MSVi | 3 years ago | on: FCC orders phone companies to block scam text messages
MSVi | 3 years ago | on: Americans are drowning in spam
Each carrier does have a small blurb on their website, but who would even think to look for it?[1][2][3]
1. https://www.att.com/support/pages/report-call-or-text
2. https://www.verizon.com/about/account-security/smishing-and-....
3. https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/help-with-sc...
MSVi | 3 years ago | on: Americans are drowning in spam
In 2018 the FCC moved away from regulating sms/mms messages as they classified them as "information services" vs. "telecommunications services", meaning that the carriers have been left to create their own rules and enforce them. Without the FCC legal backing, it's much more difficult to stop illegitimate businesses from scaling out their practices.
Meanwhile legitimate businesses in this space have fallen back to the guidelines from the TCPA[1] when answering questions such as:
"When should we send messages?"
"What content is allowed?"
"How should we handle users opting-out of our messages?"
meaning that each business handles them differently, and pushes the envelope however they see fit. Some states have been passing their own mini-TCPAs[2], but these too are limited in their capacity and mostly focus on "telecommunications services".
I'd say that if we want to get serious about stopping spam texts, the best solution would be to talk to your representatives and potentially try to convince the FCC to reclassify text messages as part of "telecommunications services". However, political sends are very large in this space, so I'm sure that large pushback would be expected.
1. https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/tcpa-rules.pdf
2. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/1120/BillText/er/...
MSVi | 3 years ago | on: Americans are drowning in spam
The SMS/MMS space is surprisingly "new" in the telecom sense. Many carriers and providers don't have all of the tools built out that you'd expect to handle spam at the scale they're seeing. From what I've experienced, AT&T has the best spam filtering among the carriers, but again they're all pretty hit-and-miss for now.
When it comes to toll-free messaging all carriers seem to do pretty well (as it's easy to detect the same message being sent out 100k+ times from a singular number), but it becomes much more difficult as more companies move over to unregistered or "local" traffic. Businesses are able to send from local numbers using a technique called "Snowshoeing", or spreading the messages out across multiple numbers and dodge large message volumes from any singular number.
While many of these messages are annoying (such as political messaging/marketing), it's not illegal. However, if you receive legitimate spam messages, all carriers allow you to forward the message to the number 7726.
Be careful if the spammer is spoofing your number as the sender however, because carriers are not smart enough to determine the legitimate sender yet and it will result in your actual number being marked as spam. From what I've heard, being able to detect spoofed sms/mms messages will be coming some time in 2023 though.
