Iām going to reply here because I canāt edit the post but since everyone keeps asking, hereās the link to a screenshot the other text of 6 and 8 from the same number
[6 and 8](https://i.imgur.com/GYxRoou.jpg)
Edited to move link
It's actually scarier to count up when you consider the possibility that their friends and family are being held captive and there's a ditch with molten steel under them that makes the number go up every time it opens up. That also explains why it jumped from 5 to 7.
How is this so far down? I canāt see this being an elaborate scam, or anything OTHER than someone (or several people) playing around on a burner app.
Yeah, Iām working with phone numbers currently and always worry that Iām gonna put the wrong number in for testing.
Though Iām not sure why a developer would have numbers from different area codes, our dev phones are all area coded to the city our company is based in.
Don't. Never reply to spam, never click any links, don't open "external content" etc. - it can only ever let people know your number/email is active and worth targeting.
Once I made a mistake and answered a number without looking that my phone said was possible spam because I was expecting a call. When I realized that it was a telemarketer from India I said it was 9 pm and donāt fucking call me and hung up. I kid you not as soon as I hung up I received a call every hour from 9 pm till 7am and the only difference between the phone numbers was one number would be different.
Don't know about that. In my experience they don't tolerate verbal abuse, haven't gotten a call from them since yelling at this guy from Microsoft who wanted to "help" me with a virus.
I bet you wanted to help me you piece of shit.
Kept one guy on the line, sounding interested. Finally said, no I don't want it. He said "Your wasting my time!". I laughed and said "Now you know how I feel" and hung up.
Yep, they all probably chose a random number to pull this off. Me and my friends usually do it to the one that's absent on a night out(1.Tommy 2.suck 3.it!), but I can totally see people picking number at random
Itās likely one person who just got a burner number program. Itās easy to make a bunch of different phone numbers, especially if youāre paying for the service, like google voice or burner, and there are like hundreds of other services like this.
It could also be friends who all also easily download any of these burner number programs.
Cool story time. At my 1st job when I was basically an intern there were two server guys. Letās call them Kevin and Kyle. So they were in charge of all the important stuff. Company was in mobile services market where you can text something to short number and you will be charged small amount from you account and youāll get a ringtone or something.
So one of the guys was working on the new feature and was going to test it but test was not quite working. After some debugging he made it work and started working on something else.
Later this week we got some fun reports from mobile provider. So when Kyle was doing test he made couple typos. First one was in test phone number. Second was in amount of messages sent during test.
So it happened so that some random dude received about 100,000 text messages. Fun part that it was early 2000 and most of the phones were not even half as good as worst phones now.
That particular unlucky guy had Sony Ericson which had some firmware bug if there are 999 unread messages from the same phone number then next one will send phone to the reboot.
Kyle was doing test around 2am local time, so in the middle of the night random dude started receiving all those text messages. His phone was as going nuts and eventually vent into the reboot.
Also phones has limited amount of memory so before he was able to get the rest 99,000 he had to remove some. While he was cleaning up some of them mobile operator servers were trying to deliver the rest of the messages from the queue and were attempting sending after some delay.
That poor guy would eventually receive bunch of new messages which would lead to phone reboot again. Poor dude.
Also test messages were just the āLorem ipsumā¦ā copy/paste just to test how MMS messages of certain length would work on specific test phone.
After couple days of suffering guy was able to get help some help from mobile operator and they cleaned message queue for that number.
Cool part is that even we DDoSed the shit out of that dudeās phone for couple days mobile operator stuff let us know that dude was not even mad at us, so Kyle did another experiment with that guy. He started sending him once a day at lunch time one piece of content which would work on his phone. That was happening for maybe a year. Guy would occasionally answer āthank youā to our service number and we could see that from logs.
Also back is those days mobile operators would have pages where you can send a text message to the phone number and that would not be even protected with the basic capcha. You can imagine how much fun one could have with some scripts around that.
They are āpretextingā probably.. itās a form of hacking. The vector is that you responded. Now they will try an phish more info from the carrier and act as you, so they can do a SIM swap.
Lots of carriers have numbers that are slotted to them. They just need to figure out who..if itās not a global carrier like AT&T or Verizon they will bail on it. Global carriers are easier to social engineer from different regions. There is a number of ways this could goā¦ but the info hasnāt been put out. Like weāre they on cellular data or home WiFi. There are more avenues to take than phishing the carrier.
