Scammers new target your cell

 

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March 8, 2013, 3:16 p.m. EST

Scammers’ new target: your cell phone

Fraudsters are now sending scam texts

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By Jennifer Waters, MarketWatch

If you’ve got a mobile phone that receives text messages, chances are you’ve been hit with the latest scam from the bad guys: smishing.

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“Smishing” is the text — or short message service (SMS) — form of the phishing scams that’ve become so prevalent in emails. They’re text messages that promise free prizes or gift cards, iPhones or cheap mortgages if you simply click on a site. And consumers can be very vulnerable to them because they’re coming to what many consider the last bastion of spam-free interaction — the personal phone.
“They will prey on you wherever they think you’re most vulnerable,” says Adam Levin, chairman of Identity Theft 911, an identity-management solutions firm. “And smishing comes to you at a time when you are most distracted: You’re in a supermarket, at work, at a retail store when you get a message from what you think is a trusted source.”
Typically, the messages direct you to a site where you are asked simple questions. Then you’re directed to another site and another site until you finally have to give up a credit-card number to cover shipping fees for your “free” gift card. Sometimes they have surveys to fill out, other times there are offers you must take to get the gift card. Even worse, they also may be downloading malware on your smartphone that allows them to harvest all your data.
All along the way, you are giving up information like your birth date, your email and home addresses, even your Social Security number. Some questions are more creative but still telling, such as: Do you have diabetes? Or are you a smoker?
You won’t ever receive a gift card and you’ll have given out a lot of information about yourself that the scammers can use to open credit accounts, drain your bank accounts or tap into your medical insurance. They’ll have your email address and phone number, which they can then sell on the black market for other fraudsters to use to try to scam you. “These types of scams have been picking up in numbers, sophistication and variations,” says Cameron Camp, security research at ESET, an IT security company. Fraudsters use the information to build fake dossiers about you and use it for identity theft.
The numbers of unsolicited text messages vary widely and have grown rapidly, enough to catch the Federal Trade Commission’s attention. Cloudmark, a firm that sells messaging-threat protection to service providers, tracked 30,000 unique SMS spam pitches per month in 2012, and about 359,000 throughout the year. Related video: Online scammers going mobile.

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On Thursday, the FTC — responding to some 20,000 consumer complaints about smishing in 2012 — said it has filed court cases against eight companies and 29 people who were collectively bombarding consumers with more than 180 million unwanted text messages. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Steve Baker, the FTC’s Midwest director. The numbers of complaints to just the FTC jumped sevenfold from 2011 to 2012.
Sending spam text messages is not a crime, but soliciting consumers for money and misleading them are. The FTC does not have criminal authority, but by filing suits against alleged scamsters, it hopes the courts will issue restraining orders and injunctions to force them to stop. In one case, the FTC hopes to win a contempt action against Phillip Flora, who the agency called a “serial text-message spammer” who was barred in 2011 for sending spam text messages and is accused of being part of this spam-texting scheme as well.
Here’s what to do if you receive unsolicited text messages:

• Report it immediately by forwarding the text to 7726, which spells out SPAM on most phones. That will send the information to a service that’s operated by the telephone companies, which use it to identify and shut down problems on their networks.
• File complaints with the FTC and the FCC.
• Delete the message and don’t click on any URLs.
• Block the number, though it’s likely the fraudsters are changing numbers regularly.
• Do not text “STOP” in reply. It will alert the bad guys that the number is live and encourage more targeting of that phone.
• Only download smartphone applications from reputable stores, and even then, be sure to read the terms of service closely.