Even the "legit" text message spammers can get bent. This guy is acting like those poor little insurance companies don't have any other way to advertise to me, because they just want me to have better insurance, out of the goodness of their job-creating hearts.

AT&T has to be among the worst. These jagoffs would send me no fewer then three texts at all hours of the day or night to simply tell me there was nothing with my account. No exaggeration: They would badger me repeatedly to say that my bill auto-pay had succeeded... and then that I could save $5 by signing up for auto-pay... and some other inexcusable nonsense.

I logged every call I made to them, during many of which they swore they'd stop it. Eventually they started claiming that they couldn't. I had to block AT&T's number on my phone.

How execrably stupid do they have to be to send "everything's fine" texts over and over and over instead of, at the very most, sending an E-MAIL?

If the so called legit folks sell you, then they are not legit.

Why does that mostly seem to be a problem in the US?

I'm from a first world country in Europe and I can count the number of spam calls I got over the years on one hand (literally 2).

Same goes for spam texts (3).

For legal reasons my phone number could be found on the open web for years.

With a fairly wealthy population (by world standard) and a language spoken by ~100 million people there should be ample opportunities to spam people.

Yet even my parents whose number were listed in the phone book get maybe 1 or two spam calls per year

I live in The Netherlands. I'm called approximately 3 times a week by numbers I don't recognize. Recruiters, telemarketeers and scams. All alike. I've just stopped answering numbers I don't recognize, because it's pointless anyway. If they don't reach out in another way, it wasn't important.

FWIW I've been in NL for a little under 2 years and got a fresh Dutch number when I arrived, and I have received zero spam calls. Even after registering my business with the KVK and entering my number into the public record -- when I did that in the states it generated a lot of spam. To be fair, I am reluctant to give out my number to businesses, so perhaps that has saved me from the typical experience.

For me there's two big offenders: KPN and AD. They each tend to call once a week. Recruiters cold-calling is indeed pretty common.

Amount of scam calls I've ever received can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. There was this time that scam texts (usually trying to impersonate either a bank or PostNL) were common, but I haven't received one in quite a while.

Most disturbing were the energy company salespeople that would actually ring the door, and somehow knew _exactly_ how large my consumption was.

> Why does that mostly seem to be a problem in the US?

GDPR outlawed large parts of that.

Spanish here, me and most people I know get weekly spam calls and phishing attempts. I suspect the reason we receive them and some people don't is that our phone numbers appeared in one or more data breaches these scammers are using.

Having Android block or flag spam calls automatically was a godsend, even nontechnical people are looking into that feature now.

Spam texts are not really a thing here in Norway, either.

I do get three to four phonecalls from spoofed UK numbers every month. I havn't picked up for a year or so, but last time I did, it was a fake "Microsoft Support" scam.

Taking my phone number out of gule sider fixed the Microsoft scam calls for me.

Probably a combo of many things making it hard to run businesses predicated on getting people to sign on the line that is dotted no matter what.

Also stuff like credit stores not being as much of a thing meaning that there's not really a whole gamut of offerings. If everyone is offering roughly the same rates there's not much of a business for shopping around

I think it’s because the US is rich and we all speak the same language and there’s 300 million of us. So if you’re going to spam, you spam in a target rich environment.

Europe is rich, but you have to spam in 20 languages so you’ll make less money.

Also, there's almost no legal downside to doing it in the US.

> Why does that mostly seem to be a problem in the US?

Because we loudly and openly tell everyone we are a very gullible people. It's all over the news, what with "stolen elections", etc.

What makes you say this is largely a US problem?