If there's back and forth interaction I wonder if it is to aid improving their "legitimacy footprint" from metadata or something to avoid spam blockers.

This is a good guess and if true, pretty damn smart.

Essentially reverse engineering the spam model by brute force.

If they are doing this at scale they can experiment with # of conversations, length, and other variables to see what is needed to bypass spam blockers with high probability.

I've gotten a few in the last couple months, with a US cellular number that I've had for over 20 years. At least two are "I missed you at the gym today!" via text and another was from a Vermont area code via WhatsApp to a "Dr. Jack":

> Hi Dr. Jack! My cat is very slow and does not eat cat food. Can you make an appointment for me?

> Sorry, you have the wrong number

> Sorry, I just checked, I entered a wrong number, please don't mind. hope I did not disturb you.

> Best of luck with your cat!

> thank you for understanding. You are a kind person. where do you come from.

And then I just moved on with my day, because as nice as that sounded I wasn't looking for a conversation.

The contact profile image is of a young, attractive Asian woman, I think at a restaurant. No reverse image results on Tineye or Google.

[Edit: I’ve had this number for over 20 years (not “nearly 20”) and now I feel old.]

I also get messages on WhatsApp with similar profile pictures, although I’ve never replied or tried reverse image search. Some of the recent messages:

“Mike, this is my new number. Let's play golf tomorrow and talk about working together?” (My name isn’t Mike.)

“Hello, how's Kevin doing?” (My name isn’t Kevin and I doubt they're talking about anyone I know whose name is Kevin.)

The thing that always seems so weird to me is, if I’m on some list, why are there so few messages? Is this some group that keeps their list of numbers to themselves and is very disciplined with how often it sends out scam attempts?

Wow, I get the same messages about golfing with Kevin and Mike! (My name is also neither of those)

My spam horror show started after responding to a text similar to these. It was poised as a woman trying to connect with her daughter. I responded, and since then have had a deluge of spam and crap messages.

Oh wow. I got EXACTLY the same message, only with a sick dog and an asian woman in a car. I did the exact some response you did too. So weird.

I got this one: “Doctor Mike? My little dog moves slowly and won't eat dog food. Can you make an appointment for me?”

The profile picture was the smiling face of an Asian girl. I didn’t bother to respond.

A bit over a year ago, I received over SMS a photo of a young woman using her mouth to lift up her shirt and reveal her bra. Her face above the very bottom of her nose is not visible.

This was followed by the text "hi, is this Grèg frm Sañta Barbara?.? It is Jennifer."

Clearly some sort of scam is afoot, but I don't know what it is. And virtually no effort has been made to be at all convincing, given the diacritics.

Being less convincing saves the scammers time, because you won't reply unless you're easily fooled.

Multiple people I know rec'd this.

There's a lot of lonely people out there who probably would welcome a friendly conversation with a random stranger. I bet that's the target audience for this scam.

The pictures are always super blurry, clearly fabricated or heavily doctored. Often I've gotten the same portrait for several scam texts from different numbers.

To be fair, my wife says the same thing about the photos I take with my phone.

Finding the right place to focus the camera is essential, to both focus on the plane you are looking for as to have it focused on a spot that will produce the desired brightness in the overall picture (how that works I don't know, just advice from an ex that went to photography school for some time)

There is no person. You are just helping train an AI

idk, I've tried baiting these -- respond with "no problem, your appointment is booked!" They will thank you and proceed with the "so what are your hobbies" part.

Excellent idea. Annoyed I didn’t think of that one.

I got one today, addressing me by a wrong name and berating me for bullying some (female) name. Last line was something like "This is Jin."

It may have been a totally wrong number or the start of a scam. I decided not to engage and haven't heard back. Considering how mad they came across in the initial message, I can only assume silence means it was a scam.

I had almost the exact same exchange, with someone with a photo just like that! 747 area code, was it?

It was an 802 area code in this case, but I think it’s pretty clear now that these scammers have multiple personas and numbers to work with.

Does the profile picture have a sign in the background saying "Vilan Pho - Fresh Soup Everyday", perchance?

I got

"Hello are you Mr.Jack? My aunt recommended you to me,saying that the found the shop I wantend."

Burmese phone number.

I went back and reviewed my conversation. I hadn't looked at the photo super close before, and was surprised when I could actually get a somewhat high-res version of the profile photo.

I had a photo of an Asian lady holding a Starbucks cup at a restaurant. Maybe an office, actually? The photo was reversed, as the lettering on the cup was backwards.

Nope. It’s some kind of restaurant. She’s drinking a tea or juice or something like that from a glass with a straw

What would the motivation be for anyone to reply to a text from an unknown person? I have also been getting these for months, in it was 100% obvious from the get-go that it must be a scam. I have never felt the slightest urge to reply.

