Gone in seconds: rising text message scams are draining US bank accounts

theguardian.com:

The text message created an instant surge of panic.

“Freemsg: Chase, Did you attempt wire transfer amount of $7500. Reply Y if recognized, Or NO to stop fraud.”

Text message-based scams can appear to come from a familiar company or person, but experts say these red flags will help you spot them.

Here’s what to look out for:

How to handle a scammer:

For Ohio resident Kelli Hinton, this was the beginning of a hard-to-detect scam in which a man posing as a Chase Bank fraud investigator ended up clearing two of her bank accounts of $15,000.

And Hinton is hardly alone. Her nightmare is part of a huge surge in sophisticated text message-based scams that now affect hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. Sometimes called “smishing”, short for SMS phishing, the scams trick mobile phone users out of their money using messages purporting to be from a familiar person or company that can be almost impossible to tell from the real thing.

While phishing texts have been around for years, data shows they are on the rise. In 2022 US phone users got 157bn robotexts, or more than 440 a person – an 80% increase from 2021, according to the company Robokiller, which offers a scam-blocking service for cell phones. And last year, more than 321,000 Americans reported having fallen for a phone-based smishing scam, with total losses of over $326m, according to data from the US Federal Trade Commission.

The problem has become so bad that last month the federal government demanded that mobile phone companies start blocking spam texts, in what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) described as its first of several planned steps to combat the rampant phone fraud.

Scammers use an unending variety of creative approaches to try to trick people out