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By Jesus Mesa
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Feel like you've been getting more spam messages than usual, especially oddly personal phishing texts? Well, you are probably right.
Spam texts have surged in the U.S. every year since the COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2024 alone, 19.2 billion spam texts were sent—about 63 per person, according to the app Robokiller.
Americans are frequently receiving mysterious texts with no prior context, attempting to spark a conversation. Messages like "hey, can you meet me for a coffee?" or "can you guess who I am?" may seem harmless, but tech entrepreneur Nikita Bier recently revealed the real strategy behind them.
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Phishing for your trust
Bier explains that these random, conversational texts are part of a strategy called "warming the number." This tactic aims to boost the scammer's phone number credibility with mobile carriers, allowing them to later send a link—often leading to a phishing website.
"You cannot send bulk texts containing a URL until your number has earned credibility with phone carriers," Bier explained in a viral Twitter thread. "To earn credibility, it needs to have replies from other numbers."
The key to this strategy, Bier said, lies in convincing recipients to respond. This is why phishing messages often contain prompts that create curiosity, confusion, or urgency—such as "hey, is this John?" or "you left your package at my house." These tactics increase the chance that the recipient will reply, helping to "warm" the scammer's phone number.
Once the scammer's phone number achieves a higher "trust score," Bier says, it can be used to send large volumes of spam messages that include malicious links. These links are designed to phish for personal information, distribute malware, or trick recipients into financial scams.
How to beat scammers
Andrew Rayo, Consumer Education Specialist at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), explained to Newsweek that there are several options available to help cut down on spam and avoid scams, such as using spam filters or reporting suspicious numbers to the FTC.
"Before you enter personal information on a website, email, or text chain, stop. Ask yourself: Why do they need this information? And what's going to happen to it?" he said.
Bier added another tactic to avoid these messages, suggesting that responding with "STOP" signals to both the carrier and the scammer's SMS provider that the number is being used for spam. This increases the likelihood of the number being flagged or shut down.
Some social media users questioned the advice to reply "STOP" to these messages, worrying it might signal to scammers that the phone number is active, thereby increasing the number of spam texts. However, Bier dismissed this concern, noting that scammers already know which numbers are active.
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"They already know your number is active because they do a lookup prior to their spam campaigns, as that is free and public data," he wrote.
The evolution of phishing attacks, from impersonal emails to personalized SMS texts, represents a growing threat to consumers. The FBI's 2022 Internet Crime Report found that phishing was the most common type of cybercrime, accounting for nearly half all reported incidents.
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