Snippet: My Own Phone Number is Now Spam Texting Me ☇

Chris Welch for The Verge:

This morning, I received a very blatant spam text offering me “a little gift” for supposedly paying my phone bill. Normally I’d groan, roll my eyes, and quickly delete such a thing, but there was something different about this particular message: it was spoofed as coming from my own phone number. As best my iPhone could tell, it was a legitimate message from me to myself. Tapping into the sender details took me to my own contact card.

Equally frustrating was that I had no obvious way of reporting the alarming spoof to my carrier, Verizon Wireless. Spoofed calls and texts are nothing new; most people face a constant deluge of spam calls that appear on caller ID as from a number similar to their own. But this was the first time I actually got something from my own number. These scammers keep getting more sophisticated.

Verizon has issued a statement that it seems to have been bad actors and they’re working to address that. However, that doesn’t change that text spam is still a pain in the butt and the carriers need to do more. We’ve gotten ways to verify calls and plenty of tools to block calls, but most carriers have email-to-SMS and email-to-MMS gateways wide open and some won’t disable them if you ask. Furthermore, why not offer a more aggressive option to only allow texts from verified ten-digit numbers? Most spam texts seem to come from “real” phone numbers as opposed to the short numbers used for verification or alerts.

On the other hand, at least set up a rule to say “if a text comes through to my number from my number, assume it’s spam and delete it”—that would make sense, right?