Ask HN: Recent uptick in spam emails and text messages? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recent uptick in spam emails and text messages?

17 pointsmeken18 comments

Has anyone noticed an uptick in spam emails and text messages the past few months?

I’ve consistently been getting ~1-2 spam emails per day and ~1 bogus text message.

The spam all seem to be imitating retail stores, offering some promo.

I use gmail and iOS.

I have noticed a ton of spam slipping through gmail as of recent. Same exact format as you describe. For some reason they appear to mostly be related to airlines or tools.

I’ve gotten a text saying:

“Hi mum I'm texting you off a friends phone I've smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number 07—————- please x”

3 days in a row from 3 different numbers. god knows what scam lies on the other end of that number

>scam:'Hi mum I'm texting you off a friends phone I've smashed mine and their phones about to die'< : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scam:'Hi mum I'm texting...>

On iOS I’ve been using Bouncer to filter out SMS and iMessage spam using regexes. It’s been surprisingly effective to filter out messages that contain non-https URLs:

https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer

Apple has (re)enabled the downloading of remote content in the Apple Mail apps, as part of their recent "Protect Mail Activity" feature. Since then I received more spam mail. I have now disabled this feature, and reenabled "Block All Remote Content" again, resulting in less spam after a while.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mail/mlhlae4a4fe6/mac

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/apple-mail-no...

Yes, last 4 months: I am getting 100+ spam emails a day, filtering catches about 90% but still that's 10 that get through EACH DAY. It used to be NONE! I now get 3-4 spam texts per week, previously it would be about 3-4 a year.

Oh, I‘m not alone! It‘s completely out of control for me. My email has been exposed for 1.5 decades now, but the last few months have been on another level. Maybe we are targeted as good value victims ?

I’m definitely getting spam texts out of nowhere after not really getting these in the past. They’re mostly of the sexual performance, obvious scam with misspellings variety. Like spam email at its zenith in the early oughts.

That matches my experience to a T. For years I was getting a spam SMS once a month, at most. Recently I've started getting a few per day, mostly for dick pills.

I don't get any spam texts but saw an uptick about a month ago in fake emails from a range of retailers. Always an order confirmation for some expensive gadget with a message prompting me to call a fake number if I have any questions. I am using Startmail and they seem to have caught up on this scam.

Funny, I just wanted to post an Ask HN to inquire how businesses deal with the increasing amount of spam.

At my place of work, we currently get around 40 spam messages per outwards-facing email.

How do you deal with that? What software solutions exist to filter spam that work well with Microsoft Exchange?

More very obvious spam has been making it through the Gmail filters lately.

Also past few months I've been getting a few spam texts a week in Chinese (although native Chinese people tell me they're Taiwanese scammers... :) ).

They're not bots, either. I just reply with funny pictures.

I've been getting a LOT of emails about my Apple ID being logged into an iPhone X from Indonesia, when I don't even have one. I also keep getting texts saying your twitter account was locked when I don't have a twitter account either.

rip

I've been getting a ton of spam texts, almost daily over the last 3 months. It's a mix of housing speculators, political donation requests, and sex stuff.

I get heaps more marketing emails than usual and many read like the products of a GPT-3 type system. They probably are.

AI generated “personalized” spam is probably hard to filter.

Not really.

Fastmail. Unique emails for businesses, a personal email that was leaked a while back, and a gmail with a somewhat common name that's about 18 years old.

Android.

Election spam text time in the USA

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