There's two different but both problematic things here:<p>- Really poorly written spam detection.<p>- Failure to notify customers/no remediation procedure.<p>No doubt people will bring up "but then the spammers will know!!" Or similar, but honestly spammers are already limited by the cost of buying SIM cards ($5/ea), and I feel like customers being negatively impacted outweighs the <i>minor</i> benefit to spam-fighting (particularly when spammers could buy a single second number and detect this 100% of the time anyway).<p>Plus I'd be pretty upset if I was a customer paying for service, and I lost access to a part of that service for 10 days because I sent the word "butt" in a conversation. I'd feel particularly irritated if I wasn't told that my messages weren't delivered, and vital ones were just going into a void.
PayPal has a similar problem. They do really loose string matching on the OFAC list[1], for any data, in any payment field...even a comment. Match a magic string in a comment, and your PayPal account gets locked down in a way that's very hard to undo.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/sdn-list/pages/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/sdn-list/...</a>
T-mobile is a joke. I lost my @simon Twitter account [0] because of T-mobile's and Twitter's utter incompetence, and it took me more than 3 months to regain control of it.<p>The way the attacker gained control of my phone number should have never been possible. I'm still a customer, why? Because there's no better alternative in the US, although I'm pondering Google Fi at the moment. Thoughts?<p>[0]: <a href="https://medium.com/@simon/mobile-twitter-hacked-please-help-2f65c691edf8" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@simon/mobile-twitter-hacked-please-help-...</a>
I ran into this a few months ago when texting the phrase "work from home" it was really strange. We rationalized it with the spam / phishing thought process, but it still seems wrong for the carriers to block messages so poorly.<p>It makes me wonder if I really want them filtering 'spam' calls.<p><i>tinfoil hat</i> maybe that's their end game!
From the scant details about the word <i>"BELLY"</i> triggering the blocks, it looks like some hypothesize it's a "Scunthorpe" type of programming bug:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem</a>
T-Mobile has also not been approving new short codes on their network since earlier this year. Frustrating for folks trying to execute legit SMS comms.
I’ve been developing SMS chatbots and using my T-Mobile phone for testing. They will also drop messages that contain URLs, although the rules for which TLDs are allowed are hard to reverse engineer, much less rationalize. Last I remember, .club URLs are blocked, .com is allowed, and bit.ly is allowed.