Moving to Australia 2018, the frequency of scam texts and calls struck me almost immediately. It’s a shame that the same thing is now hitting NZ more often.
The base problem is that there’s minimal/no cryptographic authentication underlying SMS and caller ID, so spoofing these things and getting away with it is way too easy. Phone standards need to be modernised urgently (or just straight up deprecated in favour of IP-based solutions like WhatsApp/Signal/FB Messenger).
I avoid giving my phone number out to anyone if I can avoid it. Largely I have not had issues with spam calls or texts, though I have recieved the very occasional one.
Moving to Australia 2018, the frequency of scam texts and calls struck me almost immediately. It’s a shame that the same thing is now hitting NZ more often.
The base problem is that there’s minimal/no cryptographic authentication underlying SMS and caller ID, so spoofing these things and getting away with it is way too easy. Phone standards need to be modernised urgently (or just straight up deprecated in favour of IP-based solutions like WhatsApp/Signal/FB Messenger).
I avoid giving my phone number out to anyone if I can avoid it. Largely I have not had issues with spam calls or texts, though I have recieved the very occasional one.