The Texting Trust Tax

This is a summary. Read the full article, with all 52 sources, at simplyrcs.ai.

Scam texts and calls impose a cost on every legitimate business that tries to reach its customers. The tools that fix it shouldn't carry a toll of their own.

By Noah Kamrat, co-founder and CEO of Signalmash.

I own a text messaging company, and I think about this channel every day. If I've stopped paying attention to my own messages, it's worth asking what that costs the organizations trying to reach people like me.

I call that the trust tax. Almost every organization that texts or calls its customers now pays it, including those that have never been impersonated.

The argument in brief

• The size of the problem. In 2025, Americans reported losing $3.5 billion to imposter scams to the Federal Trade Commission. When people told the FTC how a scam first reached them, text messages topped the list.
• Every signal a customer checks can be counterfeited. A familiar number, a plausible link and a fluent message were never proof of authenticity, but they used to be reasonable proxies. They no longer are.
• Where the tax is paid. Customers carry the uncertainty created by scams into every text and call they receive, including the legitimate ones. 70% of consumers told TransUnion they had missed legitimate business calls because of fraud concerns.
• Verification at the point of decision. The answer is to put verified identity where the customer decides. For text messages, that means RCS. For calls, it means branded caller ID.
• The tax on the tax. Carriers describe verified identity as essential to consumer trust. They also charge businesses for every call and message that displays it. T-Mobile charges about 38% more to deliver an RCS text than an SMS, and a $500 activation fee to launch an RCS campaign. Verizon charges the same for RCS as for SMS and MMS, which proves that verified messaging doesn't have to cost more.
• The polluter pays. Verified identity protects everyone on the network, including the carriers' own subscribers. It should be priced as infrastructure, not metered as a premium feature.

The full article covers the toll agencies paying for texts they never sent, the economics of trust from Akerlof to Spence, what branded calls really cost, five steps to stop paying the trust tax, and all 52 sources.

Disclosure: I own Signalmash, a text messaging company. Our product, SimplyRCS, provides RCS business messaging, and we also sell branded caller ID. I have a commercial interest in both.

Read the full article at simplyrcs.ai