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 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 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.

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The minute I unpublished my phone number from job recruiting sites, my spam calls declined by 60-70%.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.

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?

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.

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.