Wireless Achieves Milestone in Tracing Texts

Keeping spam out of your text messages is a shared goal of companies throughout the wireless ecosystem and for policymakers across government. CTIA's Secure Messaging Initiative (SMI) aims to enhance those efforts to protect consumers from illegal and unwanted robotexts. The SMI is an industry-led program that brings together experts in the private and public sectors, including wireless providers and messaging aggregators, as well as enforcement partners from federal and state entities to facilitate information sharing that can quickly thwart spam activity and help enforcement agencies target bad actors.

To further those goals, CTIA's SMI partnered with YouMail Protective Services (YPS) to complement wireless industry efforts to trace the origins of spam and scam text messages and report on those to law enforcement for investigation. Through this partnership, the wireless industry has delivered 10 referral packages to law enforcement partners at the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the state anti-robocall task force, which they can use to bring charges against these spammers and shut them down. Indeed, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has recognized the value of collaboration in working with states and foreign countries on enforcement: "Protecting consumers' privacy and defending them against robocall and text scams is a top priority for the Commission," said Chairwoman Rosenworcel. "Our efforts are fortified through strategic partnerships. . . ."

In each referral, CTIA's SMI identifies a threat actor and evidence like sender phone numbers, web domains, tactics and techniques that link suspected scam text campaigns to that threat actor. To produce this year's SMI referral packages, the SMI has traced over 6,000 robotexts since the beginning of 2024 alone to determine the senders' identities, analyze them to determine a cluster of activity, and refer those to law enforcement for investigation. These referral packages included evidence on bad actors conducting a variety of scam types including package delivery, personal loan, medical device, lead generation and other types of suspicious text campaigns. Beyond the evidence that have been referred to enforcement agencies, more than 21,000 additional robotexts' sender identities were traced as part of the SMI's broader investigations.

CTIA's SMI helps complement wireless industry efforts to identify the senders of unlawful and fraudulent message campaigns to create packaged case referrals for law enforcement agency partners. When CTIA's SMI makes a referral, the SMI also alerts messaging ecosystem stakeholders of the suspected activity. Mere days after an SMI alert goes out, bad actors are shut down. To learn how this works, let's look at an example:

A bad actor first used email-to-SMS techniques to send texts, then switched to sending those texts via a wireless provider. The SMI/YPS partnership was able gather enough information to identify the campaign cluster being run by this bad actor and shared the information with the provider. This allowed the provider to eliminate the bad actor's traffic from that network. The bad actor tried other avenues to continue conducting their spam campaign but working together we have achieved a 99.8% reduction in this type of scam robotext.

These are great accomplishments for the two-year-old SMI, and they are just part of the wireless industry's proactive, dynamic, multi-layered efforts to stop spam messages. Wireless providers, messaging aggregators, and other ecosystem partners also protect consumers from spam texts by analyzing and blocking spam texts using a variety of sophisticated tools, including up-front vetting and registration, spam filters, algorithms, and blocking techniques that help identify and respond to unwanted, illegal, or harmful messages.

These efforts and others have resulted in wireless providers blocking nearly 50 billion spam texts last year alone-all before they reach consumers.

To further protect consumers from spam, the industry encourages customers to stay alert. For example, when the SMI identified the unlawful and fraudulent message campaigns that have been the subject of the SMI's referrals, wireless providers, messaging aggregators, and messaging ecosystem partners worked quickly to shut the identified traffic down. While the wireless industry remains focused on protecting consumers, bad actors constantly change their tactics. Consumers should be on the lookout for these and other scams, and take the following steps to protect themselves:

• If you provide your phone number to a potential message sender, make sure you know what type of communication you are opting into
• If you receive a text that seems legitimate, but you do not want, respond "STOP" to opt-out of getting any more texts
• If you receive an unexpected or suspicious text, do not click any links. If you receive a text that looks suspicious, you should forward the message to 7726 (SPAM) (instructions for iPhone and Android)
• Click "Delete and Report Junk" to report spam messages to Apple for iPhone users and Google for Android users
• Depending on your device, you may also be able to block the sender. Check with your cellphone manufacturer (Apple, Samsung) to learn more.
• There are many spam text protection tools available to complement built-in features from your wireless provider and cellphone manufacturer, including YouMail's app.
• You can also report spam messages by filing a complaint with the FTC or FCC.
• To learn more about how to protect yourself from spam texts, watch our How to Stop Spam Text Messages video and visit the Consumer Resources

The wireless industry is committed to protecting consumers, and we look forward to continuing our work to enhance enforcement against bad actors. To learn more about these efforts, visit the Secure Messaging Initiative.