FBI Warning—All Smartphone Users Must Delete These Messages
A raft of news stories this week (1,2,3) report on the FBI warning 150 million Apple users to delete texts on their iPhones. Unfortunately the reality is even worse than those headlines suggest. Here's what you need to know and what you should do.
Right now, your cell phone is vulnerable to an ongoing attack that will come to you by way of text messages warning of dire consequences if you don't respond right away. Text messages that include links to pay outstanding bills or fines.
All of this is made up, of course, but you pay nonetheless because you're worried — that's the idea. These messages include unpaid tolls and newer DMV traffic offenses, but will soon widen the net to mimic texts from your bank or credit card company.
It's against this backdrop that we have seen headlines urging America's iPhone users specifically to delete the latest raft of DMV texts as soon as they're received.
The malicious texts are sent courtesy of organized Chinese criminal gangs that operate beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. They harness countless phone numbers from multiple countries and domains from multiple providers.
Despite network filtering and iOS and Android spam detection, the tidal wave of texts seemingly can't be stopped. Google has confirmed new AI-powered scam detection on its phones, and we await to see if this filters the threat or can be worked around.
The FBI's warning to delete all these co-called smishing texts came in an advisory last year, issued in the wake of the original unpaid toll scam that has now swept across America from state to state. Any such texts, it said, should be deleted from phones.
But that applies to iPhone and Android users — to all smartphone users. There are some iPhone specifics — the OCGs prefer iMessage to SMS, albeit they like RCS as well, and the texts often include instructions to 'Please reply with 'Y'' to get around iPhone's link blocking from unknown senders. But the the attack targets all users indiscriminately.
As I reported a week ago, the FBI has confirmed it is now investigating the latest plague of DMV-themed texts, which is unsurprising. The volume of those texts in particular surged almost 800% in the first week of June alone, and has not slowed down since.
A single bad actor armed with numbers and domains can send as many as '60,000,000 texts a per month, or 720,000,000 per year,' if that helps explain why there's almost no one in America who hasn't yet received these texts or knows someone who has.
Whether it's an iPhone or an Android phone in your pocket, don't leave these texts undeleted and never ever click on any of these links.
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