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Customer is mistakenly accused of text spamming for repeatedly replying STOP to political texts
(www.phonearena.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Hindsight is 20/20 but this could have been avoided by just not replying and blocking the number instead. Replying "STOP" just verifies that it's a good phone number and that you're reading their texts. Then they collect that information and sell it to other spammers.
Exactly what I do. Don’t respond and I just block and report.
I do the same for phone calls from unknown numbers. I just press the volume button to mute the ringer and let it time out. If you hang up or pickup you get added to the list as active.
Android has a feature where you can just ignore an incoming call. It doesn't hang up it just stops playing the ringtone and goes back to the home screen.
On iPhone it’s just pressing any of the volume buttons once. It will mute the ringer and let it go to voicemail.
Same on Android.
Pretty sure that's what happens when you hit the volume button
I've been using the 'Silence' app, which lets only known-callers ring your phone. The rest get sent straight to voicemail
I use that app to block area codes near my phone number since I moved far away from where I lived when I got this number.
Yup, same for me
https://xkcd.com/1129/
I’m pretty sure the US has a law that requires people to stop texting you after you send STOP. Additionally, service providers like Amazon will just remove subscriptions if they receive a STOP.
That would be really useful if the people behind these texts were subject to US laws.
Or STOP meant "stop," not "yes daddy give me more texts"
Laws? What about them? We don't follow laws here anymore.
To be fair, we only selectively enforced them before. And now we selectively enforce... worse shit.
Can't remember ever hearing about spam calls being prosecuted. And judging by the volume I think its fair to assume they never are.
Yes but they're all based in India so it doesn't matter.
90% of mine are local.
I didn't say that. I'm telling you the caller is local.
Relevance?
Problem with that is there may be other services that also leverage the same short code, meaning you may be blocking something you need in the future.
Edit: apparently according to Twilio: