My question arises from something mentioned in a different thread. (See the thread entitled “How to block text messages but not phone calls from unknown numbers,” which I started in this forum two days ago.) One of the responses advised reporting spam messages by forwarding them to Verizon, my mobile phone provider. I need more advice, because I haven’t been able to figure out how to do that. I’m asking by starting a new thread, because this is a different subject than that presented by my original question, and I don’t want this new question to get lost in the shuffle in the earlier thread, where there have already been a bunch of messages.
I have a Galaxy A03s. As stated, Verizon is my mobile phone provider.
In the other thread it was suggested that in order to report a message as spam, I could simply forward it to “spam” or to “7726”. I was given a link to a Verizon page, which said essentially the same thing.
I tried it, but without success. Forwarding to either of those addresses apparently isn’t possible without some additional step that I’ve been unable to figure out.
Here’s the problem. Ordinarily, when I send an original text message to someone, as soon as I’ve entered both the address and some text in the message box, a green button appears. Tap the button, and the message is sent. Sometimes when I’m replying to a business (such as a restaurant reservation service, asking me to confirm that I’m going to show up), a further step is required. Hitting the green button produces a message accompanied by a “send” button. The message warns that there may be charged if I hit “send.” Still, tap “send” and the message is sent. These are the only two ways of sending texts that I’ve ever seen.
Forwarding something specifically to “spam” or “7726” doesn’t work that way, at least not on my phone. After I tap “forward” and then enter “spam” in the address box, I get the message “no results found” (presumably meaning that the word “spam” couldn’t be found among my contacts). If I enter “7726” in the address box, the message just sits there, without anything else to tap, either to send the message immediately or to take me to a next step of tapping something else in order to send it. Under the address box appears a list of my contacts which contain the number 7726, and I can tap any of them to add them as recipients, but that obviously does me no good for purpose of reporting spam to Verizon. The only other “tappable” thing that appears is a “+” to right of the address box, but tapping that merely makes another address box pop up. I assume that that’s for the purpose of entering a second number, but that seems pointless when the idea is simply to forward the message to “spam” or “7726.”
Instead of entering “spam” or “7726” in the address box, I also tried entering one of my contacts after I had tapped forward. That produces word “Done.” Tapping “done” produces the green button, whereupon tapping the button forwards the message. So forwarding messages is possible, just not to “spam” or “7726.”
I also tried creating a new contact, which I named “Report Spam.” I tried to give it an address of “7726”, but the phone insisted on making it “772-6”, same as it would if those four numbers were merely the beginning of a longer string of numbers intended to form a phone number. And I can’t create an address of “spam” at all, since only numbers can be entered. So it apparently isn’t possible even to create in my contacts the address to which spam messages can be forwarded. (I therefore deleted “Report Spam.”)
I can create a new text message of my own and then enter 7726 for the recipient. When I do that the green button does appear, but that hardly does me any good for the purpose of forwarding spam text messages.
So what, in my benighted intellectual state, am I missing?
Any advice will be sincerely appreciated.
