Beware text messages with links
The Government and Telstra have both reported on the significant increase in spam text messages with links for the unwary to click.
Today I had two and both were clearly spam. They said they were voice messages and I had not received any missed calls. On close examination the sender could not even spell ‘message’.
I have been deleting such messages for a while but on Sunday I received one claiming to be from a specialist medical practitioner explaining that my long standing specialist had retired and that I was being recalled. It also included a link to a video.
I thought the whole thing was spam. My reasoning was that the message was on a Sunday, and specialist doctors nor their staff would be working on a Sunday on routine administration issues.
Next the use of the word recall. Being in insurance I am used to the word being used for cases where a product or service is recalled due to some fault and I struggled to understand what would create this.
The text message did have the correct name for my old specialist, so I did take the time to Google search the name of the new doctor, and check the phone number against the one provided. It all turned out to be real and they used the word recall instead of asking for an appointment for the routine medical check.
The purpose of this post is therefore two fold:
- Be very careful on clicking any links attached to text messages, particularly from anyone you do not know. Same goes for within emails of course. I have still not clicked on the one from the doctor.
- If you or your clients are sending out links to customers, with the volume of spam texts and emails out there, there is every chance the text or email will not be opened as you hope, particularly if there is the smallest red flag such as sending out the message on a non work day.
Just another couple of things we have to deal with.
A few minutes after posting this I received another spam text and this time I remembered to do a screen shot. Note the poor spelling which is a dead give away it should be immediately deleted and the link never clicked on.
Hi Allan,
I receive about 50 emails every day. Most of them are legitimate but irrelevant junk. Most of these automatically end up in Junk. Some are automatically sent to a folder I have setup called “Scams or Offensive”. This is because I have created Rules that recognise the address of a previous scam/offensive email. It is generally easy to spot a potentially dangerous email as noted in your blog. One technique I use when in doubt is to INSPECT THE SENDER’s EMAIL ADDRESS. For example: You get an email that looks like it is from your bank. But when you check the address you see it is from something like “vuc264a@brinkbokeg” in other words not your bank. These emails are usually sent out by an automated server that changes that part of the address before the @ symbol. This is a strategy designed to get around Junk mail detectors. For emails repeatedly sent by that server, you can send them to a dedicated folder, such as my scam folder mentioned above, by using the Rules function in email preferences that looks only for the email’s address “tail” after the @ Using my example above that would look like “@brinkbokeg”. You can add any number of bad email addresses to the same Rule.
If you have the time, you can report these dodgy emails to the Australian Government Scam Watch website.
I hope you find this helpful. Cheers, Simon