Getting SMS text slammed

My next political SMS SPAM will be my first.
This is mostly because the 'smart' part of my phone is still outside of the glass screen part.

About 150 years ago, when phones were still owned by Ma Bell, I was foolish enough to answer a solicitation addressed to 'Or Resident.'
It was from St Jude Hospital - and really.....who doesn't love kids, right?
I wrote them a check for $5 - which would ultimately cost THEM hundreds of dollars over the next decade or so in unanswered and increasingly strident pleas for more money.

Painful lessons make for lasting memories.

I still give money to charities and we tithe to our local church.
I just do it smarter these days.
Having a CFO that is wiser than me helps me avoid foolish financial decisions.
An old and very famous 'how-to' book contains a chapter written by a guy named Matt who showed me how to avoid toxic relationships with 'money changers.'

"....But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly...."

 

Um....yeah.
Right.
Simple......

Right after we noodle out cold fission and fix Gaza.

BT Dubbs.....
I get virtually NO junk mail addressed to me personally by using the same philosophy that I apply to spam callers.
As it turns out, it costs about $0.30 USD to send something thru our postal system.
Even in the current horrible US economy, $0.30 isn't $0.00 - although the current crop of morons in DC are trying their best!

Businesses do not spend > $0.00 USD to send out mail to people like me - who use it for landfill fodder.

 

We get spam email - yahoo mail does a good job of filtering it and sending it to the spam folder.

One thing I noticed about this spam email is the companies that send it to me have no phone number or email listed.

My impression they know they are irritating the hell out of the recipients of this spam and don't want the feedback they would get if they provided contact methods.

The two culprits in our neck of the woods that are the worst offenders are : Life Line Screening and Anderson Windows.

For us their spam emails would be counterproductive - because of them I would not do business with either company - I don't see how theses spam emails are productive but they must be.

 

If the senders are legitimate businesses seeking your business, they have more of an incentive to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, which requires them to include certain information and an opt-out method in each email (at a potential cost to them for noncompliance of $51,744 per email).

The senders that are clearly paying no attention to the Act are clearly not legitimate; they may not even legitimately own the addresses they are sending from, and they may have some other purpose in mind for spamming you, such as just to find out whether your address goes to a working account that somebody reads (which increases the amount they can sell your address for).

 

i get fake bills from paypal saying i've been charged for renewing my norton anti virus software

 

I still use PP occasionally when it's convenient and my purchases do not conflict with their 'values' but I'm not sure that I've ever gotten a 'bill' from them. They sent me statements perhaps which are valueless to me since PayPal is just a payment service.
I maintain no balance with them - and they get sucked into my spam folder.

I get SMS messages from my CU and the Apples whenever a transaction occurs.
Like others, I do get the occasional SMS message from an unknown sender occasionally but these are deleted unread and I have found that if you do not open them, you get a lot fewer of them.

Being something of a 'mudge probably doesn't hurt.

 

when i purchase something using paypal, i get an 'invoice' or 'statement' right away showing the vendor and amount.
later, i get a charge on my cc. the spam emails look authentic, but are just click bait for virus or something.

 

I recently received my first of that very item, via a legacy email long known to the spam community. Its purported sender email, and all its URLs, were just wrong. Likewise for the large paragraph of totally irrelevant text included at the bottom to get through certain spam filters.

 

The Google Messages app identifies and blocks spam.