Will Oremus at Slate discussed the phenomena, Hell Phone: Is there any way to stop the scourge of text message spam?
I have had a similar experience of late: a number (thankfully not too much as yet) of text based spam offering any number of ridiculous offers (I think I have gotten the iPhone 5 offer he notes in the piece as well as free gift cards and any number of other too-good-to-be-true offers that are typical of spammers).
I am somewhat surprised that there appears to be no easy way to block specific phone numbers from sending being able to send texts to one’s phone.
Comments
10 responses to “Text Spam Sucks”
The problem is that the spaming scammers are spoofing their number so it’s impossible to block them. The best you can hope for is to come up with a system to block anyone not in your contacts list..
It depends on your wireless provider, but yes you can block specific phone numbers from texting you…
Here’s the AT&T help document, for example: http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB115812&cv=820#fbid=URO-7zD6sNb
Also, I’d imagine a good public service a blogger could do would be to publish the number he’s getting unsolicited messages from, so the number (range of numbers) would be unusable in the future.
Blocking won’t help if the spammers are spoofing, or if they are using an internet based system to send their text messages
Like I said in my first post. The scammers are spoofing numbers and can use any range they feel like..
Putting the numbers into a search engine usually turns up a number of complaints. Site like whoscallingme.com and whocallsme.com allow recipients to describe the con and what they learn if they follow the call to a human.
This doesn’t stop the calls, but it gives something that can go to the FTC for abuse of the Do Not Call List.
I’ve had some luck with AT&T’s text spam blocking techniques. Not full proof but I get a lot less now.
http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB115812&cv=820#fbid=5ND1-u62EPH
AT least here in Brazil most of the text spam is provided by the own wireless providers.
The “delete” button on my phone works really well for text spam. You don’t even have to read the spam first (although you do have to open it ).
Sometimes, though, I do read the spam. It helps me practice my Korean.
Those of us without free texting greatly enjoy paying to get these spams…