It's like email. If you press unsubscribe you just confirm the email is valid. If you send STOP back you just confirm there's a human reading the messages at that number.
Besides, this seems to be an US only thing so it will only work for law abiding US based spammers^H^H^Hdirect marketers. Not for spammers outside the US, US based spammers that don't care about the law or scam/phishing messages.
It kinda depends on which platform handles their bulk messages. For example, if they are messaging you through Twilio, replying with "STOP" will cause Twilio itself to opt you out of messages (https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-fo...), and the sender can't disable that (https://help.twilio.com/articles/360034798533-Getting-Starte...). It's kinda like how Mailchimp handles unsubscriptions for recipients, no matter what the sender wants.
However, if they're using some other carrier or rolling their own VOIP setup, etc., or sending from a toll-free number instead of a shortcode, there's no guarantee that their particular platform will honor STOP. And there's no way for you, as a recipient, to know which is which.
Generally I will reply STOP if it's something I know I signed up for but no longer want. Things I never signed up for just get reported as spam and I don't reply.
Speaking mostly for the US here.
The STOP keyword is mandated as unsubscribe at the carrier level (Verizon, ATT, TMo) not just the vendor level. So if you reply STOP, it's very likely that you will not receive another message from that number.
This will be true for any programmatic SMS vendor. There could be smaller scale & more manual approaches, but that would be rare.
There has been a big effort in the last year+ to clean up the space and require consent before any SMS is sent.
FWIW, somewhat surprisingly, my google pixel has an amazing spam filter for SMS and I rarely get SMS that I don't want.
What I want to know is, what's the purpose of those random texts that just say something like, "How's it been?" from a number that I've never communicated with? What's the angle there? Anyone know?
> What I want to know is, what's the purpose of those random texts that just say something like, "How's it been?" from a number that I've never communicated with? What's the angle there? Anyone know?
My understanding is that they will pretend it's a wrong number, but then make a joke or talk about some innocuous hobby and try to build up trust over weeks/months to eventually phish or scam you. I forget where I read it (maybe reddit?) but there was a poster who mentioned a personal experience with one such scam, basically a fake romance scam that led to them losing tens of thousands of dollars wiring money to a fake person who pretended to have fallen in love with them over weeks of back and forth texting.
It doesn't have to work on everyone to be profitable, just the once-in-a-while lonely pensioner!
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/05/why-its-not...
John Oliver explained it (Pig Butchering) very well: https://youtu.be/pLPpl2ISKTg?si=yHwqzMX0r2h4mKl-
Thanks... that seems really labor intensive.
It's done with slave labor.
It's called pig butchering. You kidnap people, hold them in Cambodia or whatever (lots of locations where local criminal gangs rule) so the locals don't bother checking for literally kidnapped slaves.
If police stop by, pay them off and make up a story about debts and punishment.
Then you use the slaves to scam others in pig butchering scams. If the slaves refuse, you beat them until they comply.
https://www.propublica.org/article/pig-butchering-scams-raid...
So reply asking if they want you to notify authorities in their city. I doubt that the kidnappers are reading every message. And even if they are, better to let the kidnappers know that they are being encroached upon.
Btw this is also used as a sob-story tactic by the scammers if you eventually call them out after some time.
Thanks! That's a much better link and explanation than what I linked to.
Labor is dirt cheap in some parts of the world, especially compared to the tens of thousands of dollars American retirees might have access to!
I've been getting presidential political messages, each from a different number.
wonder if STOP will work for only the same number, or globally.
I also know political messages have lots of loopholes, thanks to the politicians who create the laws.
Tell that to Rite-Aid. These jagoffs spam the crap out of people, even after you say STOP as they instruct: https://imgur.com/gallery/if-youre-too-dumb-to-follow-own-in...
Isn’t it case sensitive? At least I always assumed it was.
For short codes in the USA, it technically does not have to be. And in fact businesses have to regularly check for requests even like "please don't send me messages" to be compliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg
It's well worth the watch, but tl;dr: it's a long-con scam. They invest as long as it takes to establish a relationship with you, and then engage you to do something (crypto mostly, apparently) involving cash online. They will say they made a bunch of money, and point you at the super-easy online exchange they used. You buy the crypto, you see the crypto increase in value (because it has in the real world) so you buy more, and more and more.