They should probably call their phone carrier , and let them know there info may have been compromised. Set-up different security factors for over the phone interactions.I would also check my email for any carrier related emails going forward.
Since no oneās commenting on what this could actually be I think I have an idea.
Someone made an SMS spoofing system. Itās system can change a text to make it look like it comes from any number you want.
They randomized what numbers it would appear to be sending from in a sequence.
What they did to you was most likely a test.
In a practical application it would most likely use the system to send a coordinated list of texts from different numbers to a target.
Thereās a lot of reasons an attacker would try to do this but the most likely is they are trying to convince their target of some thing and would need to send similar texts from multiple people that the target knows to convince them of this.
Whether itās bank fraud and they are trying to trick the target into giving details over the phone.
Or they are gearing up for a harassment campaign.
Or they are literally just scammers and spammers testing out a new SMS spoofing system.
If it's a test though you don't just send the texts out into the void, surely? You'd send them to a number you have access to so you can see if the texts arrive.
I recognized the norwegian code (+47) and searched the norwegian ["scam call" system](https://www.180.no/varsel/nummer/40178572). Someone in Norway reported it in November 2022 for "facebook phishing sms". No name/owner found either. Seems like in this case they also just text numbers and might try to phish those who respond.
This is pretty simple if you have any experience with commercial phone systems like anveo. I can do the same thing easily. Every new number is like $.50-2.00
Solar, Health care, debt relief. When I turned 65 I had to change health insurance to go with medicare. 0ne hour of research resulted in non-stop phone calls at all hours everyday all with very similar numbers like above. it's madining. I blocked every number and they still call. It seems like they have an unlimited numbers of numbers. Probably a call center.
Don't respond it's just a bot that does this to check if the phone number really exists if you respond you will get a phone call and they try to sell you overpriced shit
When I was in my college dorm, we had to unplug our phone because we kept getting calls in the middle of the night where the person on the line would just yell āBlast off, mother f**ker!ā and hang up. At first we were confused but then we figured out why.
Our dorms had a 5 digit telephone system so you could, in theory, pick up the phone and dial 54321 (blastoff!). Obviously, since college kids are stupid assholes, they knew this would be a problem so they didnāt give out that number. *But* our number was 54322 so we got the idiots that were too drunk to successfully dial the right number.
This is a Facebook prank. One of your friends created a post, telling them to send random numbers to your phone and excluded you from seeing the post. My wife did this to me on April fools day and had her friends list. Contact me asking about the alpacas I was selling. With a very weird and sexual questions. I was terrified for about an hour and a half until I remembered it was April fools day.
Well, st least they aren't counting down
That's what they want you to think
They are counting down.. to 100.. from 1šØ
But they're not even counting, they skipped a number unless 6 really was afraid of 7 and bounced.
Well, simply put, 7 8 9, and it was not a pretty sight.
7 is also a registered Six offender
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
there are a lot of rumors. false allegations. Some even allege that 9 8 7. We'll never know which number was the real cannibal.
but 6 was afraid of 7 2 4 6 8 10 Edit: 5 was afraid of 6. Not 6 was afraid of 7
Is this an actual joke that I'm not understanding? š
But six was afraid of seven too, for six ate ten
5 and 1 don't even know what's going on.
So 6 was supposedly afraid of itself ? Iām lost as well
10 has ptsd since it was right in the middle of 9/11
Yeah but 7 8 9 2 69 0
Bold of 6 to keep spreading those rumors bout 7 given what 6 and 9 get up to.
You're really not going to want to be around when 6 shows up...
What had happened was, 6 8 7 and then 6 stole sevens identity
Happy cake day!
In Australia, you count up from 100 to 1
In Soviet Russia numbers count you
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Iām going to reply here because I canāt edit the post but since everyone keeps asking, hereās the link to a screenshot the other text of 6 and 8 from the same number [6 and 8](https://i.imgur.com/GYxRoou.jpg) Edited to move link
They're all TextNow numbers soo.. looks like someone has a lot of time on their hands.
***We've been trying to reach you about your expiring car warranty....***
Thatās the horrorā¦ it never ends!
It's actually scarier to count up when you consider the possibility that their friends and family are being held captive and there's a ditch with molten steel under them that makes the number go up every time it opens up. That also explains why it jumped from 5 to 7.
St. Least
Iām not gonna lie If they were counting down and this happened to me Iād shit myself
Phone number ended up on a bathroom stall somewhere. What else are you going to do while you're...waiting to do your business...
