SPAM messages from seemingly familiar numbers are on the rise.
Scammers are using hacking techniques to alter how their messages are received, including mimicking their target’s own number.
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Digital scams are as old as the digital age itself.
To this day, the fabled Nigerian Prince email scam still pulls in over $700,000 dollars a year.
But hackers have gotten rather inventive over the years, drumming up highly involved plots like virtual kidnapping or low effort phishing emails.
The plot that most people have come face to face with is the robo-call – but that scam has a fast evolving counterpart: the spam text.
The New York Times reported that 11.6billion scam texts were sent in March of this year – a 30% growth from the month prior.
A spam text used to be more recognizable – an unrecognizable number from a distant area messaging you about something irrelevant.
But now, scammers are masking their numbers with familiar area codes or even duplicating a target’s number and targeting Verizon Wireless customers.
They’re impersonating shipping and commerce companies like Amazon, UPS or FedEx – trusted companies that many consumers interact with on a near daily basis and share information with.
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But there are giveaways.
Commerce and shipping companies normally use a four-, five- or six-digit number designed for one way communication – not the traditional 10 digit phone number.
Misspellings are abundant – and deliberate. Technology reporter Brian X. Chen wrote that misspellings help hackers evade Verizon’s spam detection protocol.
Lastly, the most dangerous part for Verizon customers: faulty links.
Suspicious links often lead to sites that pry visitors into entering data about themselves.
Stay skeptical when it comes to unrecognizable links and numbers – think about the sheer unlikelihood that you’ve unknowingly won a television over text.
Third party apps for spam detection are useful, but the breadth of the robo-scam industry is starting to draw the attention of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
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