r/technology
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u/speckz
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Mar 22 '23
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FCC taking a stand against spam texting - Phone companies must block text messages coming from shady sources Networking/Telecom
https://www.techradar.com/news/fcc-cracks-down-on-spammy-text-messages800
u/cavalierfrix Mar 22 '23
Too little, too late. The telephone as a communication medium is completely broken for my 82 year-old mother. She's in the early stages of dementia and I can't get her to not answer her phone. When she gets a spam call telling her she needs to do something, she gets very upset and calls me wanting to know what to do.
I explain that it's spam and she shouldn't answer the phone unless she recognizes the number, but that's not how she's used the phone her whole life.
She got hit with one of the "Grandma I'm in jail" calls and nearly emptied a bank account before I stopped her.
It really sucks.
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u/Wisco7 Mar 22 '23
I think there's a setting in android that auto blocks any phone number that's not in your contacts.
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Mar 22 '23
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u/FaeryLynne Mar 22 '23
Samsung itself does not but you can download the Google phone app and use it and it does the same as on pixel phones. Great spam blocker for both calls and texts.
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u/im_not_the_right_guy Mar 22 '23
I have Samsung and every call from a number I don't know gives me a range for how likely it is to be spam. This might be a Verizon feature though I don't know.
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u/FaeryLynne Mar 22 '23
Unfortunately many elderly people still use landlines and you can't really do mass blocks on those usually, only individual numbers one by one. My in-laws get these calls too, luckily they know better than to give out any info, at least for now they still know not to.
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u/aksfjh Mar 22 '23
I believe many telecoms offer this service as a "trusted callers" list. In IT terms, it's called a "whitelist." It stops anyone that ISN'T listed as a trusted caller to go through more screening or they are blocked outright.
There are also a number of phones with digital features like forcing unknown numbers to respond to input (e.g. "state your name" and it will announce the name before ringing) for the phone to ring. I believe VTech sells a number of them.
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u/RealAccountNameHere Mar 22 '23
There's a similar iOS feature. Settings > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers.
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u/jemidiah Mar 22 '23
There are two related methods for dealing with spam, blacklisting and whitelisting. Blacklisting is where you block individual numbers as they spam you. This is not effective in today's spam environment and is only appropriate for crazy exes and the like. Whitelisting is where everything is blocked by default, except the numbers you explicitly let through, usually by having them in your contacts. Your grandma wouldn't be able to get calls from new numbers (e.g. a pharmacy calling to say an order is ready), but that sounds like a better option than the alternative.
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u/rebo2 Mar 22 '23
Or maybe get the FCC to enforce the law and punish the carriers for allowing open connections to spoofed VoIP.
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u/OutAndABoot Mar 22 '23
They're giving useful advice that people can actually use. You're just venting about something that's out of any particular individual's hands.
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u/silkythick Mar 22 '23
This still doesnt stop number spoofing, which is so obviously only used for nefarious purposes it drives me fucking insane that the FCC hasnt done anything about it yet.
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Mar 22 '23
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u/dksdragon43 Mar 22 '23
The problem for a lot of us is that they spoof numbers close to ours, and we're on family plans with numbers close together. My number and my mother's number are the same, except one digit. I get calls all the time from numbers only one digit off mine, they could very easily hit hers - especially if you had a larger family plan with similar numbers.
Same thing goes if you live in a smaller town - all my neighbours have the same six starting digits, it wouldn't be too hard to get ones that spoofed people we actually knew. It only takes once, right?
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u/Noisy_Toy Mar 22 '23
We set this up on my mom’s landline:
https://www.amazon.com/Effective-ROBOCALLS-Scammers-Telemarketers-Solicitors/dp/B019ERMS90
Worth every penny.
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u/Default_Sock_Issue Mar 22 '23
Please block political campaign messages also. I never signed up for those.
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u/FierceDispersion Mar 22 '23
Wait, do they just send them to random phone numbers or how does that work?
