The Easiest Ways to Detect an Unpaid Toll Fraud Text
I recently rented a car in two different states. Both times I was asked if I wanted to pay an extra fee per day so I wouldn’t have to worry about paying tolls – a critical issue in some states like Florida that no longer accept cash on the road and sometimes don’t even allow you to pay online. Both times I refused and set my Google Maps to “avoid toll roads.” I was pretty confident that Google would protect me from an unpaid toll, but my heart still sank when I received a text message a few weeks ago telling me I had an unpaid I-Pass from Illinois. But then I looked at the text carefully.
SMS about missed toll roads – the newest type of fraud
It turns out that messages purporting to be from the toll authority telling you that you have unpaid tolls and must pay or face fines or even lose your driver’s license are the latest in a never-ending stream of text-based phishing scams trying to trick you into giving up your personal information (and your money).
Transportation authorities in many states have issued warnings about these texts , which at first glance appear to be quite legal. They usually claim to come from one of the major tolling programs – E-ZPass in the Northeast, FasTrak in California, I-Pass in Illinois. The text will tell you that you have an unpaid toll, indicate your upcoming due date, and outline the dire consequences of not paying. A convenient official URL will also be included where you can make your payment. Clicking this link will take you to a website that asks you to enter your credit card or bank information to pay the fine. And I’m sure you can imagine what happens next because you just gave your credit card number to a scammer.
How to recognize a fraudulent message about a missed fee
As for fraud, it is not very complicated. The scammers aren’t doing anything special to target you—they’ve just somehow gotten hold of your phone number and are including you in a mass spam attempt in the hopes that you’ll be too distracted to notice the obvious signs that the message isn’t legitimate. So here are a few things to consider: Are you even using this particular tolling service? I’ve received half a dozen of these messages in the past week. Some of them are for services that I used and could conceivably owe money on (such as I-Pass, which works in Illinois, one of the states I recently visited). Others, not so much: I didn’t even know California used something called “FasTrak” until I Googled it. So think about it: is there a legitimate reason why this tolling agency is asking me for money? I may have a missed E-ZPass toll, but I definitely don’t have a missed FasTrak toll. Check the sender. One of the most obvious clues is the source of the text. Official automated text messages usually come from a five-digit number. For example, the messages telling me that my E-ZPass has been replenished come from “39769.” Scam messages are likely to come from a full phone number, most likely an international one, with an unfamiliar country code at the beginning (I recently received a message from a number that started with “+44”, indicating a number based in the UK). Another tip: if the sender is an email, especially if it’s from a free email service like Gmail or Outlook (I’ve even gotten a few from Hotmail, which hasn’t existed for years). URLs without hyperlinks. When a message comes from a legitimate sender, all included URLs are likely to be clickable. The scam texts almost always contain unclickable URLs with strange instructions asking you to either copy and paste the address into your browser or reply to the text with a Y and then close and reopen it. This is an attempt to bypass iPhone security feature . Conveniently (for scammers), after you reply to the message and then open it again, the link they sent you earlier will become available and take you straight to a site that will steal your payment information.
Look for other signs of online fraud. There’s a good chance that the payment sites these URLs point to will also have telltale signs of phishing scams, such as poor grammar, misspellings, or strange formatting. Luckily, all of the sites I was directed to in recent scam messages are actually down, suggesting that the sites are closing as quickly as the scammers can open them. But I keep getting more of them, so they probably won’t stop trying.