not the boa i wanna play with (a spam alert for my readers)

how do i define irony this morning?

that it was “ME” that got me to register my phone on the national “do not call” register back when it turned out that telemarketers and what not would be able to access cell numbers. why is this ironic? because since she literally FORCED me to do it i’ve kept the same number. she’s on phone number eight or nine at this point since that happened. so she gets those calls and texts ALL the time.

i never do. until three weeks ago.

that was when i started getting something that looks a bit like this:

boa1234 immediate attention required. call 212-555-1212

and i say “a bit” like this as they’ve all fallen off my history at this point AND the number (both contact number and the number after “boa”) was always changing. but for a while i was getting ten to twenty a day – sometimes all in a span of three to four hours. i tried to reverse look up the number to no avail, so i plugged it into google and found hundreds of complaints on SPAM forums (who knew there was such a thing?) about similar texts dozens of times a day.

but then just as quick as they appeared they were gone.

then last week they went another way:

my07@sprintpcs.com: Hello. Call(561)2357256.Attention Required.Thank You.

now part of the reason i didn’t fall for the first ones was the “boa” part – i knew that was short for “Bank Of America” and i have absolutely ZERO dealings with bank of america. can’t stand ’em, actually. but sprint IS my carrier. that being said, since i’ve been with sprint for over ten years (again, thanks to “ME”) i know what little text return code they use to reach out to you – and it’s not “my07…”. so i googled the number – same amount of complaints, same forums. mainly from NON-sprint customers (i guess whoever these scammers are, they just put some major corp in front of the message figuring at least some of the people they reach will be customers of theirs). i got three in a ten minute period, than no mas…and the number to call looked eerily like one of the ones in the first wave of boa texts, which stretched out over a period of a couple weeks dozens of times a day. the sprint ones were three inside of ten minutes, than gone. i refer to the FIRST wave of “boa texts” due to yesterday:

infonotice@bofa.org Subject:Bank Of America Please Call 212 457 9779

they’re pretty easy to spot – partially due to the fact that they’re all typed like book titles where Every Single Word Is Capitalized and there’s never a return number. and while i’m not naive enough to fall for ’em, and have no idea what happens if you DO call (i assume they snow you if you get a real person at all, more than likely it remotely taps your phone or something) there are plenty of people with cell phones (nervous teenagers and pre-teens, older folks like my seventy-one year old dad, etc) that might fall for this shit. then what?

just figured i’d warn you guys…anybody else seeing this kind of shit?