I got a peculiar msg the other day from a number I didn't recognize.

"Hey dude, Are you good? Do you still live in X?"

Turns out it was an old friend that I hadn't heard from in a few years!

I've gotten two messages in the past month of the form "Hi, is this <my real name>?" from unknown numbers. There's a chance they're real acquaintances, but the likelihood of them just being spam finding my name & number in some online database is too high that I haven't responded. If they were real acquaintances, I guess they would tell me who they are, right? Dunno, feels weird.

Or so you think...

It's fine, he had some money troubles and needed $300 to pay his bills on time.

I guess some of us are old enough that wrong numbers were a thing and it was just polite to let them know. Especially when it sounds legit

Considering how almost every form of social trust has been abused to either spam or scam me, I am old enough to remember that but have also had that politeness completely scrubbed from me.

I wish we still lived in a time when being scammed or spammed wasn't so prevalent, but we don't and I'm not doing anything that might tip off either of those groups that my number is ripe for the picking.

Oh yeah, no judgement implied. It’s just a force of habit for me.

Wrong numbers generally used to be caused by misdialing.

Nobody dials numbers any more.

Generally, you are correct. However I had an interesting experience in the 90's where someone's number was somehow linked to mine. So their friends kept calling, for the first few times I politely said that X wasn't here, they had the wrong number. However I had a call blocker on my line, and after two or three phone calls I'd just add the number to the call blocker.

I also had an answering machine, and eventually, I got a long diatribe from the irate person whose number had been linked to mine who was very upset about the situation. They explained the phone company had accidently linked the numbers somehow. They were very upset because their friends couldn't reach them and because I had been call blocking them.

So, I listened to the message, thought a moment and then added them to my call block list.

Somehow when I was in high school, my ex girlfriend's cellphone number became linked to my cellphone number so that if someone called me while I was already in a call, the new call would be redirected to her. It caused some awkward situations. I have no idea how it happened. I had once set her number as a speed-dial on my phone and also set it as a Verizon "friends & family" number so I could call her for free, so I assume somehow there was a glitch with one of these features. She was a mutual friend with a lot of my friends so people just assumed they had called her by accident, but years later I finally realized something was up when a new friend who didn't know my ex got redirected to her. I googled a lot and found out there was some phone star code you could dial to set or unset a number to be used as a backup number, I finally understood that was the association that must have been set, and I was able to clear the association. I wondered a lot if I had accidentally used the star code in the past to set up the association but I can't imagine having done it by accident, and I didn't know about the feature before.

Consider that she did it?

Seems an odd coincidence for it to be fwd to her number of all people.

Agreed, Call forwarding on busy or no answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_forwarding Looks easy to set up and could easily be missed on the phone bill.

Nah, she was confused by the situation and I've always been the sort to keep my phone locked and to myself. She never had my phone unlocked.

Nobody dials their friends numbers anymore.

Calling a business though? A colleague had a problem where their number was 1 digit off from some delivery number (maybe pizza?) and got calls all the time.

Someone else erroneously has their number (different area code) in the google info for another business, same problem and took a while to fix.

Hah, there’s a Seinfeld episode about this, where Kramer is one digit off from a movie showtimes hotline, and he fully plays the role and starts answering everyone’s questions about which movies are showing!

I do.

It's good to have a few numbers memorized. What happens if your phone dies, and you need to call someone? If you don't know any phone numbers, you have an problem.

I dial a few of my contacts by number, just to set them in memory.

People do enter numbers into phones by hand, though.

I meet new people fairly often, and if I just ignored these messages, the chance I'm actually being rude to someone I know in real life is fairly high. Now that I know the pattern I will probably be more circumspect about it.

I admit if I got a variant of the “Andy, will my custom mahogany furniture arrive next week?” text mentioned in the article, part of me would be very tempted to reply with, “Absolutely. On its way!”

(I’d probably just ignore it, though.)

I usually reply to these fake texts with something along the lines of "send newdz". Have yet to get a response back for some reason.

Maybe he or she wanted to keep it real?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3U55usfJK8&t=382s

a good portion of these will show a photo of some hot young woman fairly early in the conversation, and trust the horniness of random dudes to outweigh their suspicion.

I’m a boomer. I don’t reply at all to any message from someone I don’t know. How dare you mock people simply because of their age.

I thought it was just me also. At first my assumption was "OK, I'm being redirected a bunch of texts from other numbers", as nobody else I asked had similar problems (and I wasn't really being scammed at all). Some of the scammers even sent pictures to make them seem more legitimate. On iOS, the green bubbles and just continual flow of similar texts eventually made it suspicions that I don't even reply wrong number anymore. I just delete and block.

Likely an exploit or simply a means to confirm the number is active. Getting those in the uk as well.