It’s funny you say that. On all the possibly scammy websites that I sign up for, I used Marc xxx as my name, and somehow I did get some texts using that name. I still wonder how they connected my cell# to throwaway emails and a made up name.
It probably falls under the ‘not illegal’ category. They got the number somehow, and I would bet it’s from some stupid agreement that lets a company sell his number and whoever buys it is allowed to send messages to it.
It’s also hard to get harassment charges for these, since realistically it is hard to contact the assholes and tell them to stop sending messages, which is required for most cases. There’s also the issue that harassment needs to be a repeated thing (and usually after being told to stop) from the same source/conspiracy. If you could prove all of these different messages were from the exact same organization, or that each entity sending the messages had collaborated, you could possibly get a judge to agree that harassment took place. Then, of course, your issue becomes the question of who did the harassment. If the judge/jury believes that it was a particular individual at the corporation, maybe that person could be prosecuted, but if they only will say that it was the entity, like a PAC or LLC or inc. or whatever, you’re boned. No one holds business/political entities accountable.
All that to say… those of us who get these messages are boned, with little legal recourse. I just block the numbers and delete. It seems like it works, because I haven’t gotten any messages like OP did for the last year or so. They must reuse numbers to send texts.
Some email systems now won’t mark things as spam. They’ll have a popup window asking if you want them to help you unsubscribe from the shit. I about blew it when I saw that.
There was something that just felt wrong about the sync app thread in one of the lemmy.world communities. Just post after post of “yay, it’s like having reddit back again.” Reddit can fuck off. I like the novelty and slight roughness around the edges.
Zip-tie surround it with carts.
Even in the very, very conservative places in the US that I’ve lived in, topless is legal. While it would definitely attract staring, women have the same ability to show skin as any male. Legality hasn’t lessened the sexualization of the breasts.
For better or worse, that aspect is never going away. Places with less funds, like rural counties and cities, rely on their police to do everything that gets called in to 911 and isn’t fire/ems/construction (which, thankfully, they have dedicated teams/people for).