Pogue’s Basics: Report text ads and spam
One of the blessings of the cellphone era: There’s no spam, as there is with email, and no telemarketer calls, as there is with landlines.
Well, there’s not supposed to be. Cellphone spam is illegal.
If you get telemarketing calls, you should sign up for the Do Not Call Registry. You probably already knew about that.
What you probably didn’t realize is that if you get text-message spam, you can forward it to your cellphone carrier for future filtering and blocking. It’s too late for you this time, but you may as well help to spare thousands of your fellow citizens from getting the same cellphone spam.
All you have to do is forward the text message to 7726. (That’s the number spelled out by SPAM on your keypad. Get it?)
If you’re feeling especially patriotic, also report it to the FTC.
And be glad you have at least some channels to fight back on.
Adapted from Pogue’s Basics: Tech, by David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance. He welcomes nontoxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here, or you can sign up to get his columns by email
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