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points by marssaxman 3 days ago | 0 comments

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.