The Justice Department, and various states, are investigating it, and working to track down the instigators. This AP story indicates that the people behind it used VPNs, and numerous phone numbers, to attempt to cover their tracks. It’ll be very interesting to see if they can actually track anyone down.
Phone service provider TextNow said that “one or more of our accounts” were used to send the racist text messages and that it quickly disabled those accounts for violating its terms of service.
“As part of our investigation into these messages, we learned they have been sent through multiple carriers across the US and we are working with partners and law enforcement cooperatively to investigate this attack,” the Canada-based company said in a statement Friday.
Major providers AT&T and Verizon both said it was an industry-wide problem and referred comment Friday to the CTIA, a wireless communications trade group.
The U.S. wireless industry has been working in recent days to block thousands of the texts and the numbers sending them, said CTIA spokesperson Nick Ludlum. An industry group initiative is working with law enforcement and has “identified platforms bad actors used to send these messages,” he said.