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In the hours after President Trump won a second term last year, Americans nationwide started receiving hate-filled text messages taking aim at their race, gender, sexuality or religion. Investigators are still trying to find the culprit. Within the digital communications industry, it was an existential crisis. Despite years of cracking down on spam, fraud and abuse, someone bypassed the guardrails on a mass scale. NPR cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin has more.
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: Dr. Robert Greene II says his students were rattled on election night. The candidate that inspired so many of them, Vice President Kamala Harris, was clearly losing.
ROBERT GREENE: The atmosphere on campus was incredibly tense.
MCLAUGHLIN: Greene is an assistant history professor at the historically Black Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. After years of escalating dangerous rhetoric from Trump and his allies, the president was back. Students were already scared and unsettled, Greene said. Then they started getting disturbing text messages.
GREENE: The content was what was particularly shocking. This idea of lining up people to be put back into slavery - things like that.
MCLAUGHLIN: The texts were explicit, commanding students by name to work on a nearby nonexistent plantation. But it wasn't just Claflin in the crosshairs. It was other minority students - descendants of slaves in North Carolina, members of the LGBTQ+ community, Muslims. Each got a message tailored with threats about deportation, reeducation camps and slavery. It was a tidal wave of hate.
Law enforcement is still trying to figure out who was behind the campaign nearly three months later, but for people in the mobile communication space, this attack was exactly the kind of thing they had been working to avoid. NPR talked to nearly a dozen people involved in the industry to try and get to the bottom of how this racist mass text campaign might have happened.
BRAD HERRMANN: And so when I heard, I was like, you know, there's an open door, and somebody's going to get in big trouble for having that door be open still.
MCLAUGHLIN: That's Brad Herrmann. He's the founder and CEO of a mass texting company called Text-Em-All. Companies like his - hundreds of them - are devoted to sending mass messages. That could be everything from facilitating an ad campaign to helping local officials warn residents about a blizzard.
HERRMANN: We send large numbers of texts to groups of folks that want and need to receive those messages.
MCLAUGHLIN: Herrmann's company, Text-Em-All, is one link in the chain. There's also the carriers, like AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, and then there's other companies that facilitate messaging. Texting is a lucrative business. That's because it doesn't require anyone to download an app. It's one of the best and fastest ways to directly reach people.
JON GREENLEE: The reality is that text messaging works incredibly well.
MCLAUGHLIN: Jon Greenlee is the cofounder at another mass texting company, CheapestTexting.com.
GREENLEE: It works so well that it is extraordinarily attractive to criminals.
MCLAUGHLIN: As Greenlee says, companies aren't the only ones that find texting super convenient and direct. Criminals love to hawk their scams via text message. Fraud got so bad several years ago that the industry joined together to try and solve the problem. Here's Brad Herrmann again from Text-Em-All.
HERRMANN: Three years ago would have been almost Wild, Wild West, so the rate of improvement is pretty impressive.
MCLAUGHLIN: Behind the scenes, companies have been working to keep track of scammers and shut them down. They're doing it a few different ways. First off, most companies have their own filters scanning for anything malicious. In this case, texting executives I spoke with speculated that the criminals might have artfully crafted their missives to avoid obvious slurs that could trigger alarms.
HERRMANN: It didn't have a spammy (ph) URL. It didn't - you know, there - it wasn't asking anybody to click on anything.
MCLAUGHLIN: There's also something called the Campaign Registry, where companies now have to register their texting campaigns.
HERRMANN: The good news is that all of these systems that have been put in place really in the last couple years are actually pretty good.
MCLAUGHLIN: Good enough that Herrmann's Text-Em-All was able to stop the racist mass texters themselves. Herrmann says the bad actors signed up for a free trial but were immediately blocked. His company wasn't the only one.
HERRMANN: Yes, I suspect they tried a lot of different places and realized immediately it was not going to go anywhere.
MCLAUGHLIN: But they didn't stop there. The bad actors were also using anonymous free digital phone numbers from services including TextNow and Google Voice, to better hide their identities and locations. Both companies tell NPR they took action to stop the misuse, but by then, the messages were sent and the culprits had vanished. Experts agreed that it's clear the bad actors put in a lot of effort. They were unsettled by the sophistication of the attack. They said it's almost like the attackers were probing the system, looking for flaws to exploit now and maybe in the future.
One way they may have done that is by making their texts look like normal traffic between friends or family, a space that's less regulated. Here's John Greenlee from CheapestTexting.com. He uses the term P-to-P texting. He means individuals sending personal texts person to person.
GREENLEE: It's clear that this really exposes a weakness in P-to-P texting, especially if it can be sort of co-opted by individuals that are looking to send out mass text messages that don't adhere to, you know, the regulations.
MCLAUGHLIN: People probably don't want companies to monitor their texts, even to look for possible scams, Greenlee said. It's a huge privacy violation. But they'll also expect companies to do something to make sure nothing like this happens again.
GREENLEE: Yeah, I mean, it's truly awful to receive a message like that. It's almost like a mental bullet.
MCLAUGHLIN: A mental bullet fired at the American psyche - one that might force the industry to act, though it's unclear what that solution might look like. Jenna McLaughlin, NPR News.
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