Ask HN: Spam SMS purporting to be from the DNC?

Meanwhile, the barrages of texts I've gotten have all been purportedly from the RNC or their supporters; basically zero from the DNC or their supporters. I wouldn't be surprised if the RNC and DNC are pretending to be each other to make each other look bad: I also wouldn't be surprised if it's genuinely them sending all this spam.

I have been receiving these SMS messages purporting to be from DNC candidates fairly continuously for the last few weeks. I finally actually looked into the few I hadn't yet done "mark as junk and delete" on, so actually looked into them.

The numbers are all afaict fake, and the links are all largely blank rebrandly hosted sites with one path that redirects to actblue.

Given that structure my default inclination is to believe that this is someone/group trying to make it appear as though the DNC is spamming, but I can't discount the possibility that it is the DNC. Either way I believe these are a violation of the Do Not Call registry, and because the numbers appear fake the "stop2end" at the end is BS.

The link is to my own twitter thread with more details from the ones I hadn't deleted, but I was curious if anyone else on HN is getting them, and for who they are getting them.

If this is an epidemic then I have to wonder if smart phones are leaking something through a side channel. In 20 years I have received maybe 2 UCE SMS messages on my disposable flip phone and I couldnt even read them because they were binary data. Could it be that smart phone apps are leaking peoples numbers to a shady vendor? Asking because I am about to venture into the area of my first smart phone and will be attempting to load LineageOS on it, maybe.

given how obnoxious it's been lately, yep; this really seems like an op. didn't go the extra step to look into them and figured it would have just been me or my data sold. this seems much more intentional.