This year will be the 30th anniversary of the modern text message (SMS). It seems to also be the year of text message spam. I don’t remember receiving even a single spam or phishing text message prior to 2021 and in 2022 it is a near-daily occurrence. Here’s an example:
How is it supposed to work from here? I’m supposed to reply “My name isn’t Logan and here is my Visa card number…”?
Also, is it trivial for senders to spoof the from number? What if I call (304) 607-3405? Will that number belong to Logan, Selina, or Lucy? Or some person entirely unaware that his/her/zir/their phone number has been appropriated?
Why didn’t we get these before coronapanic?
Update from this evening… my uncles are looking out for me beyond the grave:
(In addition to being blind, Lisa will also be suffering from heatstroke if she wears that outfit on a date here in south Florida!)
Perhaps tech companies are selling the phone numbers that they harvested under the pretense of two factor authentication (what they are really for is of course a unique personal identifier that is used to track an individual across companies/services, e.g.: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-pay-150-million-penalty-allegedly-breaking-its-privacy-promises-again).
Things can get even sleazier in an economic downturn.
It’s called “pig butchering”.
I don’t know about SMS and the telephone number spoofing, but I do know that several of my FB friends were hacked in recent days and I knew because I got FB Messenger messages saying things like: “Look at this great photo I found of us!” with an outside-FB URL. So it seems that someone is phishing easily-hackable FB accounts and then trying to entice people to click on links from “Friends.” I delete the messages immediately.
Also, I think FB obfuscates the URL being linked to so that it’s not trivial to determine where the link leads. But I can take a pretty good guess.
Speaking of FB, as if this wasn’t coming, we now have to deal with assaults both in the real world and in this “fictional” world: “Women’s Avatars Are Being Sexually Assaulted in Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Platforms” [1]. And of course, assault is just the beginning, this will be followed with all other #HashTags we all love.
I hope we have enough judges, lawyers, cops, politician and community activates to stop this madness in the real and now “fictional” world.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/now/women-avatars-being-sexually-assaulted-182436343.html
@George A
Do I have to have a fictional law degree to be a fictional judge in the Metaverse?
Could someone code in some fictional personal securtiy?
Clown world is becoming virtual clown world.
The real SMS spam for me those days are the double authentications that I have to deal with every day. At work, everything I deal with requires code that’s sent to my phone via SMS. So at my work place, and I know this is true for all other organizations, requires me to authenticate using my personal phone, a device that’s not provided to me by my company!
How was the blind date?