The problems start when you say you want to cash out. They switch from "buy more, it's going up" to "there are fees to withdraw, just deposit another <whatever> and then you'll get the withdrawal amount plus <whatever>" and of course no money ever comes out.
Oliver interviews people who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars this way, some of whom still believe that if they just toss in another <whatever> it will all be resolved and they'll get their money back. It's very sad, and I'm not doing the video justice.
Yes, can confirm about the Pixel. I occasionally check my spam folder and it's always just spam, which I otherwise never get. So either no or rarely false positives or negatives.
Also on a side note, the scams are really horrific. Although obviously scams I can imagine especially the older people getting tricked with "hello grandad here's my new number". Makes me wonder what I'll be getting tricked with when I am old.
Twilio is sort of a dream for spammers, they'll just make new accounts on it and spam campaigns on those new accounts. Political organizations do it all the time, if you get on a list you're never getting off. Lookup the numbers sending to you (Twilio's own lookup tool works great for this) and it almost always comes back Twilio/Zipwhip.
I only recommend responding STOP to short codes since there's more investment and vetting on getting a short code. Carriers will intercept the request for TFN/local numbers sometimes but I don't really trust it. These numbers are all going to be spammers buying pools of numbers to churn and burn. They'll just import their list into a new account if it unsubs.
Oh and btw, it's actually easier now as a spammer to tell when numbers get burned. A few years back when the CTIA handover on regs happened (and sending costs went up) the carriers finally started to respond with the delivery status of the sent messages. Before this they didn't respond and you only knew your provider delivered the messages to the carrier, not whether the carrier delivered them to the handset.
You can check if a number is using Twilio via a special number: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/lookup-phone-carrier-recor....
Or a site like https://www.freecarrierlookup.com/ which works for every number
A Golden Rule of the internet says that you should never reply to unwanted texts on any medium:
- stalkers and trolls live off reactions, both positive and negative ones
- spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side
- colleagues and friends will hate you because everybody thinks they're important
Replying only has negative effects. Use client-side filtering, kill files, blocking functions, or ignore the text - whichever fits best.
In Aus with Telstra there is a filter but they also recommend it, so they may enforce a block upon STOP?
"The SMS scam filter will not block unsolicited or unwanted commercial messages or ‘spam’. To unsubscribe to legitimate business spam or marketing SMS, you can reply STOP."
https://www.telstra.com.au/cyber-security-and-safety/active-...
In my experience it doesn't do much. For example, I made the mistake of contributing to the campaign of a politician. Now I get texts from candidates all over the country. If I reply STOP to one, I just get sent more texts from another number, for another candidate in another state. I just got tired of replying with STOP after the 20th time. This just guarantees I'm never giving any money to any candidate ever again.
In a previous election cycle, I made the mistake of donating a few thousand dollars to several candidates. Since then, I get spammed through the year, and close to a major election, it's dozens of emails and phone calls and text messages every week.
Thankfully, Gmail catches 99% of the spam emails and my Pixel phone filters out spam texts and calls. It has a built-in Google Assistant mode that screens unknown callers with a robot voice picking up and asking them to describe what they're calling about. Most of the callers just hang up as soon as they hear that, and if they don't and actually say they're calling about so-and-so candidate, I just click the block button.
I tried to switch to iPhone for a few weeks (for iMessage), but the spam problem was SO bad (even with Robocaller and some SMS spam filtering app) that I switched back to Android. Google's spam blocking is phenomenal on the Pixel, but they barely even advertise it. It's an afterthought for them, but a lifesaver for me. My phone would be completely unusable without it.
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In the back of my mind, I keep thinking it'd be cool to have an app that automatically looks up whoever the candidate is running against and automatically donating 10 cents (or however much) to their opponent every time they spam you. "Hi, it sounds like you're running in District _____ against ______. Because of this spam, I've donated 10 cents to your opponent. So far, this app has donated $1,234 to your opponent because of your messages. Goodbye!"
Our government is so corrupt and broken they're never going to fix any of this, so it's up to the technologists and market incentives instead...
Why is it necessary to give them your number if you do a donation? It seems many here have the same negative experiences.
Is it an optional field? If not one could practically enter any digits or can one get punished for that?
