My own phone number is now spam texting me
This morning, I received a very blatant spam text offering me “a little gift” for supposedly paying my phone bill. Normally I’d groan, roll my eyes, and quickly delete such a thing, but there was something different about this particular message: it was spoofed as coming from my own phone number. As best my iPhone could tell, it was a legitimate message from me to myself. Tapping into the sender details took me to my own contact card.
Equally frustrating was that I had no obvious way of reporting the alarming spoof to my carrier, Verizon Wireless. Spoofed calls and texts are nothing new; most people face a constant deluge of spam calls that appear on caller ID as from a number similar to their own. But this was the first time I actually...