And because their success encourages “ copy cat” scams, with new criminal groups experimenting with their own text scams, it’s difficult to stamp them out entirely, despite recent arrests. The increasing volume of these scams suggests that they do work.
Other text scams, which prompt you to click on a link, are designed to infect your phone with malware that can help criminals steal your personal data.
That’s not because of the money they’re asking people to send them – which appears tiny in the case of a £1.43 delivery fee – but because criminals can use the card details they’re provided to empty victims’ bank accounts. These types of scams are delivered en masse, and fraudsters only need to receive responses to a handful of the thousands of texts they send out to make significant sums of money. More of us are expecting a parcel in the post after increasing our online shopping since March 2020, while novel financial measures related to the pandemic, such as the furlough scheme, may have given people the impression that HMRC has temporarily altered its operations. The pandemic has extended the window of opportunity for fraudsters to successfully target people with both types of scam. Missed delivery charge scams are most often rolled out around the busy Christmas postal period, while tax scams are usually timed around April to coincide with the new financial year. To understand the apparent increase in text scams, we need to consider two key factors. The resurgence of text scams in the spring of 2021 also appears to be taking advantage of circumstances brought about by the pandemic – but learning more about them can help us to stamp them out.
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