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Comment by rpaddock | Hacker News Reader

After my wife's suicide (See the documentary Pain Warriors) I took over Karen's FB account as my own, and I changed the name on the account. Long before this breach I have been getting SMS Spam addressing me as Karen, on a number that did not exist when she was alive.

FB data can be the only possible source of that spam.

The spam is always trying to sell male enhancement products to 'Karen'. Anyone know how to stop this SMS spam crap?

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Sorry for your loss. Right now I'm pretty happy that I scrubbed all information of my FB account months ago. If only people could stop using messenger so I could delete it.

But I have a similar, but unrelated to FB, problem in that every month I get an offer to work as a nurse in Norway from different agencies. I figured they scraped some "find the number"-site here in Sweden long ago and since my mothers name was on my bill I guess my number somehow came up under her name.

It's been annoying for years but since my mother had a some (non-corona) medical problems last year it has been downright infuriating at times. Anyone know how to make it stop when there is a bunch of different agencies messaging you?

Would you mind elaborating on how you "scrubbed" information from your fb account? It's been years since I closed my account but I know (e.g. see this article) this is not enough, so I consider reenabling it only to delete all my info, and then finally (?) deleting it.

I deleted everything, going through every page and my whole timeline etc pressing delete on everything. I considered changing my number etc. to nonsense and wait a week and the delete it but I figured facebook are probably versioning that stuff anyway.

Right now my profile picture is a plastic duck, there are no photos and no information apart from my name and my throwaway-email adress (which I hope is hidden from the world via settings).

There is also a "privacy page" there where you can check what information they have saved about you and if you forgot to delete something. I would probably have done it this way first if I where to delete my FB-account but for now I need messenger.

If you are running firefox you should also install "facebook container" even if you don't have an account. :)

My deepest condolences.

I think it's pretty hard to stop incoming spam when the number itself has been made public.

The only options I know would be: a. Play whack and mole, report the number to the authority in your country that handles this kind of spam activity. b. Use some kind of mobile application that filter out the spam SMS. This one is kinda hit and miss, since the number data is coming from community reports, so some spam might pass the filter. And there might be some false positives from the spam filter.

I also would like to hear if there's alternative solution for this problem, other than changing the phone number itself.

My phone has an option called Do Not Disturb mode. I have set a schedule to turn it on everyday from 12AM to 11:59PM. What Do Not Disturb will do is block (silence the notification or ringer) every message or call from someone that is not in your phone book. While unfortunately you'll still get the spam SMS, but you wont get the alert.

The only way I can see striking back at these spam calls is to pick up the call and waste their time, because its expensive. Also if I pick up that means someone else is not getting scammed. I try to get as far along in the scam process as possible.

At least here human operators apparently are paid for call duration and they will prolong the call up to 15 minutes and you don't need to say anything.

I enjoy the pixel line of phones having google assistant answer spam calls for me. Sometimes its fun to watch the conversation they attempt to have with the assistant.

This isn't just pixel phones anymore, and it hasn't been for a while. You can also tell that it's not a person sometimes (specifically extended car warranty for me) if you have a cheap phone like mine, because you can hear the message on the other end start as soon as the line opens, before the phone shuts off the speaker and starts playing it's own message; once the assistant finishes talking, you can see the transcript start in the middle because the other end doesn't recognize Google assistant like it (probably) would an answering machine.

Very sorry for your loss and thank you for sharing.

If you only mean "how not to be bothered" (instead of radical actual solutions of legal nature etc.), and the sender is a recurring number, very probably your phone OS has an option to reject calls and/or messages from specific numbers.

There was a spammer that bothered me, I blocked the number, and started receiving spam from adjacent ones (same number, just the last digit increasing by 1). Had to block 5-6 for them to go away.

If you are in the US you can register at donotcall.gov

It's not perfect, but it has had an impact on the amount of spam I receive.

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