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u/Default_Sock_Issue Mar 22 '23
Probably voter registry. If they had an option to opt out from receiving all campaign materials I would definitely do that.
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u/OptimusSublime Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
I still have a number assigned to an area code in a state I no longer live in. Despite registering in another state I still get political texts from my original home state for local elections...it's ridiculous.
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u/marvinrabbit Mar 22 '23
Keeping my number from the low population area code where I was raised turned out to be the best thing I could do. There is nobody in that area code (except for a handful of people that are already in my contacts) that I need to get a call from. Almost all the spam calls (and texts) come from that area code. Makes it easy to ignore.
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u/wwwhistler Mar 22 '23
same here. my area code is NOT my state....it's clear across the country. so there is NO real reason for anyone in that state (that i don't already know) that needs to call me. so most scam calls self identify as scams due to them showing up as my area code.
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u/CalgalryBen Mar 22 '23
Same, brother. I wish I could just silence calls specifically from my area code (other than contacts I have saved). Would make my phone experience nice.
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u/Warin_of_Nylan Mar 22 '23
Some old guy two states over gave out my number that I've had for a decade. Now I know a whole lot about his town, political affiliation, financial investments, hobbies, and the funeral they had for him two years ago. His local Republican party still blasts me on a weekly basis to donate to their state initiatives (or Trump defense funds).
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u/Ditto_D Mar 22 '23
I have one registered to a nearby county by some old fuck who has been giving out my number to shit along with all the spam callers he could find. So I get 10 calls a day from scams. And text messages asking about voting for propositions and positions in a county I don't fucking live in.
I have had my phone number for literally 20 years now which is the main reason I refuse to change it... And it is a bit simple ending in 00s so it is a little rare to come by now.
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u/CroShades Mar 22 '23
My phone number apparently used to belong to some guy who died like 15 years ago (found his name in the obituaries dated like right before I got my first phone), but I still get a bunch of spam texts addressed to "Christopher". Don't know what to do about it except block and delete everything..
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u/JustADutchRudder Mar 22 '23
I get calls nonstop for a chick that seems to either purposely put my number in or does it on accident since some important sounding people have called for her. I tell them all she died in a horrific car crash that trapped her awake in a burning mess of vehicles, I never get a repeat call but they would always try back if I said no I don't know that lady.
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u/FierceDispersion Mar 22 '23
Damn, that's crazy. I'm glad this is not a thing where I live. Political advertising via text is the last thing i need...
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u/chubbysumo Mar 22 '23
Yep, it is 100% your voter registry, but they're also starting to use other sources for campaign access material. The easiest way to prevent a good portion of the political calls and texts, is to not put your phone number in your voter registry.
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u/GladiatorJones Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
Since we can't opt out, I like to reply to the spam texts, "Thanks! I wasn't planning on voting, but your message has now prompted me to vote for {other candidate}! I appreciate your reminder to vote, and you can go away knowing that you helped make this happen!"
Edit: I realize it may be a bot, in which case oh well. I used up 30 seconds of my time. But for the one time it's a human, I'm satisfied. More for my entertainment than trying to effectively remove myself from the system (I'm resigned to that as being futile).
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u/CondiMesmer Mar 22 '23
It's a robot, nobody is seeing your gotcha lol
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u/BigTimeBobbyB Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
Not always a robot! I’ve been on the other side of these campaigns, managing the data coming back.
We see your gotcha in an excel spreadsheet way after the fact. I’ll usually try to mark these anomalies “do-not-text” to take you off of future lists, but that opt-out stays at my organization. It doesn’t get fed back to the voter registration office where we got your number in the first place. So at best, you won’t get any more texts from us on this specific campaign.
(Btw, replying “STOP” makes the software do this automatically, so you don’t have to rely on someone like me seeing your response and marking it manually.)