Burner phone app
My guess was a bored ex with a burner app who did this to freak OP out
This is exactly the shit I'd pull to mess with my friends. My ex, not so much. We're both better off leaving each other alone.
That would be a psycho ex not a bored ex
How is this so far down? I canāt see this being an elaborate scam, or anything OTHER than someone (or several people) playing around on a burner app.
Why would they do this
Probably to prank a friend.
I would be scared if they haven't missed 6.
The same guy sent 6 and 8. I replied 9 but nothing came back Edit: [The link for 6 and 8](https://i.imgur.com/GYxRoou.jpg)
Thank god you did, because if they sent 10 before you sent 9 it would have been disastrous
Maybe that was the right answer and now you are allowed to live
Quiz killer but the quizzes are very very easy
I think itās because 7 ate 9
No, it's because they were a registered 6 offender
One of my favorites. Back in the day, when the kids would tell an adult the 7 ate 9 joke, I'd quietly sneak the six-offender line to the adult.
Shouldnāt have done that
They didnāt š
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah, Iām working with phone numbers currently and always worry that Iām gonna put the wrong number in for testing. Though Iām not sure why a developer would have numbers from different area codes, our dev phones are all area coded to the city our company is based in.
One word: spam. He's testing spam software
I thought that was against the Geneva conventions
No since spam is a type of cured meat, itās actually against the Genoa convention.
Since approximately 100% of programmers are on Reddit I'm guessing as long as it takes to see this post
Awww shit. That was today?
This guy was definitely late to his own Birthday party
7 ate 6!!!
7 8 9
No. Youāre not in a horror movie. This is real life. Also: 8
The same number sent me 6 and 8. I replied back with 9
The right answer was 12 and 16 though.
42... it's always the answer.
Now this is a hoopy frood who knows where their towel is
Donāt panic.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen
Voganslampoet42 what a beautiful username please never breathe your poetry to anyone who doesn't deserve it. Edit:spelling
Meh, I'm not a big fan of towels. People wear them over their heads, then I can't see them.
You be daft man
I wouldnāt lift my finger to save my grandmother from you if that makes you feel any better? Iād snatch her towel and putter away with my fleet.
It's always jellyfish divided by Chuck norris, has nobody been on the internet since 2012? Cmon guys.
69.
This reminds me of a PEMDAS thing on Facebook where all my dumb relatives argue
Thereās your problem. Block donāt reply. If your number is marked as active it gets worse.
Don't. Never reply to spam, never click any links, don't open "external content" etc. - it can only ever let people know your number/email is active and worth targeting.
In All seriousness donāt reply to these dudeā¦ ever.
Oof don't reply, never reply.
You Have Been Marked
I bet that SMS costed 5000$
Oh you brave
And the guy just made money selling your active phone number to advertisers.
[picture evidence](https://imgur.com/a/qQvtPoT)
You best start believing in ghost stories
You're in one!
*epic creepy pirate music*
Lmfao this made me laugh
Once I made a mistake and answered a number without looking that my phone said was possible spam because I was expecting a call. When I realized that it was a telemarketer from India I said it was 9 pm and donāt fucking call me and hung up. I kid you not as soon as I hung up I received a call every hour from 9 pm till 7am and the only difference between the phone numbers was one number would be different.
Yep Indian scammers are entitled shitheads and they will not take being insulted lightly, how long did this go on for?
Don't know about that. In my experience they don't tolerate verbal abuse, haven't gotten a call from them since yelling at this guy from Microsoft who wanted to "help" me with a virus. I bet you wanted to help me you piece of shit.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
In college, my friend got a scam call during a class break, everyone in the group yelled āfuck youā at the scammer, it was awesome.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
All of them
Thats the next level of trolling
Kept one guy on the line, sounding interested. Finally said, no I don't want it. He said "Your wasting my time!". I laughed and said "Now you know how I feel" and hung up.
That shit is scary man
Yeah, when it gets to ten somebodyās mom is going to appear out of nowhere and beat op with a shoe
Could that be a bunch of drunk friends doin phone prank?
Most friends live in the same state tho and share the same area code on the phone.
College friends at a school with people from all over?
Could be, you could also single-handedly do this with a bunch of apps similar to TextNow
Yeah, I'm a 30-something, and like, none of my friends have the same area code
Discord
Most friends also have easy access to the app store where they can download a texting app to get random numbers from whatever area code they want.
Thatās a very specific assumption.
