Question Keep getting MMS messages from people in my contacts, but they did not send them

[SJMaye]

I have a Samsung Galaxy S9+. A year more ago I began receiving 1KB MMS messages from people in my contacts with a link simply stating DOWNLOAD. It looked suspicious, so I checked with those contacts. THEY DID NOT SEND THEM. For the last year I thought it was a glitch with the Google Messages app I was using for text messages. This time I deleted Google Messages and started using Samsung Messages. I started getting them there as well. This leads me to this this is an issue with my phone.

Has anyone else had this problem?

This image shows such messages from just one of my contacts. I am receiving them from several of my contacts.

 

[B. Diddy]

I can confirm that although I am running with RCS enabled, my wife's messaging app was the Samsung app without RCS. When I changed her default messaging app to Google Messages and enabled RCS the MMS messages did go through.

With all this does it mean these mystery "Download" messages are simply an oddity caused by me being out of data on my plan?

I believe so. Keep an eye on this in the future to see if you can confirm it.

 

[SJMaye]

I believe so. Keep an eye on this in the future to see if you can confirm it.

My data plan renews on 9/7. I will let you know.

 

[SJMaye]

Checking back in. I want to confirm those mysterious messages disappeared once my data renewed. I tried checking with my provider. They were clueless.

Thank you all for your help.