According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last year more scams originated through text messages (smishing) than phone calls and with good reason.  Scammers are aware that people are more likely to open and read a text message rather than an email  The open rates for text messages are more than 90% while the open rates for emails is less than 30%.  In addition, many email providers have filters that are able to identify and filter out phishing emails while the filtering capabilities on text messages is much less.  Additionally, people tend to trust text messages more than emails.  Text message also may prompt a quick response before the targeted victim can critically consider the legitimacy of the text message. For all of these reasons, we are seeing many more text message based scams nationally, such as the one in which you are told you owe toll road payments.

A new text message scam presently circulating, a copy of which is shown below, tells you that you have a tax refund that you must apply for by providing your online banking information or other personal information within a couple of days or lose the refund.  This particular text message appears to come from the Michigan Department of the Treasury, but similar text messages are being sent to people in all 50 states.  If you provide the information requested it will lead to identity theft and clicking on the link provided may download dangerous malware.

TIPS

Regardless of how official such a the communication may appear, you should never provide personal information to anyone in response to a telephone call, email or text message because in none of those situations can you be sure that the person contacting you is legitimate.  If you do receive a communication from a bank, government agency or any other person or entity that you think might have a legitimate need for personal information from you, you should call the real entity at a telephone number that you know is legitimate in order to ascertain the truth.

In this particular case, no tax authority communicates with taxpayers regarding refunds by text messages and you do not lose any refund if you do not respond within a short period of time.

Unusually long phone numbers of ten or more digits sending such text messages is often an indication of a scam.

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#smishing, #textmessagescam