Oh that’s interesting! I wondered if there were any apps that might help. Thank you, I’m going to look into that option.
Yes, and up until now SMS has been one of the only remaining channels for me that was not clustered up with junk like this.
Intriguing. And enabled by having iCloud distribute texts to all devices using the same Apple ID, no doubt. I like your other solution of providing a “Is this spam?” button, which makes a report possible at one’s discretion. I have no idea whether AT&T’s 7726bot is effective, because I have not seen phishing and junk texts slowing down, but I can presume they are looking for larger patterns and need the information to fill out the picture. Because:
I see them both on my Mac and my phone because of iCloud message sharing. I’ve notice the 7726bot seems to have been refreshed in the past month so it also accepts email addresses as input. I’m going to ask AT&T to block messages from their email text gateway, because now it just seems like a conduit for spammers and has lost its utility for other purposes.
I doubt changing your number is going to help much. At a guess they just blanket every possible number. And unless you never give your number out it will get out. How many times when you check into a restaurant or Supercuts do they ask for your phone number? And how many of those aren’t immediately sold off with your location?
I’d be happy to be wrong.
T-mobile has some anti-SPAM for phone calls, but AFAIK nothing for messages.
Good luck. I only get a couple a day, so less irritation than you. I manually turn off notifications but realize that does little as they use/spoof different numbers.
In Australia one of our politicians is sending SMS. Apparently this is legal. They just use random digit phone numbers so that they can target the whole country. They seem to have stopped due either to it looking like they were losing votes and their private mobile number kept on being made public.
If it is legal spam: political or non-profit, just reply with the word STOP and you’ll be removed from their lists.
For real spam (commercial, investment, bitcoin, cons and scams, get rich quick schemes, etc.) all you can do is block the number being used. Tryping STOP to messages from criminals ionly encourages them to send more, knowing they reached a real human.
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I don’t know what they do, but if you try to reply the message can’t be sent. We have a do not call register, but it doesn’t apply to certain types of senders. Some of it originates from overseas and they can’t be found, so they can do what they like.
SMS spam is becoming a real problem and that’s not even counting malware SMS.
Allegedly reporting the SMS to the mobile network helps reduce this but as we all seem to agree this is not working. This is not surprising when one knows that the mobile networks actually make a significant revenue from delivering this SMS spam.
As usual our glorious leaders nee governments are doing little to nothing to help their electorate regarding this. One obvious first step would be to force the network providers to refuse calls or messages where the genuine originating number is not provided. Then we could either more realistically block these numbers or report them to legal authorities. (Who also seem to be doing very little about these crimes.) This would not prevent withholding the number where people have a genuine concern over protecting their identity - it would then be up to the receiver to choose or not to block number withheld calls as it already possible.
There are some apps on the iOS app store which claim to offer the ability to block such messages, however the way they work is that you have to agree to have all your SMS messages automatically forwarded to them. They then analyse the text and based on that block or not the message.
Using SMS for MFA is not merely common it is an increasingly common requirement as more organisations enforce MFA. Unfortunately despite SMS MFA being regarded as a less than ideal solution from a security point of view this is often the only MFA option supported and forces us to keep using SMS.
Apart from the fact that SMS messages are not encrypted allowing someone to capture and eavesdrop on your MFA codes, it is as we see with spam too easy too spoof.
The problem is that the politicians writing the anti-spam laws have created all kinds of carve-outs for their friends and lobbyists. So there is absolutely nothing illegal about sending spam if you are:
- A charity
- A survey company
- A politician or political campaign
- A business that can somehow claim you have an existing relationship
- And this clause has been abused to death.
- If a company you legitimately do business with sells their contact list to an “advertising partner”, that counts, even if the subsequent ads are for a different company altogether.
When combined with the fact that law enforcement doesn’t actually investigate or prosecute anyone, we’re back where we are today - a complete free-for-all.
Fortunately, legitimate advertising/marketing companies do seem to respect a “STOP” reply. It won’t stop the scammers, but nothing ever will because they typically operate from foreign countries using hacked telco servers. Unless they make a mistake so high-profile that Interpol decides to get involved, they’re pretty much immune from prosecution.
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I get many texts and calls and voicemails to my ex. He never had this phone number. Most are “catching up with you about the loan we talked about” and they all seem to come together. The callback number they leave is never the same as the number it comes from.
Diane
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Yep. Scammers. Pretending to have a business relationship, as if saying a few magic words somehow makes the call legal (or as if you wouldn’t know about discussing a loan with someone.)
