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How do you forward a text?

• orra 2y ago
  Often there's a long click menu in your SMS app to do it. But all that really does is copy the body into a new SMS. There's no metadata to indicate it's forwarded, as you suspect. This means texting 7726 is a two step process. First you send the body. You immediately get a response asking for the phone number of the spam sender, so then you sent that.
  • lxgr 2y ago
    Does the phone number even matter for tracing? As far as I understand SMS delivery, it’s not authenticated at all. I suppose it can be used to help the operator identify the actual incoming message in their logs?
    • toast0 2y ago
      Source number authorization depends on how the messages get to the carrier and how the carrier has things setup. At the end of the day, there's a lot of trust though; and a lot of connections would be difficult/expensive to confirm that the connection is authorized to send messages from the sources they're using. Think of BCP38 for IP spoofing, but for number spoofing. If you get an appropriate country mobile number from a carrier in that country, are you going to pay for a portability lookup to confirm that carrier is the authorized carrier for that number? Does that carrier check source numbers for all of the connections they have? Some of the aggregators are good at checking sources, and some aren't, but aggregators are often authorized to send messages from many different countries, so they're likely to have their connections unchecked, because keeping the list updated is hard. It's like IP transit, but a lot worse.