alt Hacker NewsSomebody please stop the spam texts
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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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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 simply want a whitelist. If you aren’t on it, you cannot text or call me.
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.
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 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'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.
Politicians are allowed to send spam texts, emails, phone calls. They exempted themselves from all of laws prohibiting it. Just block it.
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 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.
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.
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 think the only solution will be a local model on the phone that routes these to the trash
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!
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%.
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