There was the one case with the scammers in the UK using a homemade cell tower to essentially send out phishing texts directly to cell phones in an area, completely bypassing the phone company. It seems like this scare texts scenario would fit that kind of tech even better, as you only need to send out a message once to a large amount of people and you don’t need to collect information in response like in a phishing scenario.

Well you can send people “SMS” messages from an email system; if you know who the carrier on that number is. usually it’s [the phone number]@[their service].

it’s not hard to find what the domain name for the email transfer service is, and who owns which cell phone, and they can just buy a list of phone numbers that ping off college cells under specific circumstances that would indicate they’re college students.

Almost certainly. How many times have they been busted for this now?

Fill in all the circle.