'Smishing' outbreak hits Canadian town

Link: BCNG Portals Page (R)

Welcome to the picturesque town of Maple Ridge, about 45 minutes East of Vancouver. Surrounded by magnificent mountains, pastoral meadows and beautiful lakes, it’s a great place to take a vacation (so says the area website). However, bad things are afoot in Maple Ridge. Residents are getting worrying text messages telling them they’ve won a cash prize, in a ‘smishing’ outbreak.

The text message that beeped on Veronica Cellier’s mobile phone was too good to be true. It said congratulations, you have won $428,000 and directed the Maple Ridge resident to e-mail ‘the claims office” at claims@standfordproductions.org.

‘I’d never heard of scams through text messaging,” the 32-year-old said incredulously. ‘I’m just not stupid enough to respond.” Cellier was one of four Telus customers to report the scams which targets short message service (SMS).  Smishing or SMS phishing variation of the phishing scam where the user will receive a text message with an Internet or e-mail address.

The article goes on to say that ‘smishing’ is like phishing – if you follow the link or reply, bad virus things will immediately invade your computer, phone, washing machine and toaster.

It’s times like this when you do wonder about how gullable some people really are.. Anyone know if Nigeria gets cheap texts to the UK? 🙂