I live in the US and we've got elections coming up. Every day for the past several months, I get 3-8 text messages from political campaigns per day. I block them every time, yet they keep coming in.

My question is NOT how to stop them, but what happens to those numbers that I, and surely hundreds and maybe thousands of other people have blocked? What if an actual person gets that phone number and needs to call people? What happens then?

Because on a long enough time line, all numbers will have been used for spam.

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[–] 20 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I once received a spam call from my own number. They spoofed my own phone number to call me.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

    Soon with AI it could be your voice on the other end of the line too. Or Grandma's. Or your Proctologist.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Imagine if your email client let you just free-form type in the "From:" field. (off-topic knowledge: There used to be email clients that would do that)

    That's sort of how caller ID works if you control the call.

    In fact, just like an email is just a text file that you don't see (unless you view the source), caller ID is similar. It's all based on trust. There's no good current way to verify that stuff, so........ some spammers, instead of spoofing some random number for a while, will spoof each number they call as also the caller.

    The most annoying version of this I've seen is calls coming in purporting to be from the number "1". Just one. lol.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    There still are email clients that allow setting the from: field, in fact there's nothing in the base mailing protocol stopping you from doing so. However there are validation layers on top now that block such shenanigans.

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