The best part is that fully half of these are addressed to my mom…
Protip: don’t scribble shit out in screenshots. Too easy for people to figure out what’s underneath. Put filled in rectangles over whatever you don’t want people to see so there’s nothing that shows through. Most built in photo editors on phones have this functionality.
Filled in rectangles are so cold and impersonal. The scribbles are organic and remind me I need to brush my hair. Who cares if someone reverse engineers OP’s mom’s name?
I’m getting this shit from everywhere I’ve ever lived. I can normally ignore my phone for the most part, but I’m actually waiting on updates about the health of a relative. And this shit needs to stop. No one’s changing their mind cause of a text, guys. No one’s like, “Oh yeah, is it time to vote?” Please, just stop.
I got one that threatened me saying they will know if I voted or not.
It was also sent to the wrong address and someone else had to give it to me asking if I was ok when they saw the hand written threat.
It’s fucking insane.
“I’m just gonna vote for the last person that texted me” : the demo these assholes are targeting.
I took will vote for this dudes mom.
I’ve been getting political spam for Florida for years every election cycle. Almost always for Republicans, but I did get one Harris message the other day. The catch? I’ve never lived in Florida and haven’t even been there in over 15 years.
Fortunately Google messages filters all of it to spam and makes it very easy to toss whatever doesn’t get filtered into spam. Here’s mine from Wisconsin!
You guys need regulation about that, thank God we have some in EU
Yes it seems like that should be the duty of a functional government… Oh wait…
mine in PA. most of them are sent to a name I don’t know anyone by…
Holy shit I didn’t know I had a spam filter on my texts. Mine looks much the same.
I recently moved from Texas to New Mexico, so now I get them for both states. Thankfully, my spam filter works pretty well.
i can still see the middle name, mabye increase the brush size next time?
Did your mom also install a random sketchy app from the app store and click “Allow” when it asked to access her contacts?
Because my mom did, and I get all kinds of spam. 😠
The invention of smartphones and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Hard agree!
I downgraded to a pseudo dumb phone a few months ago, and it’s been life changing in all the best ways.
Personally I keep my installed apps to a minimum, heavily use Firefox on mobile with uBlock Origin, and heavily curate what’s allowed to send notifications and when, so my phone is quiet and not distracting but there when I want it/need it
i don’t even do sms on my ‘dumb’ phone.
when the phone makes a noise, it’s either low on battery (or, if it was plugged-in, fully charged), an alarm or timer i set, or a very high probability of being a legit call (the carrier has reasonably-effective blockers for spam, bots and spoofed origin calls).
Totally respect that.
I tried a month of dumbphone but realized there was a minimum of “smart” I needed in a daily driving device. My compromise was a low-end smartphone in a flip phone form factor which is just smart enough for what I need.
jfc I hope you reported that app.
No idea what app it was. Mom was just like “my phone got hacked so i got a new one” and a new phone number with it. 🤦🏻♂️
At this point it’s like the Onion article that they release after every school shooting about how nothing can be done to prevent it in the only country where it occurs regularly; the data raping and pillaging that goes on in the US despite other countries having passed basic common sense privacy and control laws…well too bad you can’t afford the lobbyists to pass it, Poor.
Man the USA sounds like it’s just three corporations in a trench coat pretending to be a country.
“My Life is an Onion Article” is now on the short list of titles for my autobiography.
damn is that why I get so much spam and my number keeps getting spoofed by scammers?
Life in the US must suck so fucking bad.
Nah it’s fine, see I don’t live in a swing-state, so nobody cares about my vote at all!
I find it kind of reassuring that at least our votes actually mean something to someone and the entire process isn’t completely rigged, otherwise no one would fucking bother.
That’s a very low bar ><
Also because of first past the post, most people’s votes don’t in fact matter. So personally I like to aim a bit higher.
You know, I have to say you’re right.
At this point, unless you have been living under a giant rock, there are simple, hard facts you can’t possibly not know about Donald Trump that should be unacceptable to anyone regardless of political leanings. It’s simply impossible to ignore them.
Therefore logic dictates that whoever votes for Trump today must agree with the Nazi stuff, the Trump Purge, shooting protesters in the legs, hanging vice-presidents or locking up former speakers of the house. I mean LITERALLY agree - because he LITERALLY said those things. Even MAGA people shouldn’t agree with those things: making America great again implies not destroying America!
Meaning roughly half of this country agrees with those things. If that’s not fucked up to the n-th degree, I don’t know what is.
far right parties are the biggest in most european countries and it still doesn’t come anywhere close to how much it must suck to live in america. Who you vote for is nobody’s business, and this kind of spam is insane.
I’m not sure how many OP gets in a week but I get so. many. of these stupid messages. It’s usually about 3-6 a week. It pisses me off every time I get them. Luckily I have a message filter set up with just bare bones rules to filter out anything that contains “Trump” and “President” and that’s been working great. But the fact that I even get those messages is absurd to me. I’ve blocked at the bare minimum, probably about 300 of those numbers so far. It only keeps rising every week when I decide to look through my junk SMS
That’s insane. The only message we get here is per mail, with information on where to vote and your voting card thingy. There might be some people near stores giving out flyers with information about their party, that’s about it.
I wish it were the case for us here too. I appear to be the main one in my family who gets it and sometimes it has a name attached that isn’t mine so it’s possible it’s from the previous owner of the phone number. But it’s still infuriating nevertheless that it exists in the first place. Just wish there was a “Don’t ever message me again under any other number” option.
And the worst part? They’re allowed to ignore the national do not call registry.
Oh neat, it’s just like how I can ignore the “don’t do violent shit” laws!
I’m in Missouri and I got one from some ghoul of a Republican today. It was very off putting. I fucking hate those fascist fucks.
As annoying as it is, I reply STOP to each one and then block the number. Sometimes I get lucky and get an unsubscribe confirmation.
I hardly get spam texts because I refuse to give my number out for anything. Jenny is my go to phone number when I need to give out a burner number.
Anytime I want to use public WiFi that’s behind a captive portal that requires an email, I give them “bezos@amazon.com”
I like giving them the number 719-266-2837
I encourage folks to give it a try
What is that from?
Somebody made it to demo Twilio and it’s been running for at least ten years.
Really handy for testing telephony connections.
Jenny?
867-5309
lol, and here it thought it was just a clever name for some fake phone number generator.
🤦
867-5309
