Ask HN: Can we talk about bot texts in 2025? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we talk about bot texts in 2025?

2 pointsgrimgrin3 comments

Lately I've been getting fairly "sophisticated" texts that don't break script but are clearly bots. It starts very innocent, they've texted the wrong person. You correct, they thank you, and it might be an hour or more later but it'll reply again, complimenting your kindness or whatever. I find this delay to be a nice deceiving technique

Today I'm dealing with one that is using iOS with read receipts, I ain't seen that before. Asked if I could send them money: "Haha, I don't need your money."

what is going on, long-game botting? I haven't seen the iOS angle before today, either

People are absolutely _COOKED_ unless equipped with healthy suspicion

View on HN

Never engage, delete as spam, block, move on.

> People are absolutely _COOKED_ unless equipped with healthy suspicion

Chinese Criminals Made More Than $1 Billion From Those Annoying Texts - https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/url-scam-texts-china-... | https://archive.today/brqTS - October 14th, 2025

HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Ftech%2...

thanks for the links, +1, and naturally good advice in general

personally I will engage when I'm curious about the angle. today's lesson is you can send a jpg that entirely disrupts/ends the script. they called me a slur and ended there, almost making you doubt the bot at all. interesting, that's why i can't help myself at times

Fraud messages are all over most social platforms that have DMs. I post photos and news links to: Tumblr, Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Threads and Nextdoor —- in order of worst to best. I get plenty of people who say they want to buy NFTs of my photos or who are attractive women who hold out the promise of romance, etc.

A friend of mine came across money for the first time in his life because he got evicted illegally from a homeless shelter and he has a person who sends texts like ‘I am at your local airport and need money for a cab to come see you’. Fortunately he had a friend who convinced him to go the airport in a cab himself where he found no sign of this person. We are all trying to wake this person up to the fact that they’re being targeted but it’s very hard to convince a person who is infatuated that their infatuation is wrong.

It starts out with something really innocent like ‘hey!’ but they will soon ask you question to qualify you like ‘how old are you!’ And ‘where do you live?’

See https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scam-inc-from-the-econ...

(Note I get a lot of crude promotional stuff that somebody drew with a crayon in LinkedIn but no scams, same with NextDoor)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com