Apple and Google, the respective manufacturers of the iOS and Android smartphone operating systems, advise users to block unwanted numbers, but it's so easy for scammers to pretend to send messages from different numbers that such strategies are effectively meaningless. "But now texting has opened as a more general communication channel for business, like transaction confirmations, fraud alerts."īut though smartphones are nearly ubiquitous - 97 percent of Americans own one - there's very little people can do to stop unwanted texts. It's just friends," Tobin said in a phone interview. You don't communicate with strangers via text. "Before, text was a very clean, relatively speaking, peer-to-peer channel. Jacinta Tobin, a vice president at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company that specializes in threats to mobile phones, said scammers and criminal hackers noticed that more marketers and businesses interact with people through text messages and simply followed that trend. People around the world were exposed to about 125 percent more smishing attempts every three months, a new study from the cybersecurity company Lookout found. The Federal Trade Commission got 334,833 complaints about scam texts last year, more than double the year before. But with more people using their smartphone s to make payments and as many sites for banks and utilities verify users' accounts through text messages, the fraud floodgates have opened.
Unwanted texts have existed for practically as long as the text message itself.
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