Even thought it was clear this message was the lead-in to a swindle of some kind, I had to pause and admire the craft that went into its composition. Like everyone else, I get scam text come-ons pretty frequently, and they’re always poorly pitched and low-energy. In contrast, this text opened up a rich world, animated by detail and alive with mystery. I didn’t care about packages missing their intended destinations, or Bitcoin investing advice, or whatever scammers usually texted me about, but I was interested in Tony: How many charity galas did he go to, anyway? And why hadn’t he seen his/my unknown interlocutor in such a long time? Before I reported the number to WhatsApp, I took a screenshot of the message to better remember it.
[…]There’s something to be written about here, Mark texted. What is the deal with these texts? Why do they sound like that? Who is sending them?
I rarely get spam messages, and I’ve never seen messages like these before. There is some real craft going on here, even if the goal is malicious. I have to admire the thought that goes into these.
Side note : I rarely had spam calls or messages until I moved from the UK to the US. Now I get multiple of each every day.
C’mon… we are in 2022, we know the world we live in, only a retard can trust or follow a serious chat with a strange that insists in that mood of conversation. I see cases like these every week on the news, it’s time for some people to open their eyes and assimilate some knowledge by brute force, or pay the consequences, that I think in he vast majority of cases are deserved.
Spam calls and texts in the US are absolutely ridiculous. The calls about your “warranty about to expire”, scary texts that someone did something and you need to click the link, the voicemails from what sounds like a chinese lady speaking chinese at 1000mph from a sweat-factory floor, the fucking political spam begging for money, the “is the owner of the house there”, and the list goes on and on and on… And what do regulators and politicians do to stop it? Absolutely nothing.
Crossing the street without using a crosswalk when there’s no cars in sight is a crime, but you can spam the living hell out of people’s phones, texts, emails, and mailboxes, and that’s all good. It’s beyond stupid.
Well, as of Thursday, the FCC closed a loophole that allowed smaller providers to forgo STIR/SHAKEN CallerID authentication.
Starting June 30 next year, any gateway carrier will also only be allowed to accept calls from international carriers that implement STIR/SHAKEN.
So, progress is being made on that front finally.
Drumhellar,
I hope it makes a difference because the amount of spam calls I get is insane. God knows the do not call lists and blacklist based services are futile; the caller id they are based on is completely unreliable. Telephone networks actually have very reliable identifiers that cannot be blocked and are used for billing purposes. The carriers have a strong incentive to verify and police it, unlike caller id.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identification
However unless you have an 800 number this information is typically stripped by carriers before consumers can see the data on our regular lines. The inability for the callee to access this information is largely the reason why illegal callers have largely operated with impunity. The carriers have the information (and even turn a profit billing for those calls), but consumers are left in the dark about who’s calling.
friedchicken,
Yep, we desperately needed them to crack down on it and instead they went and passed the can-spam act, what asshats, haha.
The various marketing associations keep lobbying against legislative fixes, they don’t want consumers to have a right to stop their ads. I’ll tell you what has worked for me at least with snail mail…every time I got that spam I returned it empty or with other spam in the return envelope. The money they have to spend on postage adds up quickly and they’ve taken me off their mailing lists.
I wish this technique would work as well with unsolicited calls. I get past the automated screener and reach a human to waste their time, but they usually call back every day. I would think those businesses would have an incentive to block those wasting their time, but either they don’t have the technical means to do so or they just consider those who waste their time a normal cost of business with no interest in blocking numbers. It’s so damn frustrating that it should even come to it in the first place, but if everyone could waste their time more it would kill off their business model. I wish I had an automated voice script I could forward all of them to.