SMS Spam

It seems I am not alone in getting absolutely bombarded with SMS Spam recently, particularly political spame. Daring Fireball, by John Gruber recently talked about the same issue he is having in What to Do With Unwanted Political Spam Texts. It is interesting to see some concrete evidence about what the mysterious iMessage “Delete and Report Junk” button that seems to behave like the elevator close buttons that aren’t even hooked up to anything.

I’ve worked with a few SMS services programmatically in the past, and I know that every programmatic text that is sent is expected to comply when you send back “Stop”, and in almost all cases, if they use an SMS Short Code the chances are pretty high that it will respect it. Getting a short code is expensive, and much more heavily monitored by providers (such as Twilio, etc.). There is a theoretical fine of $10,000 per message that ignores these rules, however I’m not aware of this ever actually happening. With short codes, at least the providers seem to be pretty strict about it, possibly because they themselves are afraid of those fines.

Regular SMS numbers though are trivial to get. While the “Delete and Report Junk” may help move that message to the junk folder in your messages (yes, this exists, but I’m not sure it ever actually works), you have to explicitly block the number to prevent new messages coming in from that number. I tried this for a while and it has made absolutely no difference for me personally, because every message comes from a new number.

I get literally up to 15 messages some days and it’s rare that I go a full day without a single message any more. I respond stop to every single one, and I went through the effort of blocking for a while but it does nothing.

This is a small issue compared to many issues we face as a nation and as a globe these days, but it is absolutely infuriating to me, and frankly dangerous for most people. Carriers won’t do anything unless they are forced to by the government, and the government seems to have absolutely no willingness (frankly, I’m not convinced they even understand how this all works) to fix the issue. Until they do, scams will continue to grow nearly exponentially, and we’ll keep getting blown up with messages we never signed up for and cannot effectively opt out of.