Smishing is a species of modern scam.
You might be phished, quished or even vished – but you’re more likely to be smished. The word is an elision of SMS (text messages) and phishing, which is when a scammer baits someone into surrendering sensitive information. Smishing is particularly effective as most of us respond more urgently to texts than, say, emails or post.
A message will arrive, asking you to reactivate a bank card or confirm an address for a delivery company. Perhaps it will say something like, ‘Hi dad i lost my phone, this is my new number.’
I was smished just this morning. It was my old friend PCP RECLAIM, informing me once again that I could be owed up to £2,487 in mis-sold car finance.
I have never taken out any car finance.
The attached link takes me to a site that asks for further personal details – presumably so I can be smished more effectively in future.
As long as you delete the texts – and refuse to wire the hapless child £5,000 to their new bank in the Philippines – you’re probably OK. Still, enough people take the bait for this to be worthwhile and the wider industry is both sophisticated and lucrative.
By some estimates, scamming is now worth around $1 trillion worldwide – more than the entire illegal drugs trade. The scamming heartlands are around the Mekong in south-east Asia, where multibillion-dollar syndicates operate vast scam compounds.
Often the people doing the scamming are themselves the victims of scams. They might be tech-workers from, say, Ghana or Bangladesh, lured with the promise of a high-paying job overseas, only to find themselves imprisoned, cut off from their families and forced to scam on pain of torture. According to the UN, there are as many as 120,000 people living in such conditions in Myanmar and 100,000 in Cambodia.
The most grisly scam is known as ‘pig-butchering’. Here, the scammer makes contact with the victim – say via a dating app — and cultivates a relationship over weeks or even months. Only once trust is fully established do they share details of the amazing crypto scheme they’ve discovered. Finally comes the moment of slaughter. It’s called butchering because the idea is to clean out the ‘pig’ for absolutely everything they own.
And now we have a new wave of AI scam. You are called and asked to complete a lifestyle survey – the purpose of which is to ‘clone’ your voice so it can be used to scam your loved ones.
The only reliable defence is iron-clad cynicism. And/or throw your phone in the bin.
Richard Godwin
