For the past 12 hours my mobile phone has been receiving the following text message every 3-5 minutes from an ID number displayed as 900080004000 (a total of more than 70 such messages so far):
After a lengthy discussion via chat with a Verizon support rep, it seems the first instance of the message was a legit billing notice, but they claim that none of the duplicates were sent by Verizon. More troubling, two test texts sent by the Verizon rep were not received on my phone, suggesting that they were somehow being blocked. Also, it doesn’t seem as though I can block the spam texts from my end as they do not come from a recognizable phone number.
All this was beyond the ken of the Verizon rep and they’ve launched an internal investigation. If/when I hear anything back, will post it here.
Just mentioning all this in case someone has been having a similar issue.
Considering that the first one was real, it could just be a technical error, causing your phone to receive the same text over and over again and not letting anything else through.
This doesn’t sound like phishing or anything malicious to me since Verizon did confirm the first message was legitimate. If the subsequent texts were identical, it seems like your phone and the carrier aren’t communicating properly (for this message anyway) and the service is continuing to attempt a successful delivery of the message to your phone until the message either times out or an acceptable delivered acknowledgment is send back to the sender.
LG smartphone, Android, don’t recall what version.
But yeah, I think that’s probably what happened. In any event, I won’t know for sure as Verizon annoyed me further by leaving me a text message at 3:30 AM asking me to call a support number, which connected me to a person who immediately asked me for my password. At that point, the spam messages had stopped, so I left it there.