This is a good post.

Off-topic, but on your parenthetical about SMS "wrong number" texts "(That scam doesn’t even make sense...)", part of why they do it is what's called "warming up" their sending number so that it's seen as legit by carriers and SMS filters. They're also seeing whether you're a real person who responds, in which case they can come back later with a more sophisticated scam (or re-sell you number, which is now more valuable, to another scammer for that purpose).

But you're right that it doesn't make much sense as a text you might receive naturally. Best thing is to not reply so that you're not feeding the beast.

Incidentally, I used ChatGPT to refresh my memory about how this works, and in its initial response it got it backwards, saying that "warming up" is what it does to your number. You can't trust these things one bit! Your post calls it "automated irresponsibility", and I like that.

I agree it makes sense to the attacker to do it. I was just thinking that it shouldn't make sense to the person answering the text to think that it could be a wrong number.

Thanks for reading my post.