When we send text campaigns like this we usually get something like 90%+ positive engagement rates. The people actually writing negative messages back account for less than 1% of our replies, and 99% of those are variations on “fuck you.” The candidate never sees them - you’re just yelling at a poli sci intern or a summer volunteer.
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u/mindreave Mar 22 '23
This would be great if it didn't feel like a new organization with a slightly different name popped every other week to get around opt-out requirements. CAN-SPAM requires opt-in, the only reason political texts require opt-out instead is because politics.
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u/thejew09 Mar 22 '23
The weirdest thing with these is that they always address me by someone else’s name, and it’s always from campaigns that aren’t even in my district. So they aren’t even political spamming correctly 😂 They’re also always from the exact opposite political belief spectrum, but that may be the point.
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u/-Stackdaddy- Mar 22 '23
According to all the political texts I get, I'm Gregg and it's really important to give republicans money, it's the last time they are going to ask according to them, so the texts should stop now. By the way my name isn't Gregg, and I've never voted republican. So they are just spamming everyone.
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u/LeCrushinator Mar 22 '23
The ones I get are letting me know that "if we don't hold the Biden administration accountable for 'dragging its feet' on the Federal Offshore Leasing program, then it will hurt our oil & gas workers and erode America's national security."
As if we're not already one of the largest oil producers in the world, and hopefully we're phasing out oil & gas for renewable sources whenever possible.
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u/Intrepid00 Mar 22 '23
Voter Registration records and bought data from data hoarders because no way did voter registration tell them my spouse was brown and a nurse but funny enough were texting my pasty ass as if I was them. So it has to be several sources to mix that up.
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u/LeamNoran Mar 22 '23
Those are actually excepted from the spam filter laws IIRC, annoyingly. However they legally have to respect “stop” messages, although rarely do. They can get in trouble for not following it, but good luck reporting them all. They generally rotate through third-party services to avoid direct implication. The evil ones anyway.
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u/thecravenone Mar 22 '23
However they legally have to respect “stop” messages, although rarely do.
They respect the stop message but also forward your number along to twelve other campaigns that you haven't told to stop yet.
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u/MercuryCrest Mar 22 '23
Spam emails work the same way. It's fully legal to sell your "no-spam" list to other clients since, obviously, the email is active. Something has to change.
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u/Wisco7 Mar 22 '23
Yeah, and it actually makes your number MORE valuable because they then know it's active.
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u/tarquinb Mar 22 '23
Forward all spam texts to 7726 - that spells SPAM - and the carriers log every one and follow up.
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u/CondiMesmer Mar 22 '23
Your texting app just has a report spam button that does this already
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u/Nik_Tesla Mar 22 '23
I get dozens a week that are Pro-Trump (which I am not). Not that I'd be more likely to donate to a democrat bombarding my phone with texts, but still, there is a 0% chance of these working, and they just keep coming.
I've contemplated responding by saying "Every text you send me, I'm donating $5 to a democrat.", and send a screenshot of the receipt. But I'm pretty sure they'll just see any response as good and keep texting me, so I haven't done that.
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u/condensationxpert Mar 22 '23
Some of them have an actual person that responds. One responded with how they’re not actually spam and a bunch of shit. Told them I don’t care, they’re annoying me with the constant their bullshit.
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u/cheeze2005 Mar 22 '23
Technically a real person has to send the text for political ones. But it results in some intern mashing that like button 1000x times an hour lol
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u/Readingwhilepooping Mar 22 '23
If I'm sitting at my computer when I get them i sit there pasting STOP like one hundred times as fast as I can. I usually get a real person asking me to stop, or I get blocked by their carrier, either way it works!
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u/Roxinos Mar 22 '23
The FCC's rules already explicitly disallow robotic political campaign calls and texts which makes the lack of enforcement even worse.
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u/squidwardnixon Mar 22 '23
The way they get around this is they load all of the numbers into a texting application and have a person click to send each one. As long as a person has to hit send one at a time, it is legally not a robotext. This might vary between states.