I donated $20 in 2016 and have regretted it ever since.
In the 2020 election cycle it seemed some of the texts had people behind them, so I’d reply and told them if they kept texting me I’d vote for the opponent out of pure spite. That was actually quite effective, but did have to say it to a half dozen people.
This time around, I keep getting texts asking for $40. Most I report as spam, others I say stop. But it seems these lists are distributed out far and wide, so removing the name from one, or 10, doesn’t do much.
Like you, I will never again donate to a politician and will encourage everyone else to save their money. No one should pay money to be harassed. I’m not sure how they think this is a good idea or will win people over.
I wish anyone from actblue would see this.
I gave a few small donations and foolishly didn’t use a disposable email address. That was over four years ago and I’m still getting over a dozen spam emails a day from candidates I have never even heard of.
Maybe there is some central actblue list I can opt out of but I don’t even think I created an account with them
Never donated a penny since
Your campaign donations are a matter of public record and Actblue harvests them and repackages them to sell to political campaigns and operatives. It's a shitty business model that preys upon an unfortunate part of federal law that most donors don't know about.
Everyone shares lists.
I have a politics label in gmail that is blue/red from 2012 onwards. All the GOP emails are from poking around Romney 2012, and nothing else.
I'd say you'd be surprised on the reuse, but you shouldn't be.
It's not just the re-use and sharing of lists, but also the incredible Facebook-style targeting available to anyone for spamming. Anyone can sign up for something like ActionNetwork.org or NationBuilder and send out an email blast to registered voters in a particular zip code. NGP VAN is even more powerful.
The whole industry is mature and super targeted like any other spammer, but mostly immune to spam regulations (because politics are specifically exempt from CAN-SPAM etc., and most voter registration and donation data is public record). The whole pipeline is thoroughly automated and you're marketed and remarketed to just like you are with Google or Amazon, but without any of the already-minimal consumer and privacy protections.
I had some woman use my email (I have an OG mac.com email), when donating to her local ASPCA.
They sold it to a liberal political group, who then sold it to an extreme liberal group.
I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of spam emails, every day, with the most batshit insane messages. It’s especially bad, now, with the US election coming up. The one saving grace, is that it wasn’t a right-wing group. They make the ultra-liberals look like a bunch of teetotalers.
Since she used the iCloud.com variant of the address, I simply nuke all emails that specify that, as a destination. Apple won’t let me block the domain, so I have to apply the rules, after they fill my inbox.
Sometime in there, one of the spammers figured out that icloud.com will also receive iMessage texts, so they have started coming to that, as well (so far, it is from legit political groups. I don’t expect that to last). I delete and report as junk. I very rarely respond with STOP.
I've been interested in donating before, but this is actually the main thing holding me back. I get so little spam and unwanted messages (email and text), and I am trying extremely hard to keep it that way.
So thanks for validating my decision :)
Use a email alias service like simple login, duck duck go’s private duck address etc You can disable that email alias and never receive emails sent to that address again
I wish we had something similar for phone numbers
It’s not worth it. Politicians have shown they can’t be trusted with our contact info. No one should be jumping through hoops to hide their identity to donate money.
Maybe if donations go to 0 they’ll finally get the message that citizens don’t want to be harassed for donations.
This is in no way enough to prevent election spam.
You have to give your name and address as a public record, and they will likely find your phone number and email and will call, text, and spam you from there.
Same happened to me, I replied saying I'd vote for Trump if I got another message ... never heard from them again ;)
Ha! Worked for me, too. Heck it’s a minor request from a future president ready to run a country. Next week though “Hi I am Tim. I need that $40”. Well played, I only made the deal with Kamala, after all, ;-)
Note that US law has carve outs for politicians and their campaigns. They are exempt on both email and phone spam as I recall.
These people are terrorists to my email filters, what can I do to make their behavior really hurt?
Nothing legal.
Carriers in the US will block further texts from the number. The problem is it’s easy to get more numbers to spam from. This unfortunately makes it super hard for legit businesses to send transactional texts. (And Google is leading the charge in marketing ‘new features’ as a ‘transactional’ emails and push notifications)
The undeniable way to stop spam texts is to litigate. You’re put onto special lists at “number reputation” “data brokers” and the texts magically stop.
At up to $1500/violation, there are a lot of lawyers out there willing to help out with this.