If they actually leave a contact phone number, then you should definitely file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC won’t act on a single complaint, but I guarantee that the scammers are targeting millions of phone numbers in addition to yours. If the FTC gets enough complaints, someone might do something about it. And if your complaint includes a valid phone number for contacting the scammers, that is a critical piece of information that will help the FTC to identify them.
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Ah yes, Palmer and Kelly. I’d love to see a stop to the robo-calls as well. I get a couple of spam calls a day from recorded bots telling me the tax department are going to send me to jail or my bank account has been hacked. I block them all but it’s futile. One interesting thing is they seem to be able to spoof a number that looks close to your own. Eg. if my number is 0422 234 456 the calling number might be 0422 234 458. I guess it somehow makes it look more legitimate.
As Shamino says, the real issue is politicians making the rules to exclude themselves from restriction.
I got a missed call from the scammers and rang back. Found someone in regional Victoria, so number was spoofed.
Contrary what was posted, I haven’t found blocking numbers not in my Contacts to interfere with 2FA. In fact, I never considered the possibility, and 2FA works just fine for me.
It does seem like this is something a Shortcuts guru could work up a script for, since it uses only OS software the whole way through.
the spammers are hellishly focused on sending messages from both “Apple” and “AT&T”—easily 70 percent of the traffic, as though they got my address from those two sources.
A more benign explanation could be that they are choosing to pretend to be from the cellular provider with the largest market share and the brand of smartphone with the largest marketshare in the US and are just playing the odds.
It’s been 8 days since I started using a ‘focus’ for this, per my first post addendum, that is, allowing everyone in my contacts list and blocking all other notifications (i.e. sound, obviously badges are still allowed), which I have turned on all day. ‘SMS spam’ (my name for it) turns on as soon as my DND night focus turns off in the morning, and then turns off when my DND night focus turns on in the evening. So far so good.
So, when I deliberately look at the phone I see the badges of any new non-contacts-list texts that have arrived silently (so far, those have only been from spammers!), and I’m not being bothered constantly by new text sounds from spammers. Not ideal, but waaaay better. I’ve gone back to diligently reporting all the incoming spam, at my leisure. Not sure how long that will last, though.
Enjoying the discussion and experiences of others with this problem. Thanks all.
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And of course that is also a likely explanation…I did mean it when I said “as though…” with the thought that it provides them some cover. “Jack from DMV” is a whole other matter. 
You may have noticed it in your messages app some of the bubbles are green and some are blue (these are the messages you send, not the ones you received, which are always gray, I think). The green bubble messages traveled via SMS. The blue ones via Internet/iMessage.
IMessages are very important where I live because we have no cellular phone service. So I explain to my neighbors that they can’t get green bubble messages at home, only blue bubble messages. (I’m leaving out the complication caused by Wi-Fi calling, which does enable you to get your SMS messages via Wi-Fi.)
This is definitely the case. That’s why I get spam claiming that my T-Mobile (or AT&T) account is going to be shut-down, even though my phone is on Verizon’s network.
Just like the Chinese-language voice-mail spam that (when I had a friend translate it) claims to be Chinese law enforcement threatening to revoke my visa and deport me to China if I don’t pay the scammer.
Just like the auto insurance/extended warranty scams I get on my work phone number.
Just like the vacation/time-share scam where they claim to be representing Hilton, Hyatt and several other major hotel chains.
Just like the scam pretending to be the regional natural gas provider, threatening to cut off my service (I don’t have natural gas service in my home).
Just like the scam claiming to be from your local police department saying they have a warrant for your arrest, which you can avoid by bribing the “officer” with a pile of gift cards.
There is no reason why a scammer would want to bother making sure that the basis for the scam actually applies to the victim. It’s a single recording/text message that is sent to every phone number in the book. People who think straight (like everybody on this forum, I hope) will just hang up, but enough people will be caught that they don’t care.
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I doubt this, because on my Verizon iPhone I get less than one robocall or spam text a month. On my AT&T landline I get at most a handful of robocalls a day. FWIW, the area codes on those phones are different, and I’ve never gone to the trouble of looking for privacy settings as some folks in this thread have described.
And let’s not forget the “Hello, my prey” messages claiming to have infiltrated every part of your OS, monitoring keystrokes and turning on webcams, to uncover the “filthy and disgusting” acts of the victim and demanding money before they went ahead and publicly exposed the nastiness. My spouse was rolling on the floor laughing when she saw that…but she still checked first to make sure that it wasn’t genuine.
Our communication systems are hopelessly overrun by people using the same technology to extract wealth from the users.