Source: I've worked data management on campaigns. I apologize and no I don't enjoy it any more than anyone else. For the record I really would check the "do not call" and make sure it was out of rotation when requested.
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u/robodrew Mar 22 '23
You must have party affiliation. I was independent for a long time and NEVER got political mailers or texts. Then I became party affiliated so that I could actually vote in a primary election and they really started inundating me fast. It was very annoying.
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u/tarquinb Mar 22 '23
Good luck. The government carved out an exception for all political traffic. One reason why I think I got zero emails during the last cycle… But tons of text messages expect more of the same during the next cycle.
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u/knobbysideup Mar 22 '23
Fun fact. When can spam act was passed, they put an exemption in for campaign messages. Asshats.
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u/cerevant Mar 22 '23
The only reason politicians care about spam texting is that it drowns out their campaign messaging.
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u/PacoTaco321 Mar 22 '23
But getting texts that say "Don't vote for x if you want to stop woke liberals!!!" makes it really easy to know who I should vote for.
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u/OutAndABoot Mar 22 '23
You actually did when you registered to vote with a particular party.
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u/wreckedcarzz Mar 22 '23
I send whatever is the spiciest yiff I've recently saved as a reply. It works surprisingly well - quite a lot are actually manned lines, not totally automated. Art of a femboy tiger tied down taking a toy the size of a bowling ball really gets the message across to never message this number again.
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u/YesBut-AlsoNo Mar 22 '23
Man I don't even live in the US and I constantly am getting emails to vote for presidential candidates etc. Like ????
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u/tlsr Mar 22 '23
Agreed. It's absolute bullshit that political and religious garbage are exempt from spam and solicitation laws.
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u/Numarx Mar 22 '23
I worked for a campaign, you have to say this exact phrase about removing yourself, I was told that if they didn't say it exactly I was to use the option to not call you for a couple/few weeks and that reason was political calls didn't have the same rules as sales calls.
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u/spartyftw Mar 22 '23
Spam them back with hundreds of single letter/gibberish responses. Depending on their system they could be charged for these or at the very least be an extreme nuisance for their marketing and data teams.
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u/Saneless Mar 22 '23
99% of my spam texts are from an email address somehow. Verizon seems just fine with this
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u/4kVHS Mar 22 '23
Not sure about Verizon but AT&T has an option to block all text messages from an email address but you have to call customer service and talk to like 5 different people until you find one that knows how to change the setting.
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u/Pauly_Amorous Mar 22 '23
but you have to call customer service and talk to like 5 different people until you find one that knows how to change the setting.
From my experience, that seems to be the rule with AT&T, rather than the exception.
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u/sean_but_not_seen Mar 22 '23
Surely they must be in infamy about this by now. The worst customer service experience in my entire 50+ years on this planet was with AT&T and I will never do business with them again even if the product/service was free.
It took me four months, hours and hours of calls, and 20 transfers back and forth sometimes to the same people to get DirecTV off my phone bill. Considering I didn’t have DirecTV this shouldn’t have been an issue. It was.
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u/dksdragon43 Mar 22 '23
I've always but increasingly thought that companies should have to pay us to deal with them. Have minimum wage taken off the bill for the hassle of dealing with them. So often they screw something up and then it's just up to you to waste your weekend waiting on hold to desperately try to convince them that they messed it up. And the best-case is a fix. The literal best case is wasting your entire day for something that never should have been an issue, and didn't involve you as anything but the victim.
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u/x3knet Mar 22 '23
Not refuting your experience, but I definitely got lucky. Spoke to one person at AT&T and they immediately knew the fix.
The thing they need to tackle next are "Flash SMS" texts. Those are similar to how amber alerts display on your phone (without the ear piercing alarm) and there's no way to reply to them. I get maybe one every 2 weeks so it's not overly annoying, but still a nuisance.
