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'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?