Are you tired of receiving commercial or fraudulent messages and calls on your phone? Use this free service to report spam and scams and have numbers blocked by carriers.
Like many mobile phone users, you must regularly receive unwanted text messages and calls. Painful requests, most often of an advertising nature, to offer you renovation work, training linked to the CPF, telephone plans, solar panels or all kinds of promotions. But, beyond this spam, there are also more and more dangerous requests: phishing attempts. Imitating legitimate and official messages, they aim to deceive you and direct you to a site or a trapped form in order to recover your sensitive personal and banking data, when it is not simply a question of making you call a premium rate number at high price. And any excuse is good to lure you into sometimes very well-crafted traps: a missed delivery, a fine to pay, your Vitale card to update or even a Crit’Air sticker to obtain… The crooks dare anything, and They don’t lack imagination!
Fortunately, there are several ways to fight against these scourges in addition to blocking calls from unknown numbers that you can activate on your smartphone. Including a little-known one, but which is becoming more popular: it is the 33700, a platform created a few years ago by the French Association for the Development of Multi-Operator Multimedia Services and Uses (AF2M), which notably brings together the major French operators (Bouygues Telecom, Free, Orange and SFR). This service allows you to report unwanted SMS and calls. It is free with most operators (Bouygues Telecom, Orange, SFR, NRJ Mobile, Crédit Mutuel Mobile, CIC Mobile, Cofidis Mobile and Auchan Telecom) – for others, the service may cost the price of a normal SMS.
The platform is very easy to use. Simply forward the SMS to 33700 or, if it is a call, forward the number marked “spamvocal” to make a report. You will then receive a receipt asking you to provide the spam sender number and other additional information, such as the sender’s name and the date and time you received the spam. The platform then sends you a thank you SMS to close the report. Note that you can also pass via website, by filling out a form or submitting a screenshot. A message qualification phase then begins, carried out by the operator concerned to determine whether it is indeed spam. If this is the case, he will have to do what is necessary to get the service provider to stop his practices – he can go as far as cutting the number. Please note, several alerts must be sent via 33700 for the number to be taken into consideration. Note that, in the event of a scam attempt, you can also report it to the platform Signal Spam – just register for free – or that of the Government, Pharos.
Certainly, 33700 does not have an immediate effect. But by feeding this service with your reports you will help identify and eradicate spammers and scammers more quickly. Especially since the platform can act at the source since it is managed by the operators themselves!
Please note, some commercial SMS messages are not spam. These include, for example, promotions or offers for services to which you may have already subscribed in the past, for example from your mobile operator or from stores of which you are a customer. If you no longer wish to receive them, simply reply STOP to this message. A simple and free operation.