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u/lhamil64 Mar 22 '23
The thing they need to tackle next are "Flash SMS" texts. Those are similar to how amber alerts display on your phone (without the ear piercing alarm) and there's no way to reply to them. I get maybe one every 2 weeks so it's not overly annoying, but still a nuisance.
Wow I had no idea Flash SMS was a thing. I'm surprised I've never gotten one of these.
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u/x3knet Mar 22 '23
In practice, they could be useful for OTP/short code type texts or some kind of alert, but over the last ~6 months or so, 100% of them have been spam. Similar to the standard "your amazon account is closing" or "your netflix account has been cancelled" spam texts we all get 🙄
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u/aaronmagoo Mar 22 '23
To be fair anyone can text you from any email. Your 10 digit phone number @vtext.com for Verizon carriers would send you a text from any email address. Each company has an @something to add to the 10 digit number to allow emailing a phone number.
Not a programmer but it seems simple enough to set up a program to mass send out spam if you had a list of phone numbers.
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u/mindless_confusion Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
This isn't a bug, it's a feature. All the carriers have email to SMS and email to MMS features. To name a few:
ATT | Verizon | Boost | Third-party source for all carriers, may not be up to date
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u/Telid Mar 22 '23
That explains how to do it. It does not explain how to stop it. All of the spam texts I get currently are email to text, and I want it to stop.
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Mar 22 '23
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u/jemidiah Mar 22 '23
Blocking is likely ineffective. They usually just spoof numbers and you end up blocking a smattering of random people.
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u/Norma5tacy Mar 22 '23
I’m glad I hardly get any. I got one and it said “big DICKS are easy to make” and then a link to some site but man that one got a huge laugh out of me.
Spam calls I get but not so much lately. I got one recently from Shanghai yelling at me in Chinese.
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u/BriarKnave Mar 22 '23
I think that second one might have been someone calling a spammer who spoofed your number back
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u/humbleidea1 Mar 22 '23
Last week we found out the FCC regulators own stock in the companies they regulate. So forgive me if a crack down means jack shit.
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u/clownburner Mar 22 '23
Oh, most of them have much deeper relationships than that. The previous chairperson was a lobbyist for Verizon.
It’s called regulatory capture. And it’s horrifying.
But this actually seems to be a step in the right direction.
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u/JewishSpaceBlazer Mar 22 '23
The current FCC chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, got her start as a communications lawyer and AFAIK hasn't worked at any telecom, the majority of her career has been with the FCC. She's nothing like Ajit Pai, which is why the FCC has been actually useful since she became chair.
Also, as a fun fact, her brother drums for the band Guster. I'm a fan of both siblings lol.
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u/lk05321 Mar 22 '23
I haven’t heard anything from Pai towards the end of the last administration. That POS tried to model a personality around his big mug and it was extremely cringy. He’ll only be remembered for stopping net neutrality.
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u/Qubeye Mar 22 '23
You didn't hear anything because Trump refused to nominate anyone.
The FCC cannot legally meet if they do not have enough people, much less make decisions, and because Trump didn't nominate enough people, it was hamstrung for years.
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u/blahblah98 Mar 22 '23
"Hamstrung." Meanwhile Ajit drawing a gov't salary, benefit & pension for doing not a damn thing. Socialism for GOP cronies, unregulated capitalism for the rest of us.
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u/wallybinbaz Mar 22 '23
The FCC meets monthly regardless of the number of sitting Commissioners. They've been one short since the beginning of the Biden administration.
Biden nominated Gigi Sohn for the empty fifth seat (3rd for the Dems) but she was unable to be confirmed in the Senate. He has yet to nominate someone else (or pull Gigi's nomination after she pulled herself from contention).
Generally, when the Commission is 2-2 the only things they're able to do are bi-partisan regulations. Tackling something like net neutrality won't happen at the FCC until there's a fifth Commissioner. Using that particular example, it would be better if proponents passed legislation solidifying net neutrality or else the next Republican-controlled Commission could just reverse it again. With a Republican-controlled House, that's also unlikely.
