I sent money to two political candidates and receive dozens of texts per day from candidates I never heard of in other states begging for money. The organization that intercedes with candidates and donors, ActBlue says they provide donor information only to the candidate I donated to.
Has anyone been able to stop these texts? If ActBlue is indeed innocent, perhaps candidates are giving names and phone numbers to other candidates, or to a Democratic organization that gives this information away.
Are you sure it’s not just general political spam? Maybe not dozens a day, but I think we all get plenty of political texts from groups we’ve never heard of.
About all you can do is ignore it or text STOP and hope they actually take you off their list (instead of texting from a different phone number the next day).
I get lots of them too, and only after donating to Democratic candidates. Maybe they’re sharing donor info amongst themselves. Also, all your donations are public record: Browse Individual contributions | FEC
I think there are companies that scrape & sell this data to spam companies.
Anyway, the latest iOS and Android phones should have built-in text spam blocking — might want to check yours. They will block many but not all the political spam. There are also third-party text spam blocking apps, but they usually require you to switch your messaging app over to them.
I don’t get any. But I don’t think I’ve ever given them my cell number. I get tons of emails though
Can’t you “delete and report spam” on the texts?
That stops the calling number. As mentioned above, they just change numbers.
They’ve also gotten around “Filter Unknown Callers” on my cell phone.
I’m guessing someone stole, hacked or bought a list of donors.
Your algorithm is telling them you have donated in the past and you might be willing to donate again. So yeah, you’re on the “list”.
Donate another way in the future, not online.
Dang, that click to donate $5, $10 or other amount is so easy.
I finally got them to not follow me. About a year ago I stopped the “click to donate” and they ignore me for the most part.
I gave to Kelly to back him up and sign a petition. I got an email on that. It’s hasn’t migrated to my phone, yet.
I have the same problem. I will never deal with ActBlue again. Apparently, there is no way to stop it.
I just signed up for my first political fundraiser, and I had to pay through Act Blue. Here’s hoping this doesn’t happen to me! I don’t get any political spam at all. I get very little SMS spam, just the occasional BS job and some minor catfishing.
On my Samsung Galaxy S21, I can block unknown callers (although I use a 3rd-party app that works well), but I haven’t found any way to block texts wholesale. I block new texts as they come in, but it does little good.
ActBlue sells lists directly to campaigns according to Google.
They say to reply “STOP” to every message. May take months.
So sorry, Carni(and others). Frustrating, for sure.
Remember when we griped about junk mail filling up our mailboxes everyday?
Are you able to use Google Messages on that phone? It should have blocking: How Google protects your privacy with spam detection - Google Messages
That’s wild I have donated a lot with ActBlue and never get texts.
HOWEVER…I just went and looked at my profile and see that I gave my landline phone number as my number (smart!) and I have been getting an awful lot of spam calls to my landline lately. I don’t answer them but about 1/5 of them trip my answering machine and I get an empty message.
Every call is from within my state, usually within my area code. But they’re a different number every time.
I deleted my number from my profile altogether but I suspect the cat’s already out of the bag and my landline is in the spam system. Ugh.
ETA: Replying to @Reply.
I have it, and tried it a few months ago, but switched back to Samsung’s messaging app for some reason I don’t recall now. I’ll try it again and see if it works for me. Thanks for the suggestion.
In my state party membership rolls are public. The various organizations on the Democratic side know who the Democrats are. At a minimum the party does, and they’re inclined to share their membership info with like minded PACs, think tanks, etc.
I get txt spam all day long from candidates all over the country. And recently from Mark Kelly. And from Obama. And …
They pretty much all want money. I’ve sent zero dollars in the last 40 years. When they’re not asking for donations they’re wanting me to respond to some clear push poll or online “petition”, either by clicking the link or responding “yes” or whatever.
Donating or not, they know who you (we) are and IMO they’re hitting everyone everywhere pretty continuously.
At the ActBlue web site, I found an unsubscribe link that doesn’t work on Firefox, and an email address I used to ask to be unsubscribed from ActBlue.
Thanks! I hope it works.
I get these all the time but on my Google Voice number. I never reply, not even a Stop. I just ignore.
I donated to the Harris campaign last summer via ActBlue. Now I get 6-10 emails each day telling me that if I don’t donate 5 or 7 or 25 bucks, each and every democrat running for office won’t have enough money to win the race.
I delete them as soon as I get them.
That’s what I suspect. I only donated to the Harris/Walz campaign last year. Most of the resulting donation pleas were from Democrats on my ballot, so there is an effort by most to filter out non-constituents from the email lists they receive. But there were about 20 out-of-state politicians that would email me every day asking for money (I’m looking at you, Mark Kelly and John Fetterman!). Diligent use of the unsubscribe and spam buttons cleared them all out in a few weeks.
I’ve been reluctant to block the spam texts thinking that each donation request campaign uses unique phone numbers to track the responses to that specific campaign. Perhaps that’s not correct thinking on my part.
One of the reasons I’m still technically listed as “Libertarian”, rather than reregistering. Oh, and being able to pick which primary I vote in. Doesn’t eliminate it, and it does mean the texts / voicemails I get tend to lean to Republican candidates these days, but it reduces the exposure.