While SMS spam has been an ongoing nuisance on an individual level for a while now, we had yet to see an organized attack targeting customers on a large scale—until this week.
With the advent of the so-called “FedEx text scam,” we're seeing for the first time a large scale, coordinated SMS scam event targeting customers with fake FedEx tracking numbers and fraudulent Amazon links.
With voice calling being used less and less, the bad guys are now moving to the next level, taking advantage of the popularity of text messaging to attempt to take money out of your pocket. Not cool.
And while many of these types of scams are mainly annoying, this particular one is downright threatening. According to How-To Geek.com when clicking on the links, iOS and Android users are taken to bogus websites that ask them to full out Amazon surveys and ultimately could end up tying them to a subscription service that costs nearly $100 a month!
The first thing you can do is also the most obvious: Never, ever click on any links that originate from numbers that you do not know.
Common sense prevails here as well; if you didn’t order anything, or you didn’t have it shipped by FedEx, then something funny is probably going on.
IF you really just can’t stand the curiosity, go to fedex.com and track the number there yourself. FedEx has posted some helpful tips themselves, not only for text scams and fraud but also for other forms as well — it's always a good idea to take a refresher course on protecting yourself online.
FedEx also recently issued a statement about the known SMS scam.
"Have you received a suspicious text or e-mail that appears to be from us? Suspicious messages should be deleted without being opened and reported to abuse@fedex.com. Here are more tips to protect your safety: http://fedex.com/us/security/prevent-fraud" - @FedEx
Both iOS and Android provide customers a way for you to filter messages from unknown and/or potentially untrustworthy senders into a separate mailbox.
On iOS you can enable spam text blocking by:
On Android, you can enable spam text blocking by:
You can read more on this here and here from Apple and Google, respectively.
Both of the above are fairly blunt instruments and run the risk of blocking messages that you really do want to receive, like confirmations from your doctor or pharmacy, snow delays, or other alerts from your child’s school. To prevent that from happening, we suggest using an app like Robokiller that does the work for you by applying our algorithms to analyze each message and comparing it against our huge database of spam and scam patterns to intelligently determine whether or not to let it through to your inbox.
In fact, with our new machine learning SMS filtering engine, we catch 750% more spam and send it straight to the junk folder, while maintaining over 95% filter accuracy. Why waste time and money on spam and scams? This way you get the messages that you do want — without having to resort to drastic measures — and never see the ones you don’t.
So, while you can always trust FedEx to get your package to The World on Time™, when it comes to messaging spam and scam protection, it absolutely, positively has to be Robokiller.