> The undeniable way to stop spam texts is to litigate
People here are saying that doesn't work on political orgs, does it?
Phone numbers and emails are bought and sold. Some entities sell premium lists filtered by unresponsive numbers. Texting "STOP" or answering calls can signal activity and lead to more spam.
Enable "Do Not Disturb" or its equivalent with your provider to make contacting you costlier and reduce spam. Then, manually block every number that contacts you.
I'm receiving email spam for my business ("Nice product! What does your Go-To-Market strategy look like? ..."), and they often include 'if you don't want more emails from me, just reply "remove me."'. I assume this is either to create a sunk cost, to validate that the email address works, or to avoid me hitting the Report spam button in GMail.
The fact that I'm not replying even after your second attempt should be a strong indicator that I want you to remove me. If you send me three mails, I'll mark your email as spam and block you.
I don't even click unsubscribe links anymore, I just CC straight to my government's spam complaint line and report how my contact information has been misappropriated if I actually provided it, or accuse them of acquiring it without my consent too.
I have a related question regarding snail mail: when I lived in the US, Utah in particular, I used to get tons and tons of ad leaflets on my mail; so much that it was hard just sorting out the trash (and not throwing a bill away, which I did twice). Is there a way to tell the postal service to stop this? The volume was insane.
Well, there is a certain loophole whereby you can inform your postmaster that the materials you've received are immoral, pornographic, and offensive to you, and then they're required to filter it out. But that gambit may not work for you.
You could also do what I do: go paperless for everything and then you'll never receive legit mail again. Tip all the rest into the rubbish bin!
No. Reacting to any unwanted contact just moves you further into their funnel. Ideally don’t even open the text.
How does one “open a text”?
How does one “open an email”
Same thing
Your messaging client may helpfully request the url they sent you to show a url preview.
In an email, your client renders the html including img tags (yes, this can be disabled, and may not even be default for most people anymore; it’s still a thing)
Depends on the platform, but generally speaking it requires taking whatever action changes its status from "unread" to "read." But even then, there has been at least one case of iOS malware that infected the system upon delivery of a text (since BlastDoor parsed the payload upon receipt, IIRC). That's one reason why Lockdown Mode rejects any text from unknown numbers.
Text messages don't have an "open" action. Replying STOP will unsubscribe the recipient from future SMS from this number. I have never seen an organization use an unsubscribe as a positive action in their funnel. There are less expensive and less risky ways to confirm that a phone number is valid for sure.
I reply STOP (or whatever the capitalization is that the text asks for) to every political spam text I get that says "STOP to unsubscribe" or some such. I've been doing this for years.
I got 7 political spam texts today. I don't think the STOP is working.
Not really true, if you have an iPhone, at least. URL previews are loaded on message open. A network request to the url they sent you. They know when you opened it
Unless the behavior has changed (maybe it has)?
It used to be, on some mail readers, that "opening" an email message could unleash Pandora's Box, in terms of interpreting HTML, downloading images, attachments or whatever. I sincerely doubt that is even the case for the major providers such as Outlook or Gmail. And yeah, per comments downthread, my Android Messages app has "read/unread" and that's really the only thing that "opening a text" changes. There's no additional execution or activation like opening or executing a file.
Does RCS remove the read receipt?
Back in the day, some systems used to acknowledge the request for a read receipt by default giving them the ability to determine if a number was actively watched.
Hopefully everything has it disabled by default these days.
If it's from an org that I've donated to or company sure. But if it's just a random scam text, no.
I think it depends on the carrier. With Verizon, replying STOP seems to block the number. But I only do that with political texts (I get a lot of them). For phishing I just delete/report junk.
If you are in the US, reply STOP. Carriers will enforce that. If you are outside the US and don't live in a place where carriers are legally obligated to enforce that keyword don't send anything. It will let them know they found a human.
I don’t reply, and report junk and block any number that sends me what appears to be an automated text that I wasn’t expecting. I do the same with emails subscriptions that I didn’t knowingly subscribe to.
If anyone legitimate gets caught up in that, I’m not sorry, blame the spammers for ruining it for everyone.
> If anyone legitimate gets caught up in that, I’m not sorry, blame the spammers for ruining it for everyone.
