alt Hacker NewsBeware the edge case: I responded STOP to a message years ago, then was unable to receive SMS from a popular money transmission app during the signup flow to claim funds that a friend sent me.
After over a month of troubleshooting, it turns out that I had sent "STOP" to that number years ago on a different device (no longer visible in chat history) and now had to send "UNSTOP" in order to receive the phone verification SMS required to sign up for the service. It was a shared number between multiple apps.
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I find it such a weird thing, maybe it's nice in some cases, but really this is a weird mechanism.
Phone numbers are exchanged a lot and repurposed. Most providers/carriers will likely have a do-not-use-for-x-amount-of-time bin to put newly reclaimed numbers in, but after a while, it will always be re-used. hence this kind of issue can happen.
In my country there's a place to register to disallow unsolicited marketing and other types of messaging. That's not by number you 'STOP' and hence it won't have such effects. A marketeer/sales company is simply not allowed by law to dial your number for sales/marketing, so they have auto-lookups to that registry to prevent breaching the law. translated, it's the 'do-not-call-me-registry' :D aptly named.
it won't stop phishing messages etc., but not much will. if you'd block it from 1 number, they will just use the next number..
Just wanted to say that I find it curious that you have to text “UNSTOP” and not something like “START”, lol
I’ve encountered a couple instances of businesses that 1) send me unsolicited marketing mail, 2) react to that being flagged as spam by internally blocklisting me, then 3) silently fail to send transactional mail such as password resets.
A similar thing happened to me with my Amazon account with a forgotten password. I ended up just creating a new account.
This happened to me with a major bank. They were using the same number for 2FA and some other types of texts. I got locked out of my account for a while because I had unsubscribed from their marketing texts. What an unbelievably dumb way to send 2FA codes.