US consumers lost $330 million to text message scams in 2022: Report – Times of India

Over the past few years, scams across the world have increased at an alarming rate. Amongst them, text message-based scams have been common in multiple countries, including India. Now, a new report claims that consumers in the US have lost millions due to these SMS scams. According to a report from FTC’s Consumer Sentineldatabase, text message scams took consumers for $330 million in 2022.The report also claims that the mentioned amount for the SMS scams in the US has also more than doubled the losses reported in 2021. Moreover, the amount has increased by five times than what people reported in 2019.
“Scammers use the speed of text communication to their advantage: they hope you won’t slow down and think over what’s in the message. Some messages promise a good thing — a gift, a package, or even a job. Others try to make you panic, thinking someone’s in your accounts. These are all lies and ways to take your money and personal information,” the FTC added.
Text message scams imitating banks have increased nearly 20 fold
As per the report, complaints about text scams spiked in the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The report also notes that the number of complaints never returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Amongst a randomly selected set of 1,000 suspicious texts, most of the fraudulent messages aimed to mimic well-known businesses, the report discovered. Since 2019, complaints about texts impersonating banks have grown by nearly 20 times, the report added.
How these scams victimise users
One of the sample messages reads: “Wells Fargo Bank Fraud Alert: Did you attempt a purchase at Walmart for $1,263.89? Reply YES or NO.”
Whenever recipients answered with either yes or no, they received a fake phone call from the scammers imitating the bank’s fraud department. In 2022, the reported median loss for this type of scam was $3,000. The report also emphasised that victims of these scams also shared sensitive information with the tricksters which even include their Social Security Numbers.
Furthermore, the report also mentioned that scammers tried to attract victims with the promise of a free gift from popular retailers or even cell phone companies. Several reports also asked recipients to click on a link and pay shipping fees for a fake prize that users never received.
Other text message scams reported
Some of the other SMS-based scams included — fake package delivery scams, fraud job offers, and security alerts imitating Amazon.
The report also stated that nearly 98% of recipients opened these texts while 45% of users responded to these messages. To compare, open and response rates in e-mail-related scams are 20% and 6%, respectively.
Text is a more common communication method as over half of the consumers use text on a regular daily compared to voice or email.
The report also mentions the aggregate losses to text fraud by year — $67 mn (2019), $86 mn (2020), $131 mn (2021) and $330 mn (2022).
The report has also identified the top companies in 2022 that have impersonated banks for text scams. This includes Bank of America (14%), Wells Fargo (12%)), Chase (12%) and Citibank (9 per cent).