Unfortunately, there will always be some nasty people out there who want to take advantage of good people. I’ve talked about the various scams that go around before, but I had a new one recently that I thought you should all know about.
I received the following text message from a random number last week:
“British government living expense subsidy scheme:
We will issue it to every British citizen living expenses for 2023-2024.
If you fail to update your information before 2024/10/8, we will consider you to have given up on receiving it and we will continue to distribute it to more people in need.
Please update your details in the link as soon as possible after reading the information,We will issue living expenses to you within this week”
Followed by an extremely suspicious looking link that they wanted me to tap on.
There were a few things that clued me in that this message was suspicious – firstly, the fact that it came from a random mobile number. Texts from organisations and businesses almost always show the name of the organisation at the top of the chat window, rather than just a mobile number.
Often scammers will start their message with “Fedex:” or “Evri:” to try to fool people, but it’s not the same thing. One of the only exceptions to this random mobile number rule that I’ve come across is when an Amazon driver needs help delivering your order – but those messages always follow a set pattern, and they never contain any links.
Clue number 2 was the urgent date – I received this message on the 8th October, having never heard anything about me being eligible for this “subsidy scheme” before then (probably because it’s not true). If it was true, there would have been multiple attempts to get in touch, much sooner than the day of the “deadline”.
The third thing, of course, was the dodgy looking link. Generally I would avoid tapping on a link in a text message unless you are absolutely, 100%, not-a-single-doubt-in-your-mind sure that it’s a safe and trustworthy link. If a company needs you to do something on their website, you can always open your web browser separately and go to their website there, rather than going via a link in your Messages app.
So, other than not tapping on the link, what should you do if you get a text like this? It’s a good idea to forward it to Action Fraud, so that they’re aware of the scam and can warn people.
To do that, tap and hold on the message, then tap on “More” or the three dots menu button to get the “Forward” option. Type “7726” into the “To:” field and then press Send – fun fact, it’s 7726 because those are the numbers you’d need to press to spell the word SPAM on a mobile phone, back when they had actual number buttons instead of touchscreens.