A bit of threadbending....
Speakng of SPAM and Spoofs and such:
I recently had something entirely new for me happen on my smart phone
(iPhone 4). I got a text and a phone call (which I didn't answer) from
what felt like Santa Fe (was a 505) number. I'm not sure which came in
first. No message left. Text was "Hey" or similar. Normally I would
ignore the latter if I didn't know who it was from and I *always* screen
phone calls, allowing my voicemail to take any number I don't
know/expect, etc.
Another text came in saying something like "are you ignoring me?" and I
was feeling a little frisky so I answered with some glib answer like
"yes, but only because you probably have the wrong number, this is
Steve, who is this?"
What I got back was a "Hey Baby!". Which felt kinda automated, but
still frisky I answered: "Is this Eliza?" (referring to the classic AI
program pretending to be a psychiatrist). I immediately got another
whacky text that seemed clearly not responsive... I then decided to
ignore it.
A while later I got another "are you ignoring me?" which lead me to some
other polite/banal response, to which I got an SMS picture of cute
teenage girl holding her phone up as if taking a picture of her
self... and another "Hey Babey!"... etc.
By this time I was just black-boxing the whole thing, trying to figure
out if there was a (very lame) person on the other end, or an automated
program. I couldn't figure out what the angle was. We went back and
forth and in fact I started getting phone calls as well as txts which I
still didn't answer expecting some kind of message (maybe). The "are
you ignoring me?" and "hey babey" and "Love you" messages kept
escalating... and the phone calls yielded two or three messages that
were all 2-4 seconds of silence.
My daughters (adults who I was spending fathers day with) warned me it
was some bad scam though they couldn't figure out what either. After a
day of this I just started ignoring all texts and phone calls from the
number and the frequency kicked up almost to a Denial of Service
level.. along with txt/SMS I also started getting iMessages (apple's
specific version?) and FaceTime connection requests . A text or a phone
every few minutes! I went and read in my carrier's (ATT) website and
ohter places about blockingnumbers and harrassing/nuisance calls... and
they really didn't have much if anything useful to offer.
Finally in a fit of pique, I sent a text to the number saying "any
further attempts to contact me bytxt, iMessage, Facetime, phone call
... will be treated as harrassment and reported... " blah blah blah...
I didn't get another contact attempt after that. It stopped. Dead.
BTW.. early on I did a search on the phone number so see if anyone
else was getting this kind of attempts.... I found no references to the
number except all the reverse lookup directories offering to look it up
for me for a fee. Except one... it appeared to have been the cell
phone number of a grad student (male) in Los Alamos 5 or more years ago.
I don't know what it was about. It began to look VERY automated, but
very broad, very aggressive. The fact that it stopped when I came back
with a semi-official sounding threat suggests to me that it wasn't
completely automated (unless the level of automation was to flag word
stems like "Harrass".
I have a few weak hypothesis but generally am stumped.
Anyone else have this kind of experience? Have any ideas what the angle
was?
- Steve
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
