Libby Powers shares a text phishing attempt (also known as smishing) she recently received. Can you spot all the clues that let us know this isn’t legit?
Transcript
Libby Powers: Hi, y’all! Libby Powers with another episode of Byte-Sized Tech. I wanted to share with you a text message that I received the other day, right up there. This text message came from T-Mobile, which is my current cellular carrier because Sprint was bought out by T-Mobile several months ago. This message said, basically, I am eligible for a $100 free gift because I was one of 25,000 customers that experienced an outage, and because of that, they wanted to send me a gift. I know, I’m pretty lucky, right? I thought the same.
I’m sure that many people got this message, and people clicked into it and provided the information. But this is something that cybercriminals are really ramping up. It’s called SMS phishing, or ‘smishing’—however you want to say it. Long story short is, you can see in this text message there’s a lot of misspellings, starting with the second word ‘apologize.’ There’s several misspellings in the text. ‘T-Mobile’ is even misspelled and the tax because it doesn’t have the hyphen in between T-Mobile. Also you can see that the link that it wants you to click on to a brief survey has nothing to do with T-Mobile, it’s not at T-Mobile or coming from T-Mobile. T-Mobile is not anywhere in that link.
This is a very typical texting phishing text message that a lot of people are getting. It’s actually really important that you do understand what to look for when you’re getting these messages, because it’s probably valuable information for you to share with your children. Because if they have a cell phone, they’re likely getting the same messages, and you want to ensure that they’re informed enough to take a minute and stop and actually look at the message, check for misspellings, check that link, you know? Teach them basic things to take a look and make sure that they’re not clicking into this email or into this link. Because what they’re really trying to do is they’re trying to steal information from you, credit card information, private information, so that they can in turn use that information against you to charge your credit card or whatever they’re trying to do. I want you to be sure to take a deep look at this message, find everything that’s wrong with it, and then next time you receive one of these text messages, you’ll be more educated as to what to look for. Hopefully, you won’t click on any messages like this. The more you know! Have a great day. Bye.
