislation to address the Court's decision."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Duguid
This was one of the reasons I switched from iPhone to Google Pixel.
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.
I have a Google Pixel phone and I have been overwhelmed with text messages related to the current election.
At least the phone calls are handled properly...
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.
These and the loan calls are making the medium useless
We're going to have to go to double-opt-in just to communicate.
Loan calls have filled out my voicemail inbox to full. I get anywhere from 1-5 a day. I've considered disconnecting my phone service at this point.
I send any calls that aren’t in my contact list direct to voicemail and then read the live transcription to decide if I’ll pick up
I paid for Robokiller and it kills 95% of spam. MalwareBytes works too.
The biggest problem is many of these are scams and they rotate phone numbers so tagging doesn’t work.
The politicians use services which also rotate phone numbers.
I still haven’t found a perfect solution.
I'm wondering if we could create one-off phone numbers similar to one-off credit cards when we have to give a number to a service we don't want to be regularly receiving messages from.
On a given day people from USA usually criticize EU for regulatory stuff. But on the contrary regulation is what you need here. The fine to spam people even though they have opted-out is so huge that pretty much nobody spams in EU
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].
[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...
We did not solve email with legislation. CAN-SPAM is a joke, and you as an individual have no recourse when you get spammed: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/inbox/can-spam_and_consumer_...
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.
I simply want a whitelist. If you aren’t on it, you cannot text or call me.
iOS has that for calls but they still leave a notification you have to manually clear. I wish for an option to just not tell me at all.
For folks on iOS, you can install a spam filter for text messages. i.e. https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer
If you're on Android, I highly recommend: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. It works so well, it gave me my phone back. It has all the granularity you wish texting and phone apps had.
The only slight neg is all that flexibility can make first-time set up a bit tricky, just LLM it.
> text is my highest-signal communication channel
I'm a little surprised by this. Due to the prevalence of spam, I favor private third-party messaging applications (slack, discord). Text messaging is about 50% garbage for me, and the majority I leave unread. Though contrary to the experience of a lot of others, I almost never get spam phone calls (probably <10 in the last two years), so that remains my highest signal channel.
Spam texts? What about spam calls? AT&T flags spam calls as such, and yet my phone rings. I am dumbfounded that iOS doesn't have an option for saying if the network identifies a call as likely spam, do not ring the phone, send it to voice mail directly. Actually, iOS does have an option for this... it just doesn't seem to work.
I don't know I should feel good or bad, but I have not received a single political campaign message over the past few election cycles. Never.
Says something about the political climate of where I live.
I never did until some asshole randomly wrote my number down, now I get political messages addressed to him.
Weird that vendors have this whole process that you have to fill in for new campaigns, yet somehow i still get spam all the time.
I was thinking about the possibility of getting an international phone number and using it domestically. The spam is really out of control in my area.
I have replied STOP to many of these and it has reduced the flood, but I still get several a day. The bot's reply to "stop" is always some variant of:
> 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.
I think the more reasonable explanation is that there actually are hundreds of independent entities sending this sort of political spam.
I'm pretty sure by responding you're just letting them know it's an active number. Could be wrong though.
For commercial and political texters in the U.S. there is quite a bit of FCC regulation. For scammers, obviously that doesn't matter. Probably a sign of the times that people can't tell the difference anymore, though
STOP has worked more for me with Dem begging texts, less so with Repub, but not completely with either. I've switched to sending them troll like messages back, which also results in the same unsubscribed message, but perhaps makes it clear I will not give money to politicians.
Calls too. My local cleaning business has been getting hammered with automated "your Google listing..." spam for weeks (virtual number w/ routing to our cells) now. Already hung up on 3-4 this morning/afternoon.
How do you tell the difference between political spam text and scammer spam text...
that's the neat part, you don't.
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.
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.
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 have never provided my phone number at voter registration. In any case, all the texts to me are marked with "Hello Louella". I have also been "Brenda".
I am not a Louella or a Brenda, more of a "Joe" or "Frank".
I am quite sure that ActBlue just creates a list of names, then create a wardial list and assign those names to a number.
Asking them to stop just confirms your number to work. And yes, it's ActBlue because they have specifically identified themselves as such more than once.
