Junk text messages

Ultimanecat

I recently returned to my ancestral home (read: California) and bought a cell phone on a prepaid plan. I've had it for just over a week and I've been getting one or two junk text messages a day (telling me to check my credit score at some website or to sign up to take surveys for money).

This is obviously super-annoying. The texts say I can reply with "STOP", but honestly maybe they'd forgive me for not fully trusting those who spam cell phones to do so. I'm more worried that if I replied to them it'd signal that there is actually a person at the other end reading these things, and then they'd really open the floodgates.

Beyond being annoying, it also costs me money (10 cents per received text). Does anybody have experience with this? This hardly even seems legal to me, but at the very least whenever I get one of these texts it puts me in a bad mood for the next few minutes, and that is something I can do without.

bowen

Have you given the number to anyone, even for services?

Ultimanecat

Nope, only had it for a week or so. The only people with the number are friends and family - although it is technically a burner and who knows what the person who held the number previously was doing with it.

As to that last point, though, I believe carriers cannot reassign a number until an account has lapsed for a year, at least.

MushroomStick

What carrier is it? Maybe they sell number lists to telemarketers and such.

bowen

Yeah that's about right, sign up on the DNC registry. File a complaint for everyone that sends sends you a text or leaves a message that eats your time that you haven't solicited. And yeah, don't reply to them.

https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx

Hopefully you live in the US.

Ultimanecat

Hrm, according to that website it is already illegal for telemarketers to call cell phones (since most telemarketers use autodialers and you cannot call a cell with one). I'll sign up and see what happens, but like I said I kind of feel like these guys aren't playing above the board to begin with.

wonderpug

Most cell providers have a feature that lets people use email to send text messages to their users. For instance, if you wanted to text an AT&T customer you could email a message to <theirphonenumber>@txt.att.net

Nice feature, but it means that spammers can just try and send emails to every possible phone number and see if they get a hit. If you don't have any friends or family sending you texts via the email service, you can disable the feature and cut off one avenue of spammery.

Ultimanecat

I'll have to take a look at that, since the type of spam I'm getting seems way more like email spam rather than trying to get me to buy life insurance like the telemarketers do.