This is what I really hate about the pig butchering scams. They start out like a wrong number text, and don’t even get into the scam. From what I understand it takes them months as they build a relationship. Now when there are legitimate wrong numbers from people making mistakes, people are likely to ignore it or report it as spam, and the person never knows they didn’t reach their friend.
I do the same. If I agreed to subscribe, I’ll click the link. If I didn’t, I report it as spam. If Gmail offers me to unsubscribe, I will not do that and will still go ahead and report as spam. I’ll also do this if a third party has has registered with my email with the service without my consent, since they should have verified it before spamming it, so they still deserve the lost sender reputation.
It pisses me off that Outlook no longer allows you to report something as spam anymore without also sending an unsubscribe. Because I do feel uncertainty of how that signal could be used.
First off, add yourself to the FCC's do not call list: https://www.donotcall.gov/
Once you've done that, they have 31 days to comply. There's plenty of legal entities that still will call you. If you answer, be polite, play the dope a bit to get the necessary unfortunately, ask how they got the number, then request a manager (yes, they have one, they will tell you they don't. Be polite but insist). When you get the manager politely ask for the company details, then tell them to immediately remove you from their list. Their business can be shut down for violations so once they know you know, they take you seriously (FCC takes reports more seriously when more detailed). They'll probably hang up on you, this is okay. Report them anyways (do this legal or not. They can get their voip removed and whatever shell they're using. It's still annoying for them and they might remove you because you're not worth it)
Second, don't answer phone calls. It is a practice to call, listen for a voice, then log that number as active.
Text messages are more difficult. It depends on the service but you can probably text stop. The difficulty of blocking is that legit services will use the same number to text you verification codes (can we fucking kill sms 2FA‽)
You can also sign up for a relay service (I use Firefox, but use whatever). I do this for email and every website has a unique email. Things like + for Gmail don't work and are filtered. You can also do this for phone numbers but it's more expensive.
Fourth, aggressively unsubscribe, report to FCC, change settings on devices, and so on. Do this for your non-tech savvy friends and family. Get them to use services like signal that are privacy preserving, don't leak metadata, AND is easy enough Grandma can use. Install ublock origin into their browsers and some other privacy preserving stuff and edit settings. Get them to use Firefox instead of Chrome if you can.
You need to do this to others because they will leak your information (most of my information leak comes from my parents. I even get emails in their names...)
If you want to take a step further, get a scrubbing service like optery. There's a lot of shady shit so be careful who you pick.
Edit: you can do a similar thing for mail. There is a $5 processing fee. Sucks, but sadly it's junk mail that keeps the post office alive (do not put "return to sender" unless it's prepaid. You need to give a reason otherwise your postal worker is just being nice and throwing it away for you. Don't create more work for them)
The FCC is defunct. I've been on the list for eons. Reporting is, AFAICT, a huge waste of time, and doesn't seem to change anything.
You can play wack-a-mole with uBlock, but it's wack-a-mole, and poor bandaid over our government agencies not doing the job they're supposed to be doing. You'll never get them all; AFAICT recently, my own state government sold my information to private corporations.
>The FCC is defunct.
Probably should add some context. Some bad SCOTUS rulings basically handed nearly all text message regulation to the telecom companies themselves (through the CTIA). They don't really care too much about spam if you pay them enough to do it and don't get extremely high reporting rates (especially with short codes, they will filter/blacklist toll free numbers and local numbers if you hammer carriers enough).
DNC list has been successful for me.
> You can play wack-a-mole with uBlock, but it's wack-a-mole, and poor bandaid over our government agencies not doing the job
You can feel ok about replying STOP to text messages from shortcodes. It's not impossible, but it would be an extremely bad process for an organization to have their OTP and their marketing messages (let alone spammy stuff) on the same short code.
There are short codes that are dedicated to OTP. Replying STOP to this number should not affect the ability for you to receive OTP for a different company login.
If you're an engineer for Google or Apple the best thing you could do is build into an easy way for users to report to the FCC. It's a routine forum, no ML needed but hey, pitch it if you need that to get this shit done.
If you work somewhere that is spamming and enshitified, the way to convince your boss is to show them that their domains are being blocked and that leads to less money. That's the language they understand. They don't understand metrics (that's how we got here in the first place. So don't get technical!)
