What do I tell patrons who believe they are receiving spam texts coming from TRAC?
Answer
Spam texts from "TRAC" phone numbers happen, and there is not much we can do other than let patrons know what to look for and reassure them that TRAC itself is not sending them spam.
Polaris text notifications are sent using Email to SMS, which means they actually come from an email address and not a phone number. The notices are sent from notification@... to the patron’s mobile number using an SMS Gateway. The gateway is different for each provider. For Telus it looks like this: [phonenumber]@msg.telus.com (e.g. 5551234567@...). This is not a Polaris-specific thing, anyone can send an email to SMS if they know the gateway.
On the Telus network, Email to SMS messages shows up on phones as coming from 999-999-9999. The main thing to look at is the text of the message where the first line shows the email address that it was sent from. So even though the messages appear to be coming from the same phone number, they are actually from different email addresses. TRAC email addresses are from notification@... and the scam ones may look like info@....
This is incredibly frustrating, definitely, especially for legitimate services like ours. All we can do is educate users to look for that initial email address (and not click on links!).
You can update your social media with spam warnings using this image here.
You can put up a poster with spam warnings using this poster image here.
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