The Surprising Reason Why You May Be Receiving More Spam Messages
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There are some things in life that are an irritant to all of us and make us ponder many questions. Spam texts are one of those things. And unfortunately, Last month there was a major uptick in the volume of Spam text messages that were sent out by scammers to our phones – the main culprit being that the holiday shopping season kicked off in November.
In the month of October, consumers received 18 billion spam text messages. In comparison to November, consumers received 47 billion Spam text messages. That is a 160% increase month over month.
Retailers typically use the time around holidays to text the customers that have opted in to receive messages from those companies to inform the customer of special promotions and sales at stores they regularly shop at. These figures were provided by a company called Robokiller which is a service that blocks spam calls and texts. They compile the data and make it public to consumers.
Those November figures are the largest in history. Those figures are approximately 10 times greater than December 2021’s total of 5 billion spam text messages. To put it into perspective, if we took every person in our country and distributed these spam text messages equally, each person in the country would have received 173 Spam texts during the month.
When the experts analyze this data, it’s time for the problem-solving stage to figure out why it is drastically increasing month over month. The general reasoning as to why we saw such a big spike in November, the analysts concluded, was that it was spurred on by Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
According to Consumer Affairs, “Though these strategies are effective at their intended goal, they can also lead to a number of scams and spam messages. The Robokiller report found that fake delivery text updates increased by 156% between October and November.”
Due to the level of severity of this spam text situation, you should want to at the very least know how to spot Spam text messages when they make their way to your phone number. Suffice it to say, if you haven’t already received one of these messages then you just might want to play the lottery because statistically, that would make you supremely lucky.
Thankfully, for those of us who aren’t as lucky as others, the Federal Trade Commission and Robokiller have issued guidance on identifying these texts reported by Consumer Affairs, “These messages often contain urgent notices to make payments, participate in a sale, or provide personal information through a URL – that often doesn’t look like a legitimate link. If the message contains typos or other grammatical errors, these are other signs that it’s coming from a sketchy source.”
There are a couple of options that they recommend you take when you have identified one of the Spam text messages. First and foremost, they highly encourage you not to respond to the message because they are designed to get sensitive personal information from you. They also ask that you block the phone number that the message was sent from and notify your carrier immediately.
Another option is you can forward the message to 7726 (SPAM). This way it can be analyzed and assists with identifying the trends and patterns the scammers are using to attempt to acquire our information.
All in all, this is a frustrating situation when you are waiting for communication from family or friends and your phone rings or buzzes in your pocket. You quickly pull it out to check their message to find out it is another Spam text message with an urgent message to respond about a delivery you are not expecting is the most common current engagement message.
