Voting rights groups are sounding the alarm about anonymous text messages allegedly sent to college students in Wisconsin, threatening them with prison if they vote, according to CNN."The unsolicited text, sent from at least one 262- number to cell phones of people in their early 20s on University o...
  • reddig33@lemmy.world
    1753·
    2 months ago

    There’s no such thing as “anonymous” texts — just texts the government can’t be bothered to trace back to their origin.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      621·
      2 months ago

      Well you can send people “SMS” messages from an email system; if you know who the carrier on that number is. usually it’s [the phone number]@[their service].

      it’s not hard to find what the domain name for the email transfer service is, and who owns which cell phone, and they can just buy a list of phone numbers that ping off college cells under specific circumstances that would indicate they’re college students.

        • Case@lemmynsfw.com
          11·
          2 months ago

          I know this type of information from an IT help desk job. Medical IT. Shit gets weird in hospitals.

          • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 months ago

            Yeah, I used to use it to send out 2 factor setup links for RSA. Users standardly couldn’t get their work email on their work phone until they were enrolled in Intune, so new users, or users who handnt already set up Windows Hello, I’d just grab their ISP from the cell phone distribution list or ask them if it was a personal phone and send it through att or Verizon etc.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          2 months ago

          Yup.

          And you can have an email server in some Latin American country who doesn’t give a fuck (and why should they?) and basically create a new domain when ever you get shut down for spammy spam.

    • Spotlight7573@lemmy.worldEnglish
      39·
      2 months ago

      There was the one case with the scammers in the UK using a homemade cell tower to essentially send out phishing texts directly to cell phones in an area, completely bypassing the phone company. It seems like this scare texts scenario would fit that kind of tech even better, as you only need to send out a message once to a large amount of people and you don’t need to collect information in response like in a phishing scenario.

  • Linktank
    1161·
    2 months ago

    WHO!? Who could POSSIBLY be behind such a text!?!? It is beyond fathoming. There certainly isn’t a correlation between education and voting lines, or else one party would surely be trying to destroy the education system and bring religion back into schools!

    Anonymous my ass.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      2 months ago

      Also, political intimidation and threats of violence are terrorism, and these people should be tried as such.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        14·
        2 months ago

        Really? You would trust a random text telling you that you will go to prison for participating in a cornerstone of our democracy? The internet existed 20 years ago… You really wouldn’t have thought to double check?

        • GladiusB@lemmy.world
          41·
          2 months ago

          You also have to consider a twenty year old and just running with the possibility. They don’t care if it’s necessarily true. They don’t have enough experience to know it’s probably not true.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
        41·
        2 months ago

        20 years ago, you wouldn’t have expected to have social media / internet help you determine whether a threat was real.

        • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          We had real news back then though, and many of us watched it. We knew Bush was a dangerous moron who wanted wars. And we knew Nader was a spoiler, but enough of my idiot classmates still voted against Gore. I was dumbfounded when they would admit it with a shrug. So much so that it has still stuck with me to this day.