A text arrives from an unknown number asking whether the recipient is free for coffee, or flagging a suspicious charge on an Amazon account, or announcing an unpaid toll. The Federal Trade Commission has a one-line answer for all of them: do not reply. The agency’s advice is to forward the message to 7726, which spells SPAM on a phone keypad, and then delete it.
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The instruction looks too small to matter, which is part of why people ignore it. Replying feels polite or cautious, and a reply is exactly what the sender wants. The FTC’s consumer alerts explain why the answer to even a clearly wrong-number text is silence.
The FTC’s rule: no reply, no link
The agency’s alert on unexpected texts, published in April 2025, says in plain terms: “Don’t reply to unexpected text messages.” It adds a second rule, never to click links in unexpected messages, because scammers want a fast reaction and a link is the quickest way to get one. The alert lists the openers scammers lean on: a fake fraud alert from a bank or Amazon, a package or toll notice that points to a copycat USPS or toll site asking for a redelivery fee, a job offer, and a wrong-number message.
The reasoning is about what a reply proves. Terri Miller, a consumer education specialist at the FTC, wrote in an August 2024 alert that answering even to say the sender has the wrong number confirms the number is active, which can bring more messages. In the coffee-invitation scheme she described, the friendly chat eventually turns to a pitch for a secret way to make big money through cryptocurrency.
The alert is specific about what is at stake. The delivery and toll messages link to fake USPS or toll sites that ask for a redelivery fee or payment, which can expose a card number or Social Security number. The fake fraud alerts aim to start a phone call or a reply, and the job offers and wrong-number messages exist only to open a conversation with someone who answers.
Where 7726 sends the message
Forwarding to 7726 is not a report to the government. It hands the text to the wireless provider, which can use it to spot and block similar messages. Ari Lazarus, another FTC consumer education specialist, made that point in a June 2023 alert that also named the fake bank fraud alert as the most-reported text scam at the time and described a free-gift offer that ends with a request for shipping payment.
The FTC’s April 2025 alert gives two routes. One is to delete the text and use the phone’s own report-junk option. The other is to forward the message to 7726 (SPAM). Scams can also be reported to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and the agency keeps further text-scam material on its text scams page.
For a text that seems to come from a real company, a state tolling agency or a bank, the FTC’s advice is to skip the message entirely and contact the organization through a phone number or website already known to be genuine.
The FTC’s reasoning for skipping the message entirely has a practical side. A legitimate sender can be reached through channels that are already known to be genuine, so nothing is lost by ignoring a text that arrives out of the blue, while a reply or a tap on a link can start a chain of messages that is hard to stop.
Text-scam losses in the FTC’s own data
The agency put numbers on the problem in an April 2025 Data Spotlight on top text scams. Reported losses to text scams reached $470 million in 2024, more than five times the 2020 total, even as the number of reports fell. The share of text scam reports that involved money lost rose from 5% in 2020 to 11% in 2024.
The same spotlight ranked the five most-reported types for 2024: fake package delivery problems, phony job opportunities, fake fraud alerts, bogus toll notices and wrong-number texts. Together they accounted for roughly half of text fraud reports. It also cited a 2022 FCC report estimating that text messages are opened at rates up to 98%, against about 20% for email, which helps explain why scammers favor the channel.
The Data Spotlight describes how those conversations tend to run. Phony job offers are task scams, which offer simple online work and then ask victims to pay money to unlock earnings that never arrive. Wrong-number texts lead to friendly exchanges that steer people toward fake investment platforms, and the spotlight says those losses often reach tens of thousands of dollars.
Fake fraud alerts work through pressure instead. Messages posing as a bank or Amazon warn of suspicious charges and then push victims to move money to “safe” accounts that the scammers control. Toll notices imitating programs such as SunPass and FasTrak follow the earlier pattern, with a link that harvests card and Social Security numbers.
The agency’s alerts do not claim that forwarding stops the messages. What the Data Spotlight does show is that the money is lost after a person engages, through a link, a callback number or a conversation that starts with a reply.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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