I periodically wonder how quickly this would end if the costs shifted to the telcos who currently see it as a profit center. Imagine if reporting a message got you an immediate $1 credit and they had to recover it from the network which originated the spam: how quickly would they be able to turn on egress filtering?

The fact that telcos are really party to these scams and for some reason aren't held accountable is amazing to me.

I think about that every time I just a call with a forged number. I remember when VoIP was coming on the market and people were warning about spoofing but telco executives apparently just blew that off because it’d slow sales.

About 7-8 years ago in France you’d get regular phone calls from actual humans running the same scam about a DHL or whatever packaging requiring duties to be paid. Plus the same SMS scams.

Americans are lucky in they usually don’t have to buy from abroad and when they do, rarely is tax/duty payment required from the recipient (unlike many other parts of the world).

In Germany we get those phishing SMS too, but I think the US is probably worse off, as they get way more phishing calls (which I think are more effective) as scammers in Nigeria or India usually don't speak German or French...

Plenty of low-income Francophones in the world.

In 2019, when I landed in Hamburg, I got a scam SMS before the "Welcome to germany"-SMS. IOW, the scammers managed to consume the "new arrival" event somehow, and send out their own scam. Tells a lot about how much the telcos actually care / are a part of these scams.

I dont get sms but amount of spam in gmail inbox about Swiss post (I live here but not native) is staggering.

Luckily they still look so lame its trivial to spot them, and gmail is doing a fine service filtering them right into spam.

RCS messaging being adopted on Android has meant that I now get added to spam group chats called "USPS" by some criminals impersonating the post office.