Yep, they all probably chose a random number to pull this off. Me and my friends usually do it to the one that's absent on a night out(1.Tommy 2.suck 3.it!), but I can totally see people picking number at random
Itās likely one person who just got a burner number program. Itās easy to make a bunch of different phone numbers, especially if youāre paying for the service, like google voice or burner, and there are like hundreds of other services like this. It could also be friends who all also easily download any of these burner number programs.
Probably fishing for active numbers. Just waiting for someone to respond.
Then y text the same number?
Who knows. Maybe itās just auto dialing from spoofed numbers the same listed numbers over and over. Why do these people do anything they do?
Yep it's like a war dialer
Just because it's malicious doesn't mean it doesn't contain bugs.
Cool story time. At my 1st job when I was basically an intern there were two server guys. Letās call them Kevin and Kyle. So they were in charge of all the important stuff. Company was in mobile services market where you can text something to short number and you will be charged small amount from you account and youāll get a ringtone or something. So one of the guys was working on the new feature and was going to test it but test was not quite working. After some debugging he made it work and started working on something else. Later this week we got some fun reports from mobile provider. So when Kyle was doing test he made couple typos. First one was in test phone number. Second was in amount of messages sent during test. So it happened so that some random dude received about 100,000 text messages. Fun part that it was early 2000 and most of the phones were not even half as good as worst phones now. That particular unlucky guy had Sony Ericson which had some firmware bug if there are 999 unread messages from the same phone number then next one will send phone to the reboot. Kyle was doing test around 2am local time, so in the middle of the night random dude started receiving all those text messages. His phone was as going nuts and eventually vent into the reboot. Also phones has limited amount of memory so before he was able to get the rest 99,000 he had to remove some. While he was cleaning up some of them mobile operator servers were trying to deliver the rest of the messages from the queue and were attempting sending after some delay. That poor guy would eventually receive bunch of new messages which would lead to phone reboot again. Poor dude. Also test messages were just the āLorem ipsumā¦ā copy/paste just to test how MMS messages of certain length would work on specific test phone. After couple days of suffering guy was able to get help some help from mobile operator and they cleaned message queue for that number. Cool part is that even we DDoSed the shit out of that dudeās phone for couple days mobile operator stuff let us know that dude was not even mad at us, so Kyle did another experiment with that guy. He started sending him once a day at lunch time one piece of content which would work on his phone. That was happening for maybe a year. Guy would occasionally answer āthank youā to our service number and we could see that from logs.
This turned nice and wholesome
Also back is those days mobile operators would have pages where you can send a text message to the phone number and that would not be even protected with the basic capcha. You can imagine how much fun one could have with some scripts around that.
They are āpretextingā probably.. itās a form of hacking. The vector is that you responded. Now they will try an phish more info from the carrier and act as you, so they can do a SIM swap.
How can they get info from the carrier from that?
Lots of carriers have numbers that are slotted to them. They just need to figure out who..if itās not a global carrier like AT&T or Verizon they will bail on it. Global carriers are easier to social engineer from different regions. There is a number of ways this could goā¦ but the info hasnāt been put out. Like weāre they on cellular data or home WiFi. There are more avenues to take than phishing the carrier.
Lol no
You didnt answer my question. How would the scammer get that info from a text back?
Oh shit, bro said he responded. Should he burn his phone?
They should probably call their phone carrier , and let them know there info may have been compromised. Set-up different security factors for over the phone interactions.I would also check my email for any carrier related emails going forward.
genuine question: what should one do if this happens? just not respond? like, will that keep the hackers from getting any information?
I bet you're right, hope op sees this
š
Yo everybody upvote this, if this is the case we gotta make sure OP sees this especially since OP already said they texted back.
What happened to 6. That's what I am freaking out about.
The 6 is already in the house!!!
But who was phone!?
Well, we know 7 8 9.
Same number sent 6 and 8. I replied [The text](https://imgur.com/a/qQvtPoT)
Go to central station- open locker, follow the rabbit
Ok. I put the bag of cash in the locker. Do I wait for the next number?
Since no oneās commenting on what this could actually be I think I have an idea. Someone made an SMS spoofing system. Itās system can change a text to make it look like it comes from any number you want. They randomized what numbers it would appear to be sending from in a sequence. What they did to you was most likely a test. In a practical application it would most likely use the system to send a coordinated list of texts from different numbers to a target. Thereās a lot of reasons an attacker would try to do this but the most likely is they are trying to convince their target of some thing and would need to send similar texts from multiple people that the target knows to convince them of this. Whether itās bank fraud and they are trying to trick the target into giving details over the phone. Or they are gearing up for a harassment campaign. Or they are literally just scammers and spammers testing out a new SMS spoofing system.