Edit: open meeting dates and recordings can be found here: https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/events/open-commission-meetings
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u/Titanspaladin Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
I wrote my master of laws thesis on regulatory capture in 2021 (link here, free to access). And you're right - as far as research rabbit holes/deepdives go it is fucking terrifying and depressing. But its good for people to learn about considering how many other problems ultimately stem from it.
I wrote mostly about Canadian environmental law where oil/gas money heavily impacts how those industries are regulated, but I did some research into US governance like the EPA and SEC and its just so deeply entrenched (the head of the EPA being a lobbyist who had previously taken the EPA to court 14 times was a highlight/lowlight).
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u/rebo2 Mar 22 '23
I hope their phones are unusable too. No one will take calls anymore either because of this robo call mess. It’s killing the phone and customer service, business, commerce, and communication in general.
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u/ranger-steven Mar 22 '23
Last week? We've known of these and other direct conflicts of interest for decades and decades.
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u/bobotwf Mar 22 '23
I doubt the FCC regulators are invested in phishing attacks and real estate and home warranty scams.
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u/iamanemptychair Mar 22 '23
I get a ton with “Your package is being returned due to missing information, click this link to fix it!” I almost fell for the first one, now I block every generic “Your package” or “your account” sender
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u/Akussa Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
I work in the text message marketing industry (I'm not going to name the company). We provide the platform/software for people to send out text messages. It's a constant fight against this particular scam. It tends to ramp up during tax return season. I spent I think my entire 40 hour shift last week just finding and banning these accounts. The vast majority of them are located in Casablanca, Morocco from what I was seeing.
The wireless carriers ARE trying to do something to fix this issue, and have been extremely aggressive in the types of messaging they will block from being deliverable. They've created a service called The Campaign Registry which requires businesses to register their business and texting information for use before the carriers will permit messages from being delivered through their traffic.
The issue though is not all text message marketing platforms are on board with TCR, and a lot of scammers have wised up to lying on their business registration so that they get approved, and then sending out their smishing texts. A lot of those texts will get through before TCR bans the traffic and stops messages from delivering. It's not a fool proof system, but they're working on it. The downside to a system like this is that a lot of legitimate traffic ends up getting blocked for no really logical reason.
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u/SnakeyRake Mar 22 '23
Now how about those scam calls from India?
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u/devilsephiroth Mar 22 '23
ma'am, your computer have virus... Ma'am!
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u/Ineedtwocats Mar 22 '23
DO NOT REDEEM NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYDIDYOUREDEEMISAIDNOTTOREDEEEEEEM!
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u/forsakeme4all Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
Is India ever going to be held to account for these scams? Serious question.
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u/Villedo Mar 22 '23
“Taking a stand” is the biggest load of bullshit so far. Wake me up when the term “enforcing” appears, thanks.
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u/Fraternal_Mango Mar 22 '23
I’m going to be pissed if scam calls and texts aren’t a political talking point this coming election cycle. They are targeting the oldest and least tech savvy among us and are a multi-million dollar industry bleeding the country and our loved ones…
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u/jdidihttjisoiheinr Mar 22 '23
I hope someone runs and says they'll stop scam calls, regulate cops, and create an additional federal holiday.
They could talk shit about Mom and say I have an ugly dog, and I'd still vote for them.
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u/zed857 Mar 22 '23
and create an additional federal holiday.
That's how we end up with another day off for students, bankers and government workers that's a regular work day for everybody else.
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u/Apptubrutae Mar 22 '23
I'd also like to point out that, as a business owner of a business that calls people who voluntarily signed up to be called, they are a massive productivity drain.
Scam calls have completely drained the trust out of phone system. Which is itself a piece of infrastructure, right?
Anyone who has to make calls to people who they might not call regularly is doing TONS more work to get through. Voicemails, texts, you name it.
