• IninewCrow
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    1 day ago

    Never answer suspicious calls or texts … delete them immediately and don’t give any response. Any time I get things like this on SMS, social media, phone calls, whatever and I don’t know who or what they are, or they are automated or digitally created - I delete them immediately, block the contact and report them (if you have this option) as quickly as possible.

    By answering them and replying … you’ve just confirmed to them or the bot that you are a real phone number, you are human and that you respond to texts.

    You’ll probably be getting more texts and calls in the future.

    You didn’t play the spam text bot … the spam text bot played you.

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I have a friend who at least used to answer calls from unknown numbers “hello, this is [their full name].” When I questioned them about it, they said something like “I don’t think my identity is valuable enough to hide anything.”

      Even back then, when I was far less informed, I was taken aback by that.

      • IninewCrow
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        1 day ago

        His identity wasn’t valuable before but it is now … to someone else but not him

        I used to be kind of indifferent to all this stuff a long time ago but I’m not any more. I’ve had weird stuff happen to my credit card, email, social media accounts that I know my identity, as boring and simple as it might be, is valuable … it’s valuable to me.