A Visible customer was recently the victim of what seems to be a misunderstanding of the company’s automated spam detection system. According to the user, after working with customer service to reactivate an account, the response from the company alleged that the deactivation was due to the account being flagged for excessive text messaging — or spam, as that is against the company’s terms and conditions.
However, there is one problem: the user states this wasn’t spam, but rather they were responding “STOP” to a barrage of unsolicited political messages. This situation has highlighted a potential conflict between automated spam detection systems and legitimate user responses, especially in the context of increasing political text messaging.
Hindsight is 20/20 but this could have been avoided by just not replying and blocking the number instead. Replying “STOP” just verifies that it’s a good phone number and that you’re reading their texts. Then they collect that information and sell it to other spammers.
Exactly what I do. Don’t respond and I just block and report.
I do the same for phone calls from unknown numbers. I just press the volume button to mute the ringer and let it time out. If you hang up or pickup you get added to the list as active.
Android has a feature where you can just ignore an incoming call. It doesn’t hang up it just stops playing the ringtone and goes back to the home screen.
Pretty sure that’s what happens when you hit the volume button
On iPhone it’s just pressing any of the volume buttons once. It will mute the ringer and let it go to voicemail.
Same on Android.
I’m pretty sure the US has a law that requires people to stop texting you after you send STOP. Additionally, service providers like Amazon will just remove subscriptions if they receive a STOP.
That would be really useful if the people behind these texts were subject to US laws.
Or STOP meant “stop,” not “yes daddy give me more texts”
Laws? What about them? We don’t follow laws here anymore.
Can’t remember ever hearing about spam calls being prosecuted. And judging by the volume I think its fair to assume they never are.
To be fair, we only selectively enforced them before. And now we selectively enforce… worse shit.
Yes but they’re all based in India so it doesn’t matter.
90% of mine are local.
Just because the number is local doesn’t mean the caller is. When you place a call from a computer as these people do then you can put whatever you want as the originating number(what shows up on caller id). They’re trying to change that but it’s not done. Heck, I’ve received a spam call from my number before.
Relevance?