By Kevin
Collier
The text message arrived late Tuesday.
Like others I'd received lately, it wasn't an obvious scam from the start—no promise of a guarantee or prize win, no link to a suspicious website—but rather seemed like a frantic message intended for someone else.
It's the type of text message that has become commonplace for just about anyone with a cell phone.
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"One, good night, tomorrow morning the time of the contract is changed from 10 to 15 to sign, I don't feel well, I have to go to the hospital tomorrow morning to see the doctor."
I replied that it was a wrong number.
Of course, the thing did not end there.
The person on the other end, “Anna”, struck up a conversation.
After a few minutes, he offered to help me invest in cryptocurrencies.
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So-called bad number scams - sending flashy but innocuous texts - have become the common introduction for scammers looking for people to scam.
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If the recipients respond, the scammers try to build relationships with the potential victims and eventually try to persuade them to give away their savings under the false impression that they are investing in cryptocurrencies.
Erin West, the assistant prosecutor in charge of the high-tech crimes unit in Santa Clara County, California, confirmed that "accidental" text messages have become one of the most common new ways people are being fooled. on the same crypto scams his office has been tracking for several years.
“Some are like, 'Hey, can I get my dog a date in your salon?'” said West, a top prosecutor for crypto scams.
“They are expanding the way to enter the same scam.
They are all scams, and I think they are all crypto investment scams,” he assured.
There are no definitive statistics on how widespread these scams are.
But the Federal Trade Commission tracks
spam
and scam complaints, and 2022 is on track to be the first year that more people have reported being contacted by scammers by text instead of by phone, according to Juliana Gruenwald, a spokeswoman for the agency.
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The scams do not indicate any security issues with people's smartphones or personal information, although there is no reliable way to block them.
The Federal Communications Commission, which issued a warning Thursday about
spam
and fraudulent text messages, said ignoring them is the most effective way to make sure you don't get scammed.
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Chester Wisniewski, a senior researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos, which has investigated several such cases, said scammers tend to persuade victims to switch their conversations to the Telegram messaging app, then slowly persuade them to do so. download an unverified investment app that claims to store cryptocurrencies with incredible rates of return.
“It's like, 'Jeff call me,' and you're like, 'What?
I'm obviously not Jeff," Wisniewski explained.
“But they look for commitment.
As long as you reply, they can start the conversation,” she warned.
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Scammers even persuade their victims to send small amounts of crypto that they can withdraw to prove the system is real, and then encourage them to invest more.
It is only when victims try to withdraw large investments that they realize they have been scammed.
While most people don't fall for these types of scams - FTC estimates for this year revealed that 6% of people who reported text fraud actually lost money with them - those who do become victims they can lose huge sums.
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An FBI warning published last week revealed that since the end of last year, at least 244 people have lost a total of $42.7 million to these bogus cryptocurrency investment scams.
One of the victims, an American man who agreed to speak only on the condition that his name not be published because he feared it could hurt his business prospects, said he lost half a million dollars in the scam.
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“It's really painful for the dollar value.
I am very disappointed in myself, but at the same time very impressed by the girl who scammed me, ”he assured.
He said he started talking earlier this year with a scammer who sent him a single text message out of the blue — “Hello” — and waited for him to reply that he had the wrong number before continuing.
The scammer, claiming to be a younger woman who had recently moved to the United States, spoke to him several times on the phone and convinced him to move the conversation to Telegram.
Throughout their weeks of conversation, he agreed to invest more and more money before realizing he had been duped.
"I mean he waited 20 days and a thousand text messages before he got into the investments," he said.
“I felt very sick to my stomach.
I had just bet on a card table, like red or black on a roulette wheel, $500,000, and I was wrong,” she said.
“And I'm not a gambler.
I am rather stingy,” she added.
