Fraudulent text messages are on the rise, flooding Americans with scams ranging from false claims that a person’s bank account has been frozen to undelivered online orders, a defense group has found. of the consumer.
Over the past year, the number of robotic texts in the U.S. has increased from about 1 billion a month to 12 billion, the Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit research organization, said in a new report.
The flood of robotic texts comes as regulators finally stepped up against automated calls, which for years have been the number 1 complaint among phone users. Between June 2021, when new laws for telephone operators came into force and in June 2022, automated calls dropped from 2 billion to 1 billion a month, PIRG found.
“Especially robotic call scams, the ones that are most dangerous, have been reduced by about half compared to a year ago. It’s definitely good news,” said Teresa Murray, PIRG’s consumer manager. “There are some things that are finally being done in Washington to try to dig deeper and go after the bad guys.”
Repression works
According to PIRG, several factors are responsible for the fall in automated calls. The Federal Communications Commission last year began requiring telecom providers to verify calls made to their networks. As a result, nearly 2,000 carriers have done so installed software that detects and eliminates fake calls.
The FCC is also prosecuting operators it says are dragging their feet in the automated calling app: the agency sent 18 cessation and withdrawal letters in March and sent two carriers to its enforcement office to keep from moving. fast enough to meet the new requirements.
Mobile operators are also doing a better job identifying and marking potential spam, PIRG found. In fact, the rise of robotic texts is in part a response to the limited success that regulators have had after automated calls.
"The new nightmare"
Text bots are easier to generate for scammers because they can be emailed and don’t even require a phone number. They can also be effective, according to the PIRG report, which describes these texts as "the new nightmare."
Instead of trying to fool recipients by telling them they had won a prize, once a common scam, many robotic texts now use language similar to actual bank or retail notifications. Scammers often create dedicated landing pages that resemble banks ’websites, while texts may appear to come from a local phone number, the group found, citing several examples purporting to be from Citibank.
"Your Citi debit card is in the process of being reviewed, please verify your contact information. CitiSecured05.com," read a fake text. Another stated, "Cite # 7361: Your online access has been blocked. Please check your information here [URL] to regain access ".
Other scam messages tell recipients that a package is about to be delivered or asks them to confirm information about an Amazon order. These texts, like fishing emails, try to entice a recipient to click on a link and provide financial information. In another scheme, recipients received text messages purporting to be from their pastor and encouraged them to purchase gift cards from iTunes as a way to supposedly donate to a cause that supported the church.
According to Murray, robotic texts are even more dangerous than calls.
“There is less information for you and me to decide if it is legitimate or fraudulent,” he said. "With a phone call, I'd say, you can often have a few extra seconds to process, or you can say it comes from a boiler room, or you can tell if the person can't even pronounce 'Wells Fargo correctly.'
Billions in losses
In 2021, consumers lost about $ 30 billion due to phone scams, according to the National Consumer Law Center. According to RoboKiller, an anti-spam company, scam texts cost $ 10 billion more in losses. Automation has made these scams cheap to perpetrate, while criminals only have to hook a handful of victims for the crime to be worthwhile.
“These computers are set up to make thousands and even millions of calls,” Murray said. "They don't need to have a very high success rate: they only need one, two victims a day."
For now, the FCC does not regulate robotic texts, but that could change if the commission votes on a proposal to crack down on these scams, which President Jessica Rosenworcel presented in October.
PIRG believes federal regulators could do much more to eliminate automated calls. For example, it could suppress operators offering automated calls from abroad. PIRG also supports legislation to make automated call tracking information public, allowing consumers to see where those calls are coming from and which companies are making them. The group wants operators to proactively block calls they identify as probable spam, something most operators don’t do, even though they have a legal right to do so.
"This has been a big problem. He's been at the forefront of the FCC's complaint files for years and years and years," Murray said, noting that unwanted automated calls have been illegal since 2009, more than 'a decade before federal regulators began cracking down.
"How many years have to pass, how many thousands more people have to be injured by automated calls, for something else to happen?"
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