Ah, to be an identity thief, with so many different options available to you for pilfering people’s personal information. They’ve got the mail, the Internet, the landline telephone, and now even cell phone text messaging. That’s right. Over the past couple years, identity thieves have been exploring this new and popular frontier. In fact, so much so that a new term has been coined: “smishing.†Smishing is a merger of the ever-popular phishing scam with the use of SMS, or “short message service,†the industry term for text messaging. (It is sometimes written as SMiShing.)
Other than the format used, the crime is basically the same as the typical phishing scam. The identity thief contacts his or her image by sending a text message to his or her phone. IN the message, the thief says that one of the person’s accounts has been compromised or there is some other pretend complication with it. It then thoughtfully offers up a phone number for the person to call to get this mess all sorted out or offers up a Web address. Or, in the most malicious case, the thief will ask the person to register for a service or download a program directly to his or her phone. This site or program may have a virus or spyware attached to it that gives the thief access to all of the contents of the cell phone, including passwords and the address book.
A huge problem with this type of identity theft is that a large number of cell phone users are children and young teens. They may not be as savvy to the ways of identity thieves as those who have been familiar with this crime for several years. For this reason, it is paramount to teach kids to do the following if they get a message that they are not sure about: DELETE IT!
At this time, there is not much else you can do, since it is difficult to determine the source of these malicious text messages. There are some things that everyone can do to prevent getting more in the future:
1. Never put cell phone numbers up on any Web sites, especially message boards and social networking pages. Thieves have robots that troll the Web looking for them.
2. Only give out the number to people with a legitimate reason to have it.
3. Avoid sending text messages to register for products and services if at all possible.
Another thing that can help is registering with an identity theft protection service. This is just as important for minors as it is for adults, since there are as many as 500,000 identity theft victims under the age of 18 each year. Luckily, it’s easy to protect everyone, since some plans like TrustedID offer their services for the whole family for one low price.
So, in conclusion, be wary of unsolicited messages on the Web, over the phone, on paper or through SMS. If you don’t know who a message is from, don’t assume you have to answer it or that it is legitimate.