In recent weeks, I’ve been getting more spam calls and texts than ever.
The newest spam has come daily in the form of texts offering me jobs. Not real jobs, but the same kind of bottom-rung jobs that used to show up in print ads claiming, “You can make $200 a week without leaving your home!” Yeah, by stuffing envelopes containing similar messages, which will be sent to people who also don’t want to receive them.
Actually, I’m sure these weren’t true employment searches at all, but rather phishing scams from scumbags trying to steal our information.
Of course, every time I get one, I click “Delete And Report Junk” on my iPhone, but that hasn’t slowed the onslaught. For a while, I would reply “stop,” but I think all that did was confirm to the sending bots that they had reached a human being’s real phone number, which moved mine into the “send more irrelevant content here.” I even have two spam-fighting apps on my iPhone which catch some of this garbage, but it’s like trying to stop the stream of a full-force firehose with a toothpick.
Interrupting our lives — even for a minute — with such spam should be illegal, since the FTC allowed us to sign up for its Do Not Call Registry in 2003. In 2009, it expanded the rule to keep marketers from using robocalls to contact us. But, in my experience, the flow of unwanted calls and texts never trickled out because spammers don’t care about the penalties. They’re based outside the US in some place our law enforcement agencies could never reach. Even if one of their bots gets shut down, they have servers full of others pounding away at us. Technology — especially artificial intelligence — made it easier for them and more annoying for us.
Not so incidentally, the Do Not Call list doesn’t even apply to text messages. Why? Congress is mostly made up of really old people who don’t use technology because they don’t understand it, and therefore they never see any of this trash. If they did, they might impose criminal sanctions on these disturbers-of-my-peace.
If the law was miraculously updated to ban all of the digital unwanted messages, it should also apply to junk mail. Or at least give us the option to publicly opt out of receiving it — and make it stick. Six years ago, I wrote about the way it’s handled in Amsterdam:
Among all the sights we saw, my favorites were the stickers on people’s mailboxes that read “Nee.” That’s Dutch for no, an instruction to the letter carrier not to deposit any junk mail in the slot. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that they were on every single house we passed, which made me wonder why the option even exists. Just ban the junk mail in the first place, since it’s not getting delivered!
Sure wish we had that law here.
If only we could turn the USA into a country full of Knights Who Say Nee!