How to Block Spam SMS Messages on Mobile?

You are involved in some serious work, monotonously staring at your computer, just then your phone beeps, you wish to avert your eyes but then, self loathingly, look down thinking or hoping rather, that it's a friend wanting to meet up, instead you find a junk text sent by some spammer who wants you to engage with it by clicking on the link, sending some details or something of the sort, and get you into trouble. Of course, it makes you want to tear your head apart.

These spam sms sent through bots have become a part of life, but you can make them stop. In some countries, the mobile network service providers provide some services like DND (Do not disturb) to stop unnecessary promotional messages, but these days, the SMS marketing scene is blowing out of proportion and hence a lot of messages are daily sent to millions of mobile numbers

But don't worry, in this article, we have a list of Apps and different techniques using which you can make this spamming stop.

Let's look at the different ways we can avoid these call and sms spam.

1. Do Not Respond

Generally, these scam messages come with an initial text asking to reply with a "Stop" to stop them from sending any further messages but generally, the only purpose it serves is of confirming to the scammer the validity of your number and thus only ends up increasing the flow of these messages. So unless it's from a company that you're sure is not trying to scam you, never reply to these bot-texts.

2. Block Phone Numbers

If the disturbance is too much, just block the number from where the messages have been coming. Although this doesn't work much because spammers mostly keep changing numbers. So you could get the messages from the same spammer even after blocking them.

3. Report the Spammer

You can report every bot text to your mobile carrier simply by forwarding it to a specific number. For this just copy the whole message and send it to 7726. (SPAM)

4. Filter Out Spammers on Android

If you have an Android phone, you can easily disable all the identified spam sms. Just go to Settings and then to Spam protection, then turn on the Enable spam protection switch. Now you will be alerted if any message is suspected to be spam.

5. Default Android and iPhone Message App

In both Android and iPhone with Android 11 and iOS 14, proper categorization of Messages has been introduced in the default Message Applications.

In iOS, the Messages received are stored as Known Senders, Unknown Senders, Transactions, and Promotions, hence it becomes easier for you to ignore the ones that don't matter.

6. Filter Out Spammers Through Mobile Carriers (U.S.A specific)

Some blocking and filtering tools are provided by most top US mobile carriers. They mostly are tuned to look for spam phone calls but they also block the numbers that they suspect are delivering fake messages.

Call Filter by Verizon blocks all the bot calls and messages. There is a free version, but the premium version costs $2.99 for a single line or $7.99 a month for three or more lines.

T-Mobile offers Scam Shield, which is a collection of free services to detect, block, and mislead spam and scam callers. It has a caller ID feature too which is for the numbers which aren't on your contact list.

The carriers also use some technology on the back end to trace and block the spam sms just like the email providers do. If you're looking for some tougher apps you can check out some other third-party apps.

7. Truecaller App