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This is fun, but from what I understood, the purpose of those random sms is to "warm up the number", so the best course of action is to either ignore them or reply STOP.

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You should report them as spam, because they are. There are now regulations against this in the US.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/01/26/2023-28...

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-recognize-and-report-s...

Ah, yes, regulations. Those don't seem to have been written with me in mind, since I still get spam.

I like how one of those was called the CAN-SPAM act. Others have been similar.

Interesting but in the EU spam calls/sms seem to have gone down over 99.99% after GDPR. Some huge fines at the beginning helped

The first step is missing though. We need a caller ID for every call and text that shows who is actually calling / paying for the call. One option I think is to allow people to opt into a new phone call protocol that automatically rejects all calls and texts that are not in this new protocol where caller ID / texter ID contains the entire information.

Slowly, as more people opt into it, we can make it opt out, and then get rid of the old protocol completely. If some countries don't want to adopt the new protocol, well tough luck at that point but I think it is fundamental for us to be able to trust caller ID before we can do anything else.

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