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points by JohnMakin 3 days ago | 0 comments

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. I would not reply to it. It's very unlikely to do anything but make the problem worse.

[–] marssaxman 3 days ago

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.

[–] mrandish 3 days ago

I think you got lucky the first time. Traditional political candidate campaigns and mainstream parties are supposed to comply with some FEC regs about respecting unsub replies (I think it's tied to getting broad access lists and maybe reduced rates for campaigns), however a LOT of texts and robo-calls (whether supporting candidates or initiatives) are now funded by PACs who seem to have no issue using spammer SIM farms and AFAIC are under no regs.

Since there's no way to tell PAC texts from actual candidate-funded texts, and the PACs seem to now be the vast majority, I always hit the checkbox to block and report as SPAM to my telco. Not that it'll help much but if it's an actual candidate, the telcos whitelist them anyway (because of course politicians passed a law that requires them to), and if it's a PAC maybe it'll burn their SIM farm number pool a little faster, costing them more.

If you're on Android, I highly recommend: https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker. The UX is a little obtuse to set up the first time (ask your LLM) but once set up it works great.

[–] bombcar 3 days ago

The secret they use is that the company with the list NEVER sends anything, it simply sells the list to a campaign or PAC or whomever, and THAT group DOES remove you, but the moment a new campaign or PAC or whomever springs up, they buy the same list again.

This is why every campaign is a new legal entity each time around.

[–] mrandish 3 days ago

Indeed, My 90 year-old, deeply religious mother sent a televangelist $10 one time. A year later when she was in the hospital for a few weeks. I picked up her mail once a week and quickly found out I had to bring a large sack for one week of mail. For every actual bill she got, there were over a hundred pieces of physical spam mail from every kind of religious and political cause, candidate and prophet imaginable - usually in large four-color, glossy envelopes.

It's not just offshore call center con artists preying on the elderly. There's a huge, highly profitable, legal-but-scummy onshore industry too. It was obvious that 'nice Reverend on TV' sold her out to anyone who'd pay - and then they sold it and so on... Even though I'm an atheist, these assholes make me wish there was actually a hell full of fire and brimstone awaiting them.

[–] fmajid 3 days ago

The word you are looking for is “simony”

[–] bradknowles 3 days ago

I use NoMoRobo Max for this stuff. For what it is, it works pretty well, IMO.

Sadly, each time they use a different number, so my list of blocked numbers is huge and getting more massive by the day. Sooner or later, I will have blocked every possible phone number in existence.

[–] mrandish 2 days ago

SpamBlocker lets you put numbers into groups like those in your contacts, those you've ever called, and those in your area code or prefix. Then each group is tested against a content whitelist and blacklist based on words, length, formatting, even Regex. And it's not binary, each list hit has a numeric weight and when a text falls below a certain score without being 'saved' by any 'always keep' whitelist terms (like the name of my HMO, my wife's name, etc) it gets either silenced, reduced to vibrate-only or trashed.

Last time I checked NoMo nor anything else has that level of granularity. All the other spam blocker tools prioritize "one-click simple" which means all their scoring is generic and opaque. At most they let users add binary black and whitelist terms. I haven't seen any that let users weight their own terms.

[–] bradknowles 1 day ago

Yup, haven’t seen anything like that for blocking calls.

For me, the only calls that ring through are the ones coming from people who are already in my list of known contacts. Everyone else gets filtered through NoMoRobo Max. And all spam callers so far haven’t bothered to try to get through to me. They just hung up.

Likewise, the only text messages that get directly through to me are from people already in my list of known contacts. Anything from any unknown number gets filed separately, and I have to periodically go check to see who or what has sent me which messages I haven’t seen.

So far, I haven’t had anyone text or call me that was legitimate, who wasn’t able to get through one of those filters. I might have had to call them back after seeing their text message or hearing their voicemail, but that’s as far as it has gone.

I am not yet dissatisfied enough with NoMoRobo Max that I would be looking for alternatives. But that said, I’m glad to know of a good alternative that I can try if/when that happens.

[–] elevation 3 days ago

> then blocking the number & reporting spam

I think it's also helpful to be prompt if you'd like to help others; A campaign will use e.g. twilio numbers leased for a matter of hour, then release it. If you wait too long to report spam, you damage the number's reputation without actually punishing the hyperactive spammer.

[–] plorkyeran 3 days ago

If twilio does not want its numbers to be marked as spam then it needs to do a better job of not being used to send spam.

[–] eastbound 3 days ago

Isn't Twilio complicit? and isn't it deserved that random Twilio customers, who are funding an illegal organization, get banned? If there is no consequence, Twilio will continue. I'd happily fund a campaign to drive Twilio to bankruptcy.

[–] subscribed 3 days ago

Twilio is complicit so it rightly affects the number reputation.

[–] saghm 3 days ago

I got a text from a political party recently (not one of the major ones, just trying to get me to put in a vote for the same candidate that a third party nominated as well, after I had already mailed in my ballot) that said to send STOP to stop receiving messages or SKIP to "opt out entirely". I still have no clue what the distinction is supposed to be between those.

