How to get rid of SMS spam forever

Every day, almost a third of Americans 29 percent receive spam with annoying ads. Another 24 percent get it a few times a week, 17 percent get it once a month. Spam most often refers to banking and medical services 73 and 34 percent , as well as communication services 35 percent . These are the results of the latest VCIOM survey. Eliminate spam as a phenomenon can not. But you can protect yourself from it personally with the recommendations of experts from Roskachestvo.

According to part 1 of article 18 of the Federal Law of 13.03.2006 g. № 38-FZ “On Advertising” distribution of advertising over telecommunications networks, including telephone networks, in the absence of prior consent of the subscriber to receive advertising messages is not allowed. The ad distributor is responsible for this breach.

Texting can be perfectly legal. You may have “signed up” for it when you made a purchase, signed up for a discount card or service online, or even just registered on the site. Illegal mailing is the one you did not agree to. This means that your phone number was sold to spammers, and they included it in their database.

Legal lists imply the ability to unsubscribe at will. Go to a website or make a phone call to say you do not want to receive promotional messages. It is your right to refuse them, which the company cannot refuse by law, and one call or message on the website is usually enough to stop the ads from bothering you. Unsubscribing from an illegal mailing requires more effort.

Anton Kukanov, deputy head of Roskachevo:

“Don’t call back the number from which the text message came. It’s possible that your number has been obtained by swindlers, who are waiting for exactly that – a reply SMS or call, after which the service provider will automatically debit your money, or the attackers will try to extort them with the help of social engineering methods. Find the website or phone number of the company on whose behalf the mailing is taking place, contact it through official channels and demand that you be removed from the database. They are required to do so at your request.

If you can’t or won’t contact the person who’s doing the mailing, call your carrier’s hotline and ask them to unsubscribe you from all or part of the mailings that come to your number. There are also alternative – preventive – ways to combat it.

Sergei Kuzmenko, Senior Information Product Testing Specialist at Roskachevo Digital Expertise Center:

“At the moment, all Big Four operators have paid services to protect your number from SMS spam. As an alternative we can cite offers also commercial from major players in the IT market, such as Kaspersky Lab. But no anti-spam service guarantees to block a hundred percent of malicious content new numbers appear too quickly to instantly enter them into the database , so in any case the user will need to comply with anti-phishing rules. For example, you should not click on links in SMS from numbers you do not know or open seemingly empty messages.

Roskachevo also doesn’t recommend using free applications from Google Play that promise to protect your phone from SMS-spam. Although this category has not yet been tested for security, even the first indications are that free apps of this kind can pose a phishing threat to your phone.

You can hold spammers accountable with the help of authorized government agencies. Complaints can be filed to the Federal Antimonopoly Service, Roskomnadzor, or the prosecutor, and reference should be made to the Federal Law “On Communications” and the Federal Law “On Advertising”, which we mentioned at the very beginning. Violators will be fined for illegal messages, and you should, of course, be spared the intrusive messages.

Read more about how to do it, as well as tips for combating e-mail spam – here >