Photo: Compassionate Eye Foundation (Getty Images)
You might find yourself wondering from time to time: Why is it always you who constantly gets spammed with emails while your buddy Steve—who doesn’t even take the time to unsubscribe from spammy emails—gets to seemingly live his life spam-headache free? The answer isn’t that Steve is just lucky; it’s that you might be doing too much to avoid it.
If you’ve ever replied “STOP” to a spammy text message or unsubscribed to a spam email, you’ve been taking the bait. Scammers rarely target specific people because that is too time-consuming. A more efficient way to gather victims is the good old throw-spaghetti-to-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks technique. If you’re responding to these messages, you’re sticking to the wall, and looking like a tender, delicious target.
Yes, some of the time unsubscribing or texting “STOP” to legitimate sources will clear a lot of the clutter and notifications in your life, but if it is a scam, they are just probing to see if your contact information is valid.
Scammers always seem to be thinking one step ahead, and are aware that people are suspicious of potential scams; they play to that fear to trap you. A new technique they are deploying comes in the form of “This wasn’t you? Click here to unsubscribe” in the form of texts or emails. But the link doesn’t unsubscribe you, it just lets them know you’re a hot noodle sticking to the wall.
Best practices
Just ask Steve for some advice: When he gets invited to a group-chat on Twitter with hundreds of other entrepreneurs plotting how to invest in the latest crypto before it shoots to the moon, he simply flags the group to Twitter and leaves it. When he gets a text message from PayPal thanking him for signing up with a link reading, “Not you? Click here,” he forwards the number and text to 7726 to report it to his carrier and blocks it. When he gets an email about a prince in Nigeria, he just marks it as “spam” and deletes it.
The same logic can be applied to interacting with Instagram bots, responding to spammers, or answering calls to “troll” spammers and waste their precious time (there‘s a whole subreddit dedicated to the art).
Be like Steve. Just block, delete, and ignore it.