[–] volkk 3 days ago

So funny how fairly annoying it was to sign up for a phone number for a chatbot for my company going through the 10DLC campaign verification, being rejected like 3 times because I kept missing something and yet...none of it clearly really matters.

[–] bink 3 days ago

Did the deluge stop because you replied "STOP" or simply because the election period was over? If it took several months I'd assume it was the latter.

[–] marssaxman 3 days ago

The spam continued long after that particular election was over. I don't remember how long it took to clean it up, exactly, just that each campaign who got my number did in fact respect the END/STOP request, and I was eventually able to get ahead of the viral spread.

[–] dualvariable 3 days ago

i've been taking to responding "fuck off" instead of "stop" and then blocking and reporting.

they do at least enough sentiment analysis so that "fuck off" behaves like "stop" and they respond that they're removing you from their list and won't contact you again.

[–] ericbarrett 3 days ago

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.

[–] brigade 3 days ago

STOP to a 10DLC number should block further texts from that specific number at a carrier level, regardless of whether the campaign honors its 10DLC requirements. At least, until it’s recycled to a new campaign.

[–] didgetmaster 3 days ago

I wonder if 'STOP or I will vote for your opponent' might work. Then again, if that worked, you might just start receiving messages asking you to vote for their opponent instead.

[–] WesolyKubeczek 3 days ago

It's so bizarre, to get political texts via SMS. Here in Europe, I have got 0 (zero) political texts in my life.

[–] JohnMakin 3 days ago

I am not even really in a place with any close or important races and I'm getting 10+ a day, as a data point for you.

[–] JohnMakin 3 days ago

You'll just end up on another list for the next election cycle. It's marketers - no one is forcing them to respect STOP replies, and a STOP reply is just another data point.

[–] ericbarrett 3 days ago

There is in fact quite a bit of FCC regulation around texts; see e.g. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-24A1.txt

[–] JohnMakin 3 days ago

Note that regulation differs quite a bit from enforcement. People sometimes confuse the former for the latter.

[–] cogburnd02 3 days ago

N. B. In the US, you can actually report this to the FCC. Look at unwanted texts at the bottom of this page: https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/1150022...

[–] ericbarrett 3 days ago

I don't fault your cynicism. There has been a lot of "looking the other way" lately.

[–] dv_dt 3 days ago

Not even the next cycle, as far as I can tell if you say stop or unsubscribe, the political spam mailing list system adds a new candidate to the ~8-10 candidates they keep you loaded with

[–] pluralmonad 3 days ago

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.

[–] solyin 3 days ago

What jurisdiction are you in? Legit companies respect unsubscribe links eg Eventbrite because there's actual fines associated with not respecting unsubscribes. Also, buy a domain name and use per-vendor emails with a salt. Eventbrite@solyin.com is guessable by spammers, eventbrite_1243@solyin.com is not. So then you have easy signal for what's definitely spam.

[–] Sayrus 3 days ago

GMail and many other web clients do the unsubscribe request for you if List-Unsubscribe is present. That doesn't leak your information but still shows that you care and is signal for spam.

[–] Ensorceled 3 days ago

Gmail will helpfully suggest unsubscribing from obvious spam that contains an unsubscribe link ...

[–] kotaKat 3 days ago

Except then it doesn't shitcan it to the spam folder. It archives it in All Mail.

There's no "Unsubscribe and report as spam", just "unsubscribe" and "report spam".

[–] ASalazarMX 2 days ago

You only unsubscribe from legit senders, never click on a true spam unsubscribe link.

If it's a regular email that you vindicatively want to classify as spam, do that and don't unsubscribe. It will go directly to your spam folder in the future, and it will hurt a tiny bit their standing with Google.

[–] radicality 3 days ago

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?

[–] AugurCognito 3 days ago

At least in my experience, it's enforced at the sender/platform level. I can confirm that from working with Twilio and Amazon SNS. They suppress messages to opted-out recipients. Though the exact implementation varies by provider. For example supported keywords might be different(we have our internal list of opted out keywords).

[–] winternett 3 days ago

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.

[–] reaperducer 3 days ago

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.

[–] kelnos 3 days ago

No, STOP is a keyword that the carrier intercepts. The recipient never sees it. The carrier will ensure that you don't get any messages on that number anymore. The business behind the number can (sometimes, depending on the platform they're using) set a custom reply to STOP, which is what makes it seem like they're getting the message, but they aren't.

Of course, it only applies to that phone number, so they can still spam you from another number in their rotation.

[–] webninja 2 days ago

+1 on sending “STOP”. Telecoms have detection for this keyword and punish the sender/number if two or more people send it to a number in a ~2 month period. The above comment should be the top comment.

[–] fierycatnet 3 days ago

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.

[–] zerotolerance 3 days ago

Outbound is over. RIP

[–] fierycatnet 3 days ago

This is what it feels like. I went from high performer to barely getting in touch with people in the last year and those are warm leads not cold-calling. Time for a new gig...

[–] Grombobulous 3 days ago

Perhaps replying with a message that looks similarly automated would work better. Make it look like they accidentally contacted GameStop chat support or something.

[–] StanislavPetrov 3 days ago

Exactly right, better to cut your losses and just hit "block and report as spam".

[–] DANmode 3 days ago

or answer unknown callers.

This is the buried lede.