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Last month, AT&T announced an accomplishment that might seem as unlikely as a call to a customer-support line being answered with zero hold time: a sustained decrease in spam texts.
In a post headlined "??AT&T Text-Blocking Sets a Record," Matt Bailey, an assistant vice president for product management and development, wrote that “new and better network filters” blocked a record 1 billion-plus spam texts in July, and ever since “customers have collectively reported one-third fewer spam texts getting through to their phones.”
That post credited customers for using AT&T’s ActiveArmor security app for “ forwarding us much more suspected text spam” after AT&T eased that process about a year ago. (The company installs ActiveArmor on Android phones it sells; iPhone users can download it later.)
“This has helped us investigate and block similar spam messages and even take down malicious websites,” Bailey wrote in the post.
After I responded to an AT&T pitch highlighting this accomplishment with a lengthier version of “o rly?”, the Dallas telecom firm set up a call with product-technology director Derek Baylor. And yes, the people at AT&T do seem to think they’ve turned a corner.
“Now you’re not getting as much through, and that kind of dissuades the fraudsters,” he said, crediting AT&T customers for their help through ActiveArmor reports: “We take that information and try to block more spam for our customers.”
He suggested that the decline in spam-text volume that AT&T has seen will remain a little bumpy as scammers time pitches tied to such seasonal happenings as holiday shopping, tax filing deadlines, and health-insurance enrollment periods, saying, “Fraudsters are trying to game the time of year and fit in.”
Baylor didn’t say how many iOS customers had installed or used the app but did repeat a tip mentioned in that blog post: activating ActiveArmor’s option to block all email-to-text messages, an ancient workaround now widely abused by spammers.
He also said the efforts of the FCC to crack down on scam operators have helped too. For instance, it moved to require the STIR/SHAKEN authentication standard for calls and imposed death-penalty-equivalent disconnection orders for operators that ignore them.
“Yes, it has made a difference,” Baylor said.
AT&T’s two nationwide competitors don't have a comparable decrease in spam texts to show.
T-Mobile didn’t offer any numbers in a response while noting that the problem of phone scams “ebbs and flows as scammers work to find new ways to impact customers, especially during key seasonal moments like the holiday and tax seasons.”
Verizon, meanwhile, said it’s seen its volume of blocked messages increase by 10% since May, with 180,000 blocked messages alone following 14,000-plus customers opting to block email-to-text messages (by texting “OFF” to 4040) in that time period.
The FCC, meanwhile, saw reports of unwanted texts submitted through its complaint form this year range from 770 to 940 through July before jumping to 1,460 in October and November.
My own phone does offer one other data point that suggests the spam-text problem might be getting slightly less awful: Somehow, I haven’t gotten any since Nov. 10. But now that I’ve bragged even a little about that in public, I’m sure a new “pig butchering” scam text is right now on its way to my phone.