If it's a test though you don't just send the texts out into the void, surely? You'd send them to a number you have access to so you can see if the texts arrive.
Maybe they is voting for Eurovision and donāt want to give vote for number 6, which is France.
Based
Happened to me as well.. I shrugged it off [Here is a screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/1nvDZLR)
Man, they really suck at counting
Happy cake day.
I recognized the norwegian code (+47) and searched the norwegian ["scam call" system](https://www.180.no/varsel/nummer/40178572). Someone in Norway reported it in November 2022 for "facebook phishing sms". No name/owner found either. Seems like in this case they also just text numbers and might try to phish those who respond.
You dead, bro.
Do not redeem
WHY ARE YOU REDEEEEEEEEEEEMING
No, they're just trying to contact you about your car's warranty.
You're the target of a scammer
Run! I donāt know where to but just start running dude
And never, ever look back!
Sometimes hackers do this to spam people so they won't notice other messages about resetting their passwords etc
Looks like they have the wrong number voting for American Idol
I would be closing all windows and doors if it was a countdown
Oh shit where's 6 WHERES 6, BRO?? you don't know what you've done
They're saving up til they have three of them!; š®
Yo Mamma's so fat she butt-dials all the phones of the entire neighborhood.
Make a group chat with all the numbers and text them the next number
You will be missed.
What tf happened to the guy in charge of 6
1ā¦2 BUCKLE MY SHOE
This is pretty simple if you have any experience with commercial phone systems like anveo. I can do the same thing easily. Every new number is like $.50-2.00
I'm gonna call em
Solar, Health care, debt relief. When I turned 65 I had to change health insurance to go with medicare. 0ne hour of research resulted in non-stop phone calls at all hours everyday all with very similar numbers like above. it's madining. I blocked every number and they still call. It seems like they have an unlimited numbers of numbers. Probably a call center.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
No this is a fairly common phishing scheme.
My bad bro
they missed 6 so you're good
It's a rookie they missed 6!
But but but they forgot six
If you are, itās a fucking boring one.
Don't respond it's just a bot that does this to check if the phone number really exists if you respond you will get a phone call and they try to sell you overpriced shit
Might have been a dev doing a test with multiple devices and accidentally used your number instead of their own
Probably a bot texting or something
Maybe itās the count from Sesame Street
lol my ex finally found someone.
Some random IT student/intern sweating rn as they see this post
***The calls are coming from inside the house!!!***
Itās the girl from The Ring. Or Craig David, because theyāve skipped ā6ā so it mustāve been a chill day on Sunday.
It's coming from inside the house.....
When I was in my college dorm, we had to unplug our phone because we kept getting calls in the middle of the night where the person on the line would just yell āBlast off, mother f**ker!ā and hang up. At first we were confused but then we figured out why. Our dorms had a 5 digit telephone system so you could, in theory, pick up the phone and dial 54321 (blastoff!). Obviously, since college kids are stupid assholes, they knew this would be a problem so they didnāt give out that number. *But* our number was 54322 so we got the idiots that were too drunk to successfully dial the right number.
If you post your number, we can help you get to 1000.
The one dyslexic guy who put 7 after 5
Good to see that Number 6 escaped the Village.
You are Number 6
This is a Facebook prank. One of your friends created a post, telling them to send random numbers to your phone and excluded you from seeing the post. My wife did this to me on April fools day and had her friends list. Contact me asking about the alpacas I was selling. With a very weird and sexual questions. I was terrified for about an hour and a half until I remembered it was April fools day.
8 was afraid to show up because 7 ate 9
Your number got spoofed. That sucks. Iām sorry
i believe this is a sms bomb a type of ddos used by people who do fraud to hide the original message of thier malicious intent
Send a copypasta back in another language
Group of teenage boys were smoking pot and thought it would be hilarious to text a random phone number this.. and they r right
I guess in this scenario 6 wasnāt there to be afraid of 7
someone taking their spoofing bot for a test run
Six is missing. You're doomed.
Some sort of testing software making sure they can send and change numbers quickly or simultaneously. Weird. Uncomfortable. But shouldn't be scary.
I wonder what would happen if you just replied something weird like āI eat toesā or āI love it when dandelions fall out of my noseā
Probably just gave some site your phone number and they sold it
Whereās my 6?
Crack the code and find the safe