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why do i receive hundreds of fake phishing/scam text messages every week. why cant apple stop this?

how do i notify or let apple know that my device or phone number has been compromised? Every day i receive at least 5 text messages from different phone numbers containing fake information like "You have 5 days to claim this money www.fake phishing link dot com"


even if i change my number it only takes a few days before i start receiving the same messages.


i dont visit phishing websites or shop online at all.


very frustrating that apple doesn't acknowledge this and does nothing for the victims



iPhone 12 mini

Posted on Dec 11, 2021 9:39 AM

Reply
14 replies

Dec 11, 2021 11:44 AM in response to vicsanitÿ

Do not respond to unrecognized numbers. Block and move on. Mute all unrecognized numbers; what Apple calls Silence Unknown Callers. Same handling for spam email, too. Responding to any of this dreck just makes your contact info more valuable to the spammers, and draws more replies and more activity, whether replies as shown in the now-expurgated chat log, or “remove me” or using spammer-provided unsubscribe links, or whatever.


The displayed domain from that now-expurgated chat log is freshly-registered (from mid November), probably rotates fairly quickly to avoid filters, and the whole sequence reads like a bot, so I’d expect this whole sequence is automated. Dating services are overrun with bots right now for instance, usually selling some subscription or another. (One of the standard jokes when the other party in a dating chat might actually be a bot is a request to “say potato”. Most of the bots aren’t programmed to respond to that. Yet.)


In short, you’re chatting with a computer program, and your responses increase your value for future engagement.


You won’t be able to silence each spammer, as the callers are faking their calling info—haven’t seen my own number, but have seen piles of clearly-faked calling numbers. This is the same mess as the endemic faked sending email addresses mess, too.


Requesting that Apple automatically block selected “spam risk” or other text strings as presented by the carriers would be a nice addition to iPhone, though. If you’d like that, visit: Product Feedback - Apple

Dec 11, 2021 9:43 AM in response to vicsanitÿ

It's not really something that Apple can do anything about. Most of these scam messages come from the Indian sub-continent or from Russia, and no-one has any control over them, and obviously Apple is in now way responsible for them. Once they get hold of an address they keep bombarding it with attempt to get the owner to react and give away personal details. Spam-blocking software such as SpamSieve can do a good job of filtering such messages to your Spam folder.

Dec 11, 2021 10:01 AM in response to vicsanitÿ

What’s to acknowledge? Everybody that thinks about it knows every telephone number in their country or region, and could probably come up with the list of telephone numbers for the whole world. There’s no way around that.


And it’s certainly known that computers can connect and mass-spam at a scale beyond what most folks can comprehend, too.


And it’s known that spam is a business, with substantial investments, and with testing.


And it’s known that the calling numbers are routinely spoofed / faked / forged.


And around here, we get the same spam messages repeated through the whole exchange. Which is easy to do, when you’re running a computerized business that calls everybody. They’ve picked up a new subscriber over the past few weeks, and the volume of some of the other spam messages may have been effected by a recent US class-action lawsuit.


As for the spam messages, the telephone network is entirely busted, and also working exactly as designed and as required by cellular providers and by regulators. Handset vendors have no control over who can call who, too.


What can you do? Contact your regulators and particularly your legislative reps. Right now, they’re seemingly not hearing enough from their constituents to seek to address the mess.


What to do about the spam short-term, pending any hypothetical legislative and regulatory shifts? Shut off notifications from unrecognized senders. And your carrier may have additional (and probably extra cost) options, so check with them.


Dec 11, 2021 11:22 AM in response to MrHoffman

What's fun is when they text or call you with the caller ID of your own number.


AT&T is an example of a carrier that knows how to monetize annoyance; you can turn on a service for free that will label messages from identified callers as "Telemarketer" or "Suspected SPAM," but to actually block those calls on an automatic basis is an extra monthly charge.

Dec 14, 2021 6:29 AM in response to Smilin-Brian

mr fish wrote:

Under SMS/MMS, toggle every option off.

Problem solved. ✅

You can't turn off SMS from the phone. You can only turn it off by contacting your carrier.


If you mean Settings>Messages>Send as SMS, that has no effect on the phone's ability to send or receive SMS. It only stops the phone from sending an iMessage as an SMS if the iMessage fails.


Turning off Subject Field and Character count also will have no effect on this.

why do i receive hundreds of fake phishing/scam text messages every week. why cant apple stop this?

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