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Analysis
Who doesn’t hate scam texts? We’ve all received one at least once, but now we know what the most reported text scam was last year.
Any guesses?
If you thought scam texts impersonating banks, you’d be correct. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a new report where it analyzed what kinds of scam texts were most reported to them in 2022 and named the top five.
The FTC said reports to them from consumers about bank impersonation texts went up nearly twentyfold since 2019. These kinds of scams typically ask you to reply “yes or no” to confirm a large transaction that you didn’t make, and when you reply someone calls you from a fake fraud department where they eventually steal money.
The second most reported scam were texts about “free gifts” or rewards from companies like your phone carrier. The scams usually ask you to pay a small fee for shipping, which gives the scammer access to your credit card information, according to the FTC. The third most common scam was fake delivery problems, with texts pretending to be from USPS, FedEx, or UPS and asking for customers to pay a small “redelivery fee” which also gives them access to credit card information.
The other text scams that rounded out the most-reported list were fake job offers and fake security alerts from Amazon.
Why it matters
Over the last few years, people have used social media to try and warn others about scam texts targeting Verizon users and AT&T users.
Usually, they are pretty easy to spot, but as the FTC noted in their report scammers duped people out of $330 million last year.
The FTC says if you get a scam message, you can forward it to 7726 (SPAM), which “helps your wireless provider spot and block similar messages” and you can report it to the FTC itself.