22 April 2023

The plague of robotexts


An article in The Guardian today details the flood of scams being perpetrated by fake text messages.
While phishing texts have been around for years, data shows they are on the rise. In 2022 US phone users got 157bn robotexts , or more than 440 a person – an 80% increase from 2021, according to the company Robokiller, which offers a scam-blocking service for cell phones...

There are more than 362,000 robotexts being sent a minute in America.."

I don't believe this is impossible to stop.   

5 comments:

  1. But,.... the free market and job creators!

    As for it not being impossible to stop, few such texts go around in Europe.

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  2. I got one of these in mid-March. It was odd because a package I was expecting was several days late in arriving and the day it finally arrived was the day I received this text. I could not fathom how the USPS had my cell phone number, so I deleted the email, but if the text had arrived a day earlier, they might have got me.

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  3. I get several, as many as a dozen, every damn day. From USPS, UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and many more. They all have the official logo complete with the circle R registered trademark symbol. The USPS, UPS, and FedEx ones are trying to deliver a package, the others want to give me tools and such. I get a kick out of FINAL NOTICE from the same source 7 times the same day.
    Looking at the return address or address to click on it appears to be going to at least a dozen people.
    I don’t understand why the owners of those trademarks don’t fight this, surely they can find people to hire that are familiar with the seedy underbelly of the web... you know, hungry hackers. Maybe they don’t want to draw attention to it for fear people will trash legitimate correspondence from them... or they’re in cahoots.
    xoxoxoBruce

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  4. I recently bought my first cellphone. I received a spam phone call about an hour after activating it. That was before I even had a chance to use it.

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  5. I don't get any spam texts (knock wood). I guess it's because I had a dumb phone for twenty years and no one ever got a response to a text.

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