I’ve been getting quite a bit of text message spam lately. Strange messages show up on my cell phone telling me how to get my horoscope or how to make $100/day by being an undercover shopper. How do you stop it?
You could do what the messages say and reply “STOP” or “NO” to the message. This goes against the common knowledge that you shouldn’t reply to email spam. The idea being that you’ve just told them that the email address that they have is indeed a good address. This seems only logical for text spam as well. And, while email spam doesn’t cost you anything, except time, the text message does cost you money out-of-pocket.
A quick search on the Internets found the article below by David Pogue of the New York Times. Here’s what he found out for AT&T, my carrier:
AT&T: Log in at mymessages.wireless.att.com. Under Preferences, you’ll see the text-blocking and alias options. Here’s also where you can block messages from specific e-mail addresses or Web sites.
Funny that when I called AT&T that they didn’t give me this information. They said there was nothing that I could do to stop the messages. The article is from three years ago, but for AT&T the instruction were still correct. We’ll see if the messages stop, but at least I’ve been proactive about stopping it.
