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Scam Of The Week - SMISHING


straycat19

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straycat19

Internet bad guys are increasingly trying to circumvent your spam filters and instead are targeting your users directly through their smartphone with Smishing attacks, which are hard to stop.

 

The practice has been around for a few years, but current new scams are mystery shopping invitations that start with a text, social engineering the victim to send an email to the scammers, and then get roped into a shopping fraud. 

 

These types of smishing attacks are also more and more used for Identity theft, bank account take-overs, or pressure employees into giving out personal or company confidential information.  Fortune magazine has a new article about this, and they lead with a video made by USA Today which is great to send to your users as a reminder.

 

I suggest you send employees, friends and family an email about this Scam Of The Week, feel free to copy/paste/edit:


"Bad guys are increasingly targeting you through your smartphone. They send texts that trick you into doing something against your own best interest. At the moment, there is a mystery shopping scam going on, starting out with a text invitation, asking you to send an email for more info which then gets you roped into the scam. 

 

Always, when you get a text, remember to "Think Before You Tap", because more and more, texts are used for identity theft, bank account take-overs and to pressure you into giving out personal or company confidential information.  Here is a short video made by USA Today that shows how this works: 

 

 

 

 

Obviously, an end-user who was trained to spot social engineering red flags (PDF) would think twice before falling for these scams. The link goes to a complimentary job aid that you can print out and pin to your wall. Feel free to distribute this PDF to as many people as you can. 
 

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With all due respect straycat19, this isn't really news. USA Today is a crap newspaper and it looks like they are trying to fill the paper with worthless articles. If my bank sent me a text or even an email asking me to log in to update my account info, First, I would call the bank and find out what the hell is going on and second, I wouldn't even reply to the message. Not only wouldn't I not reply to the message, would take a screenshot of it and send it to the bank. If a hacker really wants to hack you, they need just 3 things. Your first and last name, date of birth and mothers maiden name. All of them are public records and can be obtained fairly easily. 


So if you get a text, phone call or email from your bank or any other bank or any govt official --irs, fbi, etc. Do not click on the link and report it. If your gut tells you something is wrong here, it probably is.  Some dumb ass Nigerian scammer has nothing better to do they try to rip someone off than get a real job.  

 

I even go so far to record every inbound call so I have evidence of these dumbasses.
 

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Seems that some sites are already covering this. Funny, I got the exactly what I believe is the same message as mentioned in the article here, except, instead of SMS it was an Whatsapp. But still think there is not need to give a new name for it.

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