Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

“Debt Settlement Order” Text Spams – How do they work?
There are likely to be two approaches: An autodialer of any description would be more than capable of sending an SMS or initiating a direct telephone call with any set of telephone numbers.  Such autodialiers can run off a personal computer via VoIP or some such third-party.  As to getting the numbers, it can be either from a purchased list (if they're serious about this and are obeying any call opt-out lists) or simply a number range dialed sequentially, whether they work or not. In a more serious operation, any returns are fed directly to a call centre where real human beings then initiate direct contact.  Otherwise it is simply a fishing expedition and any valid numbers can then be sold to other agencies as a screened list (and, therefore, more valuable). From an SMS perspective, anyone can purchase a vendor-level SMS Gateway subscription (of which there are loads of vendors - and note the number that allow "web-to-SMS") which permits you to receive and respond to any SMS received. This is always about the "law of large numbers".  If they can get in the hundreds of thousands of valid numbers and a small number respond then they can make money.  Like any spam, because a few are gullible, the rest of us are targets too. Update: A few searches for "software auto sms" and similar results in a fair number of prospects.  As I don't wish this to become too much of a "how-to" I'm not going to link.