The Do Not Call list does nothing for SMS or anything but voice calls. The Do Not Call list only prevents legitimate companies which are cold-calling you. Do Not Call cannot prevent the scams or criminals, and it cannot prevent anyone who has already established an "existing business relationship" including political campaigns and non-profit fundraisers. I've been on DNC for decades and, thankfully I do not receive many bad calls at all, but it's difficult to say how much to attribute to DNC itself.
I receive, however, a fair measure of suspicious SMS, real-estate scams, political campaigns both legit and sus, and some pretty slick "USPS shipping" RCS phishing messages.
Now my Pixel Pro has a lot of spam protections and I need to leave them all completely disabled, because I routinely need to answer inbound voice calls from sketchy numbers, time-sensitive, because they could be a delivery driver or a taxi service. I just never know. The app does tag known spammer numbers, which sometimes turn out legit after all?
I consider SMS the worst mode of communication bar-none. It's locked to a single device with a single SIM. They can't be categorized, organized, tagged, forwarded, managed en masse, exported, or anything. To me it's a single-stream jumble of electronic jerks demanding my immediate attention and reactions over a most impersonal medium. I likewise disdain voice calls in many cases, so don't get me started.
disable notifications for unknown senders - ios has this hidden deep under notifications setting
Don’t reply - that can be used to confirm your number is real. That info is used and resold to spam you even more. Also the STOP keyword works only on some source phone numbers technically.
In the US you can report the spam texts by forwarding the message to 7726 (“SPAM” on your keypad) at which point your carrier will text you back and ask for the source number. This doesn’t report the message to the government agencies but just your carrier, so they can hopefully punish the platforms sending spam.
Use a site like https://www.freecarrierlookup.com/ to see which carrier or platform sent it, which is useful for the next step of reporting offenders.
Now report the incident at the FTC and FCC websites. Do this every single time so it eventually creates difficulties for the platforms enabling this. Mention the carrier or platform carrying the spam. Put in all the details correctly.
https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new
If it is an iMessage you should use the built in “report junk” feature.
You can also go to the website of the platform that carried the message to report things through their abuse reporting pages, but not all of them are diligent. Some are happy taking money from spammers to abuse you, and will make you keep reporting each phone number that spams you because they do nothing about it except block that one number from contacting you. They won’t fix the underlying root cause of why they have all these illegal abusers as customers.
My personal experience is that the vast majority of text spam comes from a few offending text messaging platforms - for example Sinch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinch_AB) and Bandwidth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_Inc.) for example. These are potentially seemingly commercial platforms for spammers. Note that Sinch owns Mailgun and Mailjet too and has a long documented history of legal trouble due to spamming. Businesses should avoid using these platforms because their own reputation and delivery will be affected by being mixed with spammers.
Great that there is a 'procedure' to follow, how can this be automated? Spammers are using automation too right?
Just want to add that 7726 works in the UK too.
I never respond to any unsolicited message or call. If enough people block them and mark them as spam eventually the algorithm will mark them as spam and stop sending them out all together.
You can’t mark them as spam easily. The phones don’t have built in features for that. You have to go through a bunch of manual steps that Apple and Google should really make a one click process. See my other comment here:
What does the “Report Junk” button do then on iOS in Messages app? I use that for unknown spam sms, and was under the impression that it sends it to Apple and/or my carrier for processing / feeding some ML classification funnnel.
Must be phone specific. I have a (not so fancy) Android phone and I've never gotten a call or a text that I couldn't block and mark as spam in a single step.
Replying STOP sends a clear signal that this number is being used by a real person.
There are cheaper and less risky ways to understand if a number is valid. STOP will legitimately unsubscribe the recipient from messages from this phone number.
There aren’t more reliable ways to know if the number is valid and actively used. Relying means that number will receive spam from many other numbers later.
I approach texts and emails the same way as web servers and simply not respond.
STOP/HTTP 403/unsubscribe all tell the other end that the address has something there. You’ll end up just reinforcing your place on a list of phone numbers to pass around.
No, never interact with spammers/scammers, you'll just be feeding them with more info about you
Never use SMS for anything other than the automatic notifications, so I really don't care in the first place.
Replying STOP means you are a real person who doesn't ignore texts from unknown senders, which means you will only receive more spam.