I recently rented a car in two different countries. Both times I was asked whether I wanted to pay an additional fee a day so as not to avoid worries about paying toll fees – a decisive problem in some states such as Florida that do not even allow them to pay online. Both times I declined and realized my Google Maps to “avoid toll fees”.
I was reasonably confident that Google would protect me from an unpaid toll ticket, but my heart still skipped a clock when I received an SMS message a few weeks ago, in which I knew that I had unpaid I-Pass toll fees from Illinois. But then I took a closer look at the text.
Most toll texts are the latest fraud
It turns out that texts that are supposed to come from a fee-based administration that are told that they have unpaid toll fees and that they have to pay or even with fines or even lose their driving license, the latest in an endless stream of text-based phishing frauds, who are trying to get them to give up their personal information (and their money).
Transport authorities in several countries have published warnings of these textsthat appear quite legitimate at a glance. As a rule, they come from one of the most important toll programs of the E-Zass in the northeast, Fastrak in California, i-Pass in Illinois. The text informs you that you have an unpaid tribute, state an impending due date and describe bad consequences for non -procurement. Also included is a practical, official URL where you can make your payment.
By accessing this link, you lead to a website on which you enter your credit card or bank information to pay your fine. And I am sure you can imagine what happens from there because you have just given your credit card number to a fraudster.
How to recognize a fraud missed toll text
As fraud, it is not very refined. The fraudsters do nothing special to target them – they only have their telephone number and take them into a mass parameter attempt in the hope that they are too distracted to notice the obvious signs that the message is not legitimate. So here are a few things you should pay attention to:
Do you even use this special toll service? I received half a dozen of these texts last week. Some of them are suitable for services for services in Illinois, one of the states that I recently visited in Illinois, one of the states I have recently visited in Illinois. Others, not so much: I didn’t even know California used some name “Fastrak” Until I googled it. So take a clock to think: there is a legitimate reason The The Tolling agency asks me for money? I may have a missed E-Zass-Toll, but I definitely don’t have a missed Fastrak-Toll.
Check the sender. One of the most obvious knowledge is the source of the text. Official automated texts usually come from a 5-digit number. The texts that I told myself come from my e-Zass, for example from “39769.” Fraud texts are more likely to come from a full telephone number, probably an international, with an unknown country code at the beginning (I recently had one from a number with “+44” that indicates a number based in Great Britain). Another Tell: If the sender is an e -mail -especially if it comes from a free E -Mail service like Google Mail or Outlook (I even received a few from Hotmail that has not existed for years).
Not hyperlord urls. If a message comes from a legitimate sender, all URLs contained can probably be clicked. Fraud texts almost always have no clickable URLs, whereby strange instructions are either asked to copy and insert the address into your browser or to answer the text with a Y and then close it and open it again. This is an attempt too Use an iPhone security function. Comfortable (for the fraud) as soon as you have answered a text and then reopened it, the link you have previously sent will click on and lead you to the website on which your payment information is stolen.
Search for other signs of an online fraud. The chances are good that the payment pages to which these URLs lead them also wear treacherous signs of phishing fraud such as bad grammar, misconditions or strange formatting. Fortunately, all those I visited about my last fraud texts do not really work, which indicates that the websites are removed as quickly as the fraudsters can set them up. But I always get more from you, so you probably won’t stop trying.
