I give up.<p>For the past two years now I've been getting 5 to 15 spam texts a month always from spoofed numbers. Often times including a hyperlink.<p>I get phone calls too. About twice as many. Also from spoofed numbers.<p>I installed the paid version of Robocall a few months ago<p>I frequently re register on the do not call registry.<p>I even spent a lot of time reporting the spam on the dnc website.<p>I want to learn how they are spoofing numbers and how they are making money.<p>Maybe if I understand how they're doing this I can feel a little less bothered by these incessant interruptions.
For voice calls, most high volume VOIP services simply let the customer pick the caller ID. This is/was common for T1 based calling as well. There's lots of valid reasons for the customer to set something, so they just let anything through because it's easier; shaken/stir is supposed to change this over time.<p>To some degree this is true for SMS as well, but in the US, it's less so. Mostly you have to send from a number associated with your account, so you get 'random' number messages: the SMS aggregator has a ton of phone numbers, and picks one at random to send from. SMS spam is much rarer in my experience.<p>If you're in the mood, you can probably get most of the spammed links taken down by reporting to the providers; or if it's phishing, by reporting to the people being forged (who may have better connections; credit unions seem to know how to get things taken down real quick)
Here is one recent example of a failed attempt to scam money: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348721" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348721</a>
i’m afraid i don’t have a lot of insight into the workings of spammers, but if you have at&t they offer a free app that uses crowdsourced blacklists to block then:<p><a href="https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1147710" rel="nofollow">https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1147710</a><p>it has cut out about 2/3 of my spam calls (i don’t get many texts)