Yes and those are really the only texts I get, as a matter of fact. Various polls.
I've had my phone number for more than 20 years and I routinely get 2 or 3 a day.
You're lucky...
Have you ever donated to a candidate?
Politicians are allowed to send spam texts, emails, phone calls. They exempted themselves from all of laws prohibiting it. Just block it.
Yep, political spam, um, isn't spam.
This year has been the worst I've ever seen. Hundreds of them so far.
The TCPA was supposed to stop all spam calls. But we just decided to never enforce it.
Performative politics at work.
Spam calls, at least in the US, are a much more frustrating thing for me right now
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.
I get four per line per day and have two lines on my phone. They all follow the same script with slight variations and the voicemails are all ai that often get confused and repeat things.
Screen unknown callers. Any call that comes from a number that is not in your contacts will just be sent to voicemail or blocked entirely.
the red icon for all the voicemails drives me nuts. I had a long wait for my kid's dr appt a few weeks ago, and I went through to delete/report spam each one. I just checked, and I have 30 new ones now :(
never had this issue on my personal android device, just my work iphone.
I don't remember the last time I got a spam text - but I'm in the UK, is this common in the US?
I had (still have but they don't send as much lately) a similar problem but with email and Outlook.
I get like 10 spam emails in my Junk folder every day from the same domain but with different subdomains, which would be fine if I could define a rule to delete all emails with the matching root domain BUT rules don't work on the Junk folder (facepalm).
I can't fathom why are they not blocking the root domain outright, I'm pretty sure it's just for spam. It got so bad that, at some point I wrote a script that deletes these emails periodically - but getting that was not easy since I needed to use OAuth to get an token.
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.
May work for some people, not sure if it works for most.
I'd miss all kinds of texts from my doctors which seem to come from all kinds of different numbers forcing me to browse the bin anyway.
on iOS I still get badge notifications from unknown senders. I don't think there's a way to turn this off for some reason?
I have a long email ready to send to ACTBLUE right after the midterms. It threatens informing the FTC, which might do something since they are Republican controlled atm, which I would simply have done automatically if I weren't sympathetic. It asks, again, to be removed from all of their affiliates. I imagine I won't be successful. Totally agree that it shouldn't be up to me to somehow succeed at whack-a-mole and finally send STOP to every last spam I receive. I use 'END', 'STOP', and 'Delete and mark as spam'. I do all three. STOP and END do work, but I am being asked to fund every single campaign regardless of U.S. region.
Not an excuse, but keep in mind that this is an absolute minefield for any company. If there is even a hint that the filtering is disproportionately one party, the media will run wild with it. There is nothing more that journalists love to write about than a "conspiracy" to influence elections, real or imagined.
I think the only solution will be a local model on the phone that routes these to the trash
The real solution is punitive spam legislation. I can’t remember the last time I had a spam text and I’ve had the same number for 10 years.
It’s extremely annoying, but political organizations and politicians are not subject to any spam or telemarketing laws. If I had known prior, I would have never made political contributions or used a real email for voting. The naivety of youth
Worst thing I ever did was donate twenty seven bucks to Bernie, RIP my SMS inbox lol. I'll never make a political contribution again.
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!
That is the law in the usa also. Any cell contact, from a business to an individual, without a preexisting business relationship, is illegal via the TCPA. But that's never actually enforced, so...
Yes it is. There's a whole industry of baiting spammers and then suing them.
https://www.leadshook.com/blog/biggest-tcpa-lawsuits/
I "solved" this for email years ago (as did many before me):
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%.
Eh, at least for me I'd miss all kinds of text notifications from health providers if I did that.
Nope. Just like anyone else, they get your permission to communicate, and you get their notifications.
Right now, a lot of orgs will send you a text message when you initiate business with them, and the first message always informs you how to get off their list. If you do nothing, you remain on the list. With my way, they just send a "special" message asking to connect with you. If you do nothing, you don't hear from them.
The difference between a whitelist and a blacklist (current approach) is you don't have to do the work to keep getting off people's list. They do the work to get on your list.
You're confusing permission to communicate with consistent sources they communicate from.