SALT LAKE CITY — After a crook hacked Renee Stevens’ Amazon account, he locked her out by changing the password, the email address and the phone number on the account. When Stevens tried to get back in, Amazon asked her to verify information she did not recognize.
“It said, ‘Please verify the phone number ending in 86,’ and we don’t have a phone number ending in 86,” Stevens said.
That was obviously the person who’d been trying to hack her.
Stevens started the painstaking process of proving she was the real owner of the account.
Eventually satisfied, Amazon told her it would text a six-digit code so she could reset her password.
But the code didn’t show up.
She called back.
Same answer.
Still no code.
“We are just in a circle, ‘Groundhog Day,’ merry-go-round loop because we can’t get anywhere,” Stevens said.
Her complaint is one the KSL Investigators have heard many times before: Someone gets hacked, then cannot get their password changed because they never receive the code texted to them.
The trouble can have to do with an entirely different kind of fraud: bogus text messages.
Think about how many scam texts you get: imposters pretending to be your bank, the Department of Transportation, the post office, or even police or, yes, Amazon. There are so many that phone companies and messaging apps have started screening them for us.
Some scam texts get through; others get pushed into a spam folder. You know about the spam folder in your email. But did you know your text messages may have one, too?
Renee didn’t. She does now. And, indeed, the six-digit codes Amazon had been sending her were not missing. Her phone had flagged them as spam.
Once Stevens found the folder, she finally got back into her account.
“I cannot believe that all this time, all I had to do was … after a month of this,” Stevens said.
A simple fix, but only if you know it exists.
Here is where to look
On an iPhone running iOS 26, Apple says Messages automatically filters some junk messages into a Spam folder. Open Messages, tap the Filters button, tap Spam, then tap the message you want to review. To move it back, tap Not Spam, then Move to Inbox. Apple also says Filter Spam is on by default in iOS 26.
If the missing text is not in Spam, also check Unknown Senders. Open Messages, tap the Filters button, then tap Unknown Senders. Apple says messages from people you have not previously interacted with, or who are not in your contacts, may appear there when unknown-sender screening is turned on.
On Android phones using Google Messages, open Google Messages, tap your profile photo or icon, tap More options, then tap Spam & blocked. From there, select the conversation you want to review. Google says unblocking a contact moves the conversation back to the Home screen.
On Samsung phones using Samsung Messages, go to the Inbox tab, tap More options — the three vertical dots — then Settings. Tap Block numbers and spam to view blocked numbers and messages.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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