How to “get a subscriber”

I would like to clarify right away that what is described below is not a guide to actions and ideas for various types of spammers. I’m just describing a situation that happened to my wife, in which I am powerless, and I don’t see a solution to this “problem”.

The situation itself

The first time this happened was on July 9th. The girl's number (not his wife at that time) began to receive SMS messages with confirmation codes from various services, and they began calling numbers from robots dictating the confirmation code.

I started asking questions again – where I registered recently, what sites I might have visited – but I couldn’t remember anything. This continued until the night (we have +7 Moscow time) – at night she switches the phone to airplane mode, so only in the morning were we able to see the SMS messages that had arrived.

We looked at which services the SMS came from – the girl was registered with some, but with others she either had never registered or had never heard of them at all (because they don’t exist in our region). This does not look like an erroneous entry, because the frequency of SMS messages is from one to 5 minutes. That is, it is clear that there is a targeted attack on the number through various services.

Yesterday, October 5, the situation repeated itself again. It all started late at night (about 3 a.m.), according to our time, and then continued for another couple of hours.

What should I do?

An unusual situation. You won’t go to the police – this is not spam, but the correct operation of services. Complaining to services about incorrect requests is not a fact; many sites/services will be able to provide the IP addresses from which requests for account registration/password recovery were sent. Even if they do, what should you do about it? You won’t go to the police for the reason above.

But at the very least, the main question arises – why many services do not time out recovery/registration requests and where is the limit on the number of attempts.

It turns out that using the structure of the site you can write a simple script that, after a certain period of time, will “get” a person you don’t like. Why do this, who crossed the road, is not clear. “Interception” of codes, when after receiving an SMS scammers call you to find out the code – this did not happen, it was just a bombardment of SMS messages from services.

This once again confirms that the current practice of using only a number to register on a website is not a very good solution, but now it’s like that almost everywhere. There is also no law protecting in this situation. Reminds me of the joke about the salt shaker and the hacker, but in reality. It's all sad.