If you receive a text message that appears to be from AT&T, telling you that you had an unsuccessful payment, and to call 422850125, don’t respond!

Here’s how to make text message spammers, robocallers and telemarketers pay you money, because it’s illegal for them to text or call a cell phone.

If you get a text message supposedly from Wells Fargo, saying that your account has been temporarily locked for security reason, DO NOT click on the link! The message may come from 1410100007 or it may come from another number, it doesn’t matter. Again, do NOT click on the link.

Because of spyware companies like the NSO Group, and their Pegasus spyware, it can now be fatal to click a link sent to you in a text message or email. That is what experts believe happened to Jamal Khashoggi, and perhaps almost to Omar Abdulaziz, who received a fake text message supposedly from DHL, and which experts believe installed the NSO Pegasus spyware on his phone.

The USPS (the U.S. Postal Service or, as most people refer to it, simply, ‘the post office’) Informed Delivery service is now in full swing. Announced earlier this year, with the Informed Delivery service you can sign up with the post office to have scans and notifications of your mail sent to you via email and text message, including first class envelopes and packages that are on their way to you.

Here’s a nifty, little known service offered by Amazon: text message (i.e. SMS) notifications of when an Amazon order is delivered to your door, as well as when an order has been shipped, when a refund has been posted to your account, etc.. In this day and age of so-called ‘porch pirates’ (people who follow the UPS truck and steal your packages as soon as they are delivered) this is proving to be a very useful service!

A brand new SMS text message scam has hit smartphones. Coming from prvs=1846e0b0b3=kross@bloodsystems.org, it is an image of text, which reads “CONFIDENTIAL Mrs Thorens has assigned a rewarding charity project worth $2.5 Million USD to you. For full details, please contact her only at her private email address below.” The sample that we saw had an email address of mav22@rogers.com, although it’s quite likely that as that email address gets shut down, the scammers will swap in a different email address.

Getting SMS text messages on your Mac or iPad may just be the holy grail for many Macbook and iMac users, but until now iMessage has not worked with messages sent from Android phones. If the person with whom you are messaging has an iPhone, then you can message them from your Mac with iMessage, but that has not been the case for texting with Android and other non-iOS phones.

So you’ve set up 2-factor authentication at all of the places we’ve recommended, and now you can’t figure out how to get Facebook to send you the authorization security code text message to your mobile phone so that you can log into your Facebook account. Here’s where you need to find it.

We’ve all received them. Those spam SMS messages that tell you that “Your entry in our drawing WON you a FREE $1,000 Target Giftcard! Enter ‘312’ at www.target.com.tgrz.biz to claim it and we can ship it to you immediately!”, or something similar about a Walmart or Best Buy gift card. Now the scum behind that text message spam, Daniel Pessin and Jacob Engel, along with their shell company Rentbro, have been taken down by the Federal Communciations Commission (‘FCC’).

Oh how we have longed for this day! After we made the switch to the iPhone, after being staunch Android fans for so long, the thing that we missed most about Android was apps like SMS Backup, which automatically forward your text messages to your Gmail account. This means that if you are at your computer, and not by your phone, you still get your text messages. It also means that you can maintain an archive of your text messages, if you like. This function has not existed in any app for the iPhone, and in fact we tried having it developed on our own, and ran into obstacles at every turn (mostly restrictions by Apple). But now, at last, we have our beloved SMS backup to Gmail function back, on our iPhone, and we are very happy campers.

If you have suddenly started receiving odd, unexplained text messages that start with the term “BREW” in them, it’s not an advertisement for beer gone awry. They may come from 47205, from 9114, or from some other number you don’t recognize, but believe it for not, they aren’t spam. They usually start with strings of characters such as //BREW:01095caa or similar. BREW stands for “Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless”, and is a 3rd-party application development system for mobile phones that is used by some apps and other programs.

The U.S. and U.K. both seem poised on the brink of allowing people to send text messages to emergency services, instead of dialing 911 (999 in the UK).

Ok, now this is really cool. You can now get notices of new articles which show up at your favorite websites sent to your cell phone via SMS text message, as part of Yahoo’s free “RSS by SMS” alert service.

We’re not sure what Miss Manners would have to say about the correct way to apologize to someone whom you’ve just shot, but we’re pretty sure that she would not say that it’s ok to apologize by text message. Then again, given that the victim might not want to see your mug – except on a ‘wanted’ posted with “apprehended” stamped over it – maybe she would. While this may sound like an “only in the movies” scenario, it actually played out in real life in Orange County, California.