There is a huge surge in sophisticated robotexts bombarding phones and costing unsuspecting people millions of dollars. The text message-based scams are sometimes called “smishing” which is short for SMS phishing.
The scams are tricking mobile phone users out of their money using messages pretending to be from a familiar person or company, and are typically hard or almost impossible to tell from the real thing. Last year, more than 321,000 Americans reported falling for a smishing scam, with total losses of over $326 million, according to data from the US Federal Trade Commission. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is demanding companies start blocking spam texts, as one of the first of several planned steps to combat the fraud.
There is a variety of approaches scammers are trying to trick people out of their money. Some pretend to offer jobs and ask people to transfer money for job supplies, while others pretend to be contacting the wrong person with the hopes of striking up a conversation that leads to longer exchanges and eventually to transferring money. Another common scam involves impersonating a person’s boss and asking for a favor involving purchasing gift cards, then asking for photos of the backs of the gift cards in order to cash the cards. Others pretend to be from a familiar company, like Amazon, or from a bank and try to prompt access to a person’s account in order to wire money out of it.
Text scams are hard to avoid; people tend to react more since it is so immediate. Scammers are also likely using automated systems to blast messages to thousands of phone numbers as a time and often at random. Calls for action to help prevent scammers from taking advantage of people are mounting, as well as pressure on the federal government. Visit here to learn more about some recent attacks, and new protections being put in place.
