Hearing Americans regularly complain about SMS and robocall spam still blows my European mind. I haven't received a single spam call or SMS in my life, ever.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s the worst that could happen was, say, texting a commercial number to get a polyphone ringtone, and that actually being a subscription. But obviously that is something you have to initiate first, not something passive.
I live in Germany and I get a lot of spam calls and spam SMS. It's always in waves. Some days I stop answering calls if I don't recognise the number, because its one of these days where Interpol has informwd me already three times that my identity was stolen and I have to give them all my details to fix this ..... They're very patient at Interpol, I keep hanging up on them and they never give up.
When I have a spammer/scammer on the phone (and I actually picked up), I usually just put my phone on mute and stop talking to them. They waste a bit more time that way before they hang up (without more effort from me).
I, in Australia, had never received a spam call or SMS, until two years ago. I now receive several per day. All automatically blocked, but still.
My number was leaked in a particular data breach that actually had nothing to do with me, but a different family member who had all of their contacts vacuumed up before the breach. So from my perspective it was passive.
in india its pretty common for businesses/ orgs to sell number data in bulk which is bought by advetisers.
you can be sure to be bombarded with calls and sms if a students applies for a notify thing or gives their number somewhere outside exam halls or on student help websites.
same for shops asking for mobile numbers.
then there are marketers who randomly call each number, send sms to see what sticks.
the situation is pretty bad i would say because for every careful person who sees through the ruse, there are hundreds who fall for million dollar prizes and kyc scams and all.
people call you and say "we are form bank. main branch. you need to verify your debit card or your account will close". no name of bank, no place of branch, just "from bank. main branch".
If you have your number up on the net somewhere, you will recieve calls. For example that domain registration you did 30 years ago that required a phone number... I got myself a smartphone for the reason I could easily block out of country phonecalls. I haven't had any recent spam calls though, was many years since the last one.
Here in Singapore SMS and phone spam comes and goes.
At the moment it's pretty bad with lots of calls from overseas. (People with hilariously un-local accents trying to tell you they are calling from the Ministry of Health of Ministry of Manpower...)
Those overseas callers are faking caller id to look like local numbers.
I read about it on HN some months ago. I don’t recall if it was in comments or an article. But I read the info and sources and was convinced enough at the time. I’m sorry I didn’t save the original info. I’ll try some googling “geolocation from SMS” and see what I can find.
That’s not what I’m talking about. And since number portability and mobile devices became possible, area codes are mostly irrelevant. For example, I’ve lived 2000 miles from the area code of my phone number for probably 10 years now.
Greek here, mobile phones are non-geographic but used to be service provider specific, but even this practice isn't applicable due to number portability.
Landlines used to be geographic but this isn't relevant any more again new to number portability.
I read about it on HN some months ago. I don’t recall if it was in comments or an article. But I read the info and sources and was convinced enough at the time. I’m sorry I didn’t save the original info. I’ll try some googling “geolocation from SMS” and see what I can find.
