# How do you report a spam text message?

## Direct answer

How do you report a spam text message? In the United States, forward it to 7726, which spells SPAM on the keypad and is free on AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Your carrier will usually reply asking for the sender's number, because a forwarded text does not reliably carry the original sender with it. Answer that second message or the report cannot be matched to anything.

Report it inside your phone as well. On an iPhone, a thread from an unknown sender shows a Report Junk option; on Android, Google Messages offers Report spam. Those go to Apple or Google and to your carrier.

Report the fraud itself to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov if you lost money.

Tell the organization being impersonated. Banks, delivery carriers, toll authorities and government agencies almost all publish an address for forwarded scam messages, and they act on what arrives there.

Do not reply and do not tap the link. A reply confirms the number is live and reaching a real person.

## Key takeaways

- 7726 is the free carrier route, and it needs the sender's number to be worth anything.
- Blocking is not reporting.
- The FTC and the impersonated organization both want the report, and both act on volume.
- Close to six in ten reported messages turn out not to be scams, which is why triage matters more than raw reporting volume.
- Every free route ends with an acknowledgement rather than an answer, so the person who reported never learns what the message was.

Full page: https://www.smishalert.ai/answers/how-to-report-a-spam-text
## Where SmishAlert fits

Reporting to a carrier helps the carrier. Reporting to the organization being impersonated is the one route where that organization learns its own customers are being targeted in its name, while the campaign is still running.

SmishAlert gives an organization a reporting route of its own, so a suspicious message reaches the people accountable for it rather than a queue that never reports back.

A report comes back with a plain verdict and the reasoning behind it, rather than an acknowledgement.

On iPhone, messages from unknown senders are screened before anyone taps anything. On every other channel and platform, reporting is one tap on a screenshot or a forward.

Each report is recorded, so a security or fraud team can see when the same campaign is reaching several people at once.

When a message or link is confirmed malicious, the next unknown-sender check on any protected iPhone marks it automatically.

An individual can install SmishAlert on their own iPhone from the App Store and report messages the same way.