With Scam Calls On The Decline, Texts Take Their Place
July 24, 2022 - With a general decline in spam calls over the past year, as well as a heavy enforcement push by the FCC in the past few weeks, it seems that SMS text scams are beginning to ramp up and take their place.
According to an October statement, the FCC says that scam texts more than doubled in 2020, compared to the previous year. In the statement, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed the establishment of rules to enable blocking of such messages.
The texts have become a larger and larger problem for consumers, bombarding them with COVID-19 related scams, false banking communications, fake delivery updates, and enticing with fictional giveaways. In these scams, the recipient is urged to click a link that will prompt them to provide personal information, payment details, or that is otherwise malicious.
With the FCC's continued crack down on voice-based scams, we suspect the trend for more text scams will continue to rise going forward, but consumers can start to better protect themselves by using an SMS application that features spam filtering, such as Google Messages. In addition, the FCC has posted helpful tips on identifying and avoiding these scams.
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