Scams such as the Pig Butchering Scam often begin with initial contact made by:
My YouTube short below is intended to spread awareness of wrong number scams:
Often, but not always, a wrong number scam will begin with a text that includes a photo of a scantily clad woman.
This would be difficult to explain to 15-year-old me, but I do not find incoming texts with pictures of attractive women to be at all pleasant.
Such texts almost always mean that someone intends to scam me.
In my particular case, it is actually not merely almost always but simply always.
The scam message was likely initiated by an automated process.
There is no value in replying to a wrong number scam.
Even if you feel compelled to reply with a stream of expletives, all that replying can do is confirm to the scammer that your number is live.
Depending on the scam operation, you may be handed off immediately to a human if you answer the text or an automated script might continue on its own.