As more and more people fall prey to malicious text message scammers, we’d like to take a look at how you can identify potentially criminal activity aimed at your phone. These should set alarm bells ringing:
You Have Won a Prize Out of the Blue
Don’t remember entering any sort of competition? And now someone wants to give you a cash prize? One of the oldest tricks in the book, the mysterious raffle operators with seemingly endless supplies of massive yachts and buckets of money have been running this one since those dark, pre-internet days of the landline phone. They’ve updated their medium in accordance with the smartphone age, but the game is the same: ask ‘participants’ to load credits (ie give money) in exchange for a non-existent prize. Avoiding this scam is pretty simple – if you did not enter a raffle, you have not won a raffle.
Uncle Bob is Stranded in Marrakech
It’s incredible that anyone would fall for this, but it’s a common enough text scam to suggest it’s working somewhere. You get a text, allegedly from some foreign official, claiming one of your relatives has run into financial difficulties while abroad. In order to be a good family member, you must wire cash. A variation on this involves an SMS from the ‘relative’ themselves, who is using a temporary pre-paid phone while on holiday. Never send money to a relative abroad unless you’ve spoken to them directly.
The Sender is an 11-digit Mobile Number
Legitimate text messages from businesses will come from a shortcode. Don’t trust a long phone number unless you recognize it.
Your Bank Asks for Your PIN
Your bank will never ask for your PIN unless you’re standing at an ATM. Remember that one fact and you won’t fall victim to one of the most common types of scam. Here’s how it works: a text message lands in your inbox saying your account has been suspended (usually, in an ironic twist, because of a feared ‘security breach’). It asks you to call a 1-800 number at which point your PIN and account details are requested. If this happens, your identity is being stolen.
As you can see, the majority of SMS scams are pretty shabby, transparent ruses. You might feel insulted even being warned against them. But spare a thought for the less tech-savvy people you know – the kind of people who probably aren’t reading this blog! Grandparents or elderly neighbors, perhaps. It’s precisely these vulnerable members of society that these scammers rely on hoodwinking, so if you know anybody who might be at risk, why not let them know about some of the more common frauds that go on – and must work – every single day.
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