Even if the attacker doesn't get that money from you, they can get money by selling your information."įor most people, falling for a smishing attack leads to either losing money or ending up at higher risk of identity theft. "Each attack that happens, each text you respond to or each call you respond to. "The intelligence about you doesn't dissipate. Tobin, of the cybersecurity company Proofpoint, said replying to smishing attacks most likely makes you more of a target. "Texts from 'Amazon,' I get one of those almost every day." "I get texts about 'your package from UPS is waiting, please click this link to confirm,'" she said. But that was all the help they gave, and while she hasn't noticed anyone taking out a loan in her name, the spam texts have only gotten worse. Once Beckwith realized she'd fallen for a scam, she contacted the FTC, which didn't respond, and the Social Security Administration, which told her to monitor her credit. There's also little indication that authorities are doing much about it or have advice for the public. It's so common that in April, after researchers realized that hackers were able to pull more than half a billion Facebook users' names and phone numbers from the site, Facebook accidentally sent a Dutch reporter an internal memo that "we expect more scraping incidents and think it's important to both frame this as a broad industry issue and normalize the fact that this activity happens regularly." Apple at least allows users to filter all messages from people who aren't already in their contacts, but that doesn't flag which texts are likely to be scams, and it puts them in the same folder as authentic messages from unsaved numbers.ĭata breaches of users' personal information - including their phone numbers - are a frequent occurrence, and hackers regularly trade people's data with eager scammers.
#Just checking on you text messages android#
Apple and Google, the respective manufacturers of the iOS and Android smartphone operating systems, advise users to block unwanted numbers, but it's so easy for scammers to pretend to send messages from different numbers that such strategies are effectively meaningless. "But now texting has opened as a more general communication channel for business, like transaction confirmations, fraud alerts."īut though smartphones are nearly ubiquitous - 97 percent of Americans own one - there's very little people can do to stop unwanted texts. It's just friends," Tobin said in a phone interview. You don't communicate with strangers via text. "Before, text was a very clean, relatively speaking, peer-to-peer channel.
Jacinta Tobin, a vice president at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company that specializes in threats to mobile phones, said scammers and criminal hackers noticed that more marketers and businesses interact with people through text messages and simply followed that trend. People around the world were exposed to about 125 percent more smishing attempts every three months, a new study from the cybersecurity company Lookout found. The Federal Trade Commission got 334,833 complaints about scam texts last year, more than double the year before. But with more people using their smartphone s to make payments and as many sites for banks and utilities verify users' accounts through text messages, the fraud floodgates have opened. Unwanted texts have existed for practically as long as the text message itself. In the space of a few minutes, Beckwith became the latest victim of "smishing," or SMS phishing, in which a scammer sends a text message to trick a person into turning over some sensitive personal information, which can be used for all sorts of fraud, like siphoning money from their bank account or opening up credit cards in their name. That's when I thought, 'Oh my God, oh my God, I think this is a scam.'" "I'm surprised it didn't connect me with somebody to talk to. "I was like, wait a minute," Beckwith said in a phone interview. A smishing attempt sent to Alyssa Beckwith. A robotic voice welcomed her to Wells Fargo and asked her to verify herself, so she entered in her credit card number, Social Security number and birthday. So when a scammer texted Beckwith in April, telling her that her Wells Fargo card had been charged with a $240 withdrawal and to "Contact Us if Suspicious," she didn't think twice and called.
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