I get a ton of spam texts, every day. Not quite as bad as the spoofed robocalls, and a mere shadow of the email spam I get (which suddenly exploded, so I guess they figured out how to get past the low-level gatekeepers).
The legit folks sell you to the non-legit folks, then say “I’m not responsible for what they do with it!”
I logged every call I made to them, during many of which they swore they'd stop it. Eventually they started claiming that they couldn't. I had to block AT&T's number on my phone.
How execrably stupid do they have to be to send "everything's fine" texts over and over and over instead of, at the very most, sending an E-MAIL?
I'm from a first world country in Europe and I can count the number of spam calls I got over the years on one hand (literally 2).
Same goes for spam texts (3).
For legal reasons my phone number could be found on the open web for years.
With a fairly wealthy population (by world standard) and a language spoken by ~100 million people there should be ample opportunities to spam people.
Yet even my parents whose number were listed in the phone book get maybe 1 or two spam calls per year
Amount of scam calls I've ever received can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. There was this time that scam texts (usually trying to impersonate either a bank or PostNL) were common, but I haven't received one in quite a while.
Most disturbing were the energy company salespeople that would actually ring the door, and somehow knew _exactly_ how large my consumption was.
GDPR outlawed large parts of that.
Having Android block or flag spam calls automatically was a godsend, even nontechnical people are looking into that feature now.
I do get three to four phonecalls from spoofed UK numbers every month. I havn't picked up for a year or so, but last time I did, it was a fake "Microsoft Support" scam.
Also stuff like credit stores not being as much of a thing meaning that there's not really a whole gamut of offerings. If everyone is offering roughly the same rates there's not much of a business for shopping around
Europe is rich, but you have to spam in 20 languages so you’ll make less money.
Because we loudly and openly tell everyone we are a very gullible people. It's all over the news, what with "stolen elections", etc.