“Hi, Dani. I’m sorry, my vacation was postponed. Might not be able to travel with you.” So read the text message on my phone that was the first step in a new kind of scam.
It’s one you might have had appear on your own phone and puzzled over. Spam calls are sort of easy to spot, but texts like these seem like honest mistakes that you could be tempted to step in and correct, letting the sender know they’ve reached the wrong person. Which is what I did. But after a minute, it became apparent that the text message had indeed reached the correct person, which was anyone at all who would respond and could perhaps be defrauded.
The person replied with an apology and then: “Thank you, I was thinking I accidentally sent the wrong text message, so I met a kind and friendly friend, I think this is a very interesting thing, ha ha.” It’s a response that is designed to lure the recipient into a conversation that I could sense was not for friendly reasons. I had to admire it as a carefully crafted piece of social engineering. But the scam seemed all the more nefarious because it targets the helpful and if successful will dissuade them from being so friendly in the future.
These ostensibly misdirected messages are being used to lure people into all sorts of scams, typically direct requests for money or phishing. Sometimes they’re just used to make sure a number is active to open the way for other kinds of spammers and scammers. So here’s how to spot this particular…