I'm guilty of it too, scheduling something and then getting a call a few hours later and not trusting the suspicious number.
I think this is a secondary concern to scams affecting the vulnerable, but it's still absolutely a cost of how flooded the system has become. Essentially criminals are ruining public infrastructure, and they're doing it with alarming speed and efficacy.
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u/humaniteer Mar 22 '23
Too fuckin late assholes, I stopped picking my phone up like 3 years ago, and now me, and all my associates communicate through text and email threads. I now prefer text and emails over the phone, so everything is in text, and the supreme court upheld contracts written in emails, and that's mostly what I want.
So when people are wondering "How did we change back in the 2010's and 2020's such that we stopped using phone calls ?" The correct answer by the student writing the essay should be "Big business and the Government failed the rest of the country yet again by not acting to stop spam calls for 15 years." And that would receive a 100% correct mark from the professor.
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u/lakotainseattle Mar 22 '23
This is so true. I’m in the same boat, except my too many spam calls led to mental breakdown prior to giving up the phone calls and moving to text and email completely for communication😂 I’m literally aversive to the phone ringing now haha
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u/Agarikas Mar 22 '23
I have mine set to only let calls through that are in my phonebook. I like emails and texts too but sometimes a minute long phone conversation can save me from writing 10 emails.
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u/jemidiah Mar 22 '23
Looking through my phone calls, it's about 1/4th spam, 3/4ths real. About 50 calls since the start of the year. I definitely still use my phone, but there are only four use-cases left: long chats with friends and family, phone-based tech support for some software I maintain, brief communication with businesses like phone-in orders, and brief logistics discussions with friends and coworkers. By actual time spent on the phone, it's mostly just the first one.
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u/romario77 Mar 22 '23
If you read the headline though, it's not about spam calls, but about spam text messages.
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u/dewhashish Mar 22 '23
The FCC is actually doing something to help consumers? Let me know when they put the fairness doctrine back into place and force title 2 on ISPs again.
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u/Dig0ldBicks Mar 22 '23
From my industry adjacent knowledge, this has been in the works for a couple years. People are only now noticing because we're finally reaching a point where it's going to mean something to the average consumer. The carriers have been giving tech companies that use automated messaging tons and tons and tons of time to update their workflows to remain compliant so they can continue to send their legitimate messages. Maybe too much time, but as someone who is responsible for updating those workflows, it's incredibly complicated and varies wildly by use case.
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u/Unnoble_Savage Mar 22 '23
Hello customer, we've been trying to contact you regarding your car's warranty, which is about to expire.
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u/shaggitron420 Mar 22 '23
Give me an option to block these guys who email directly to my phone number. The worst spam comes from emails and it won't let me block them. Only can block numbers.
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u/david76 Mar 22 '23
FFS. Can we do something about spam calls that spoof other numbers?
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u/nfloos Mar 22 '23
Remember when Ajit Pai was the chairman and repealed net neutrality despite everyone being against the decision, and then proceeded to emote on everyone he works for?
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u/3dnewguy Mar 22 '23
So whatever happened to that law they passed that made it illegal to play TV commercials louder than the program you are watching? Because that shit is still happening.
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u/DemonShroom87 Mar 22 '23
It’s about damn time I can get behind the government actually doing something worthwhile.
Problem is, I love fucking with these people and wasting their time, so it’s kind of a double edged sword for me.
I always giggle when I get a call from “Spam Risk” when I’m with friends. I’ll answer in English and talk to them for a minute, then switch to Spanish and then they start getting all pissy with me, then I switch to English again and apologize for being BipolarDID. Usually I’m the one who gets hung up on haha
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u/ConstantTelevision93 Mar 22 '23
Pretty sure the phone companies are selling our phone number info. I purchased a new phone/number and that same day received spam texts
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u/whatistheformat Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
Wonder if they are going to use AI to determine what numbers to block, the same way incoming calls are identified as Spam Risk.
