By Zak Doffman
Beware those devilish little SMS messages designed to fool you just long enough to click. Maybe your bank with an unrecognized transaction, or how about that late-running Amazon delivery, or FedEx trying to deliver a parcel or even highway tolls.
That’s the latest warning from the FBI, whose Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has received several thousand reports from users complaining about “smishing texts representing road toll collection service from at least three states.” The Bureau says this scam might now “be moving from state to state.”
The scam has been running since last month, with links designed to “impersonate the state’s toll service name.” Other than that and different phone numbers, the wording of the fraudulent messages appears to be broadly the same:
“(State Toll Service Name): We’ve noticed an outstanding toll amount of $12.51 on your record. To avoid a late fee of $50.00, visit https://myturnpiketollservices.com to settle your balance.”
SMS scams such as this one, which mimic email phishing campaigns, are known as smishing attacks. And such crimes are surging. When the global telecoms industry gathered in Barcelona in February for the Mobile World Congress, one headline session asked “Who will stop global SMS fraud? And how?”
The data is eye-watering—just in the US, mobile users lose more than $300m each year from SMS scams, with more than 400,000 malicious texts sent each day. Nearly half of all smartphone users now say they receive them.
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