The SMS messages come with increasing regularity, almost daily now. The Apple Messages app on my iPhone stays loaded up with text messages from Amazon, generally informing me that I’m a winner in the day’s product raffle. All I have to do is click a link within the text message — a message, by the …
If you feel like robocalls have picked up significantly in recent weeks, you are not imagining it. Citing data collected by YouMail over the last twelve months, CNN reports that Americans received more than 4.6 billion robocalls in February, which was a 15.1% increase over January despite the fact that February was three days shorter. …
The scourge of robocalls and spoofed numbers is bad as now as it’s ever been, but in recent weeks, the government and the private sector have both been taking the issue more seriously. In fact, US mobile carriers T-Mobile and AT&T revealed on Wednesday that they are teaming up to bring call cross-network call authentication …
In an effort to curb the recent epidemic of spam and robocalls, Verizon announced this week that it will be giving all of its customers free access to protection tools (which were previously behind a paywall) starting this March. As Joe Russo, senior vice president of network operations, explains, Verizon added call and spam screening to …
If you’ve ever answered a call to your cellphone that had an unfamiliar number but a local area code, making you wonder well maybe I ought to see who this is only to find out it’s a spam call, we have some bad news. That’s going to happen a lot more next year. A new …
Every year, phone scammers come up with new and creative ways to bilk individuals out of their hard-earned money. From calling up folks and pretending to be IRS agents to robocalling every permutation of phone number possible with promises of easy money, the variety of different phone scams seems to increase significantly with each passing year. …
It’s always frustrating when you receive a phone call from a strange number only to find out that it’s a robocall trying to sell you on the fact that you just won a cruise to the Caribbean. Even more problematic are the rash of even more egregious spam and fraud calls which now seem more …
One of the harsh realities of the web is that many sites profile their customers, and then sell that data to third parties. It’s not just Google, Facebook, or Amazon, which probably do it better than anyone else. For better or worse, it’s the way the web works, and there’s no fixing it anytime soon. …
An incredibly sinister new form of spam has infiltrated countless iPhones and iPads in recent weeks: fake iCloud calendar invites. Personally, I’ve been bombarded with fake invites for weeks, but many iOS users were confronted with the unfamiliar notifications for the first time over the holiday weekend.
Have you ever gotten a piece of spam that made it past your filter and thought to yourself, “I wonder what would happen if I actually replied to this?” British comedian James Veitch has made a routine out of replying to spammers and scammers in recent years and late last year he gave a TED Talk that …
