It’s not just you. There’s even more spam making its way to our phones in the form of text messages than last year.
Scammers target Texans with spam text messages more than residents in any other state besides California, according to data from spam-blocking app RoboKiller. Texans are projected to receive a whopping 11 billion spam texts in 2021, amounting to an estimated 355% increase over 2020 volumes, RoboKiller says.
Why are Texans the target of so many phone scams?
RoboKiller suggests that these scams could target residents of southern states more than others because of their larger elderly populations. California, Texas and Florida are all home to a large portion of the country’s population over the age of 65, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
But those states are also the most populous states and therefore are likely to see higher volumes of spam overall, University of Texas at Dallas cybersecurity expert and computer science professor Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu said.
The advent of low-cost services that allow anyone to send calls and text messages over the internet has made it easier for scammers to hide their real identity, and the technology has made spam text message schemes especially profitable, Kantarcioglu said.
Many spam text messages will appear to come from a well-known company, aiming to fool the recipient into clicking a link. Claims that messages come from companies including Walmart, AT&T and Netflix have all been identified in news reporting on recent text message spam. Some even pose as government agencies offering legitimate services.
One commonly received message reads like a notification that your phone bill has been paid, and offers a reward:
“AT&T Free Msg: August bill is paid. Thanks, [name]! Here’s a little freebie for you: [link].”
In some cases, clicking on a link may install malicious software on your device to track your activity. In other scenarios, clicking a link could lead you to a page that asks you to enter more personal information, according to Kantarcioglu.
“Never, ever click any links in a text message,” Kantarcioglu said.
If you’re worried that the message you received might be important and is not actually spam, Kantarcioglu advises verifying the message with the company it claims to be from.
“It’s better to just call [the company] or check your account,” he advised.
Dallas-based AT&T as well as T-Mobile and Verizon advise customers who get suspicious text messages to forward those texts to 7726 (SPAM) so the company’s spam defense team can take action.
The Federal Communications Commission recently targeted robocalls specifically, implementing new requirements this summer that voice providers must update their back-end systems and authenticate the caller ID of numbers passing through their voice networks.
Dallas-based AT&T as well as T-Mobile and Verizon are in compliance with the new frameworks for identifying calls, according to company spokespeople. Each company offers its own applications for actually blocking spam calls, too. And third-party apps like RoboKiller and YouMail can do the same for consumers.
No tool is perfect, however, since a company’s ability to block malicious spam is only as good as the data it has collected on the many spam campaigns that exist, Kantarcioglu said. And there’s always a new one.
But as the framework comes online for voice providers, at least one member of Congress, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D.-Conn., is pressuring the FCC to further expedite its crackdown on both robocalls and “the recent surge of unsolicited text messages,” according to Politico.
Earlier this year, the FCC announced its largest robocall penalty in the agency’s history, fining Texas telemarketers $225 million for sending more than 1 billion robocalls falsely claiming to sell health insurance plans from credible providers.
While the new FCC regulations around voice calls are a positive step for consumers, they don’t directly address text messaging. Scammers are known to be resilient and will poke around for new ways to get their eye-grabbing phishing messages and calls through providers’ systems, Kantarcioglu said.
After all, digital scams are increasingly big money. In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission found that 2.2 million Americans reported losses totaling $3.3 billion to digital fraud — a 73% increase over losses reported the year before. At least $86 million of that fraud originated with spam text messages.
In a letter sent to the FCC in August, Illinois Democrat Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi warned that in the wake of robocall regulations, “bad actors will likely shift their attention to other means of scamming consumers. Spam texts appear to be a likely vehicle for scammers to use.”
In 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stopping Bad Robocalls Act, which aimed to provide more consumer protections against fraudulent robocalls and text messages, but it was not enacted into law.
