The text was from a number I didn’t recognize, but there was no question I knew the sender’s name.
He identified himself as the CEO of a company I’ve worked with for years, and he had a favor to ask. Would I mind going to the nearest Apple Store and texting him a list of available gift card denominations? He planned to buy a few for his staff as a surprise.
I was immediately suspicious.
For one thing, the CEO is in California, and I’m 2,500 miles away in Massachusetts. He also deflected my request for a call to confirm details by explaining that he was on a conference call with a client, an unlikely excuse on a Saturday afternoon.
When I again insisted that he call to confirm, the texter went silent for good.
A quick search showed that the Apple gift card scam is common enough that Apple has devoted a page to it on its support site.
Phone and text scams are out of control, and the problem is only getting worse, according to a report released last week by Truecaller.
The survey of more than 2,000 American adults found that one in three has fallen victim to a phone scam with an average loss of $577, up from $502 in 2021.
The company projected that nearly $40 billion was lost in phone scams in the U.S. alone over the past 12 months.
Meanwhile, spam texts – called “smishing” for the combination of SMS and phishing – have more than doubled in three years. Robokiller estimated that 87 billion of them were sent in 2021, up 58% from the previous year and…
