No idea what kind of scams they are pushing but it seems very cheap and easy to abuse the system like this. I wish we could escalate this to operators and force them to deal with abusive customers properly like they clearly can't be bothered to do right now. Some countries probably have rules and regulations. Like Germany probably has. And yet, I get spam calls from German numbers on my own German number. So, clearly whatever there is, isn't working all that well.
What makes this so much more frustrating is that I work in the telephony industry, and I know the hoops brands have to jump through to make calls or send SMS/MMS. I work with TCR for brand/campaign registration, I work with NetNumber and STIR/SHAKEN cert issuance for attestation levels. All of these hurdles for us, and it seemingly makes no impact in the real world for spam filtration.
never had this issue on my personal android device, just my work iphone.