Also wonder if the future of phones will be whitelisting. When you get a new doctor, you have to whitelist their phone number and they whitelist yours. Maybe via an automatic add to contacts utility.
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u/c00ker Mar 22 '23
This is likley just trying to enforce STIR/SHAKEN (https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication), not actually prevent "legitimate" numbers from calling you.
You're likely not going to get a solution where you only get calls that you know, but you'll get a solution where the phone number can't be spoofed, which in itself will limit spam calls because all numbers will have a known source.
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u/digitalliquid Mar 22 '23
Thats just putting a band aid on it. We need to make a new protocol for the phone system. Probably using data to register a number like Google voice, that way the numbers can't be spoofed, which is really the crux of the situation here. It would never happen but end to end encryption like signal built in would be great.
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u/creamy_cheeks Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
blocking genuine spam is a great idea but unfortunately there is a very big unintended consequence.
Many legitimate texts are now also being blocked which is causing a huge problem.
I work for a small app developer that makes an app for retirement and assisted living communities. This app ties into the call system at these communities. In a nutshell, when residents trigger their call buttons to indicate that they need assistance, an alert is triggered on the mobile app that caregivers are logged into, letting them know who is in need of assistance.
Alongside this functionality we implement "escalations" basically if a call light has been going off for a certain period of time and no caregivers have responded to that call light via the mobile app, a text message containing that alert information is triggered and sent to designated phone numbers, usually tied to administrators and supervisors.
This is a very important safeguard. If someone has a serious emergency such as a heart attack and they hit their panic button and nobody responds, a supervisor gets a text message and is able to respond saving the resident from having to wait an excessively long time for help.
Unfortunately, Verizon seems to have a 90% market share when it comes to mobile devices operated in assisted living facilities. And guess what? Verizon's new spam blocking prevents these important escalation text messages from being received.
This has caused an absolute nightmare for many hundreds of assisted living organizations all over the country who no longer have this important text message safeguard thanks to spam blocking.
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u/twss87 Mar 22 '23
Why not just trigger a push notification to the app+device of whatever number you would have texted? Or better yet both a push notification and SMS? This seems like a fairly solveable problem.
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u/MidgardDragon Mar 22 '23
I'm having to register several legitimate businesses for TCR and RingCenrtal has been terrible to work with on this.
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u/effin_dead_again Mar 22 '23
Holy crap I wish I could upvote you more. All of my SMS traffic is properly registered as 10DLC campaigns yet once every couple months my clients on random carriers will just stop receiving their messages. I run an answering service where we do things like texting on-call technicians, and it is incredibly frustrating when our messages start getting rejected at 2AM with no legitimate reason.
I just wrote an integration with Signal and have started moving our largest clients that need guaranteed message delivery over to Signal to receive their notifications because I'm tired of dealing with the carriers' nonsense.
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u/LigerXT5 Mar 22 '23
Not only from shady sources, treat it like email, if a random number is sending out identical messages in mass, and not an approved number to do so, they should be blocked from texting for a while.
I have a church client who still uses Yahoo for their email (small church), and took a few rounds of their account requiring a password change to understand my warnings.
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u/Rom_ulus0 Mar 22 '23
One too many politicians have been added to the free version of "Cat Facts" I see. Guess thats what it took them to finally act.
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u/quaybored Mar 22 '23
Also can they make it so spammers can't forge my number in their caller ID. i get lots of confused/angry call from locals who think i called them. google will probably start blocking my number.
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u/Individual-Result777 Mar 22 '23
Don’t think for a second it’s in our best interest. Spam makes it harder and more expensive to read and store everyones messages with so much spam to go through.
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u/CandidEstablishment0 Mar 22 '23
I’ve been getting lots about my Amazon account that doesn’t exist, and my streaming services being cancelled. It’s really annoying and I feel for people who are too trusting to click any links sent by these scammers