Don’t Fall for Unpaid Parking Fee Scam Text
Unpaid parking fines happen to the best of us, and one of the latest phishing scams wants you to believe that you missed or forgot to pay the amount due. This text message scam asks you to pay your overdue parking tickets and give your credit card number and other personal information directly to the scammers so they can use it.
Fraudsters exploit threat of unpaid parking fees
The unpaid parking fee scam is one of many relatively simple text phishing attempts that relies on recipients responding to the threat of debt while giving up personal and financial information. This is similar to the current unpaid toll scam text , which may seem plausible enough that you may be tempted to click the link to pay the supposed fine.
In this case, scammers impersonate city officials, sending notices of unpaid parking “bills” that will accrue daily late fees until payments are made. The text message contains a web address or link that spoofs an official government website that prompts you to enter information ranging from your name and billing address to your credit card number. If you do this, you will obviously be handing over your credit card to scammers.
The Salt Lake City phishing text , for example, reads: “This is a notice from Salt Lake City. Your vehicle has an unpaid parking bill in the amount of $4.35. To avoid a 355 late fee, please pay off your balance as soon as possible. To avoid late fees, access your file by entering the following link in your browser” with a web address that looks similar to the city’s parking portal but is actually fake.
According to Bleeping Computer , these texts began circulating in December 2024 and were seen in many US cities, including major cities such as Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, New York, Salt Lake City, Charlotte, San Diego and San Francisco. Some texts have a clickable link that uses an overt redirect to Google.com , which avoids an iOS security feature that disables links from unknown senders and suspicious domains.
How to recognize a fraudulent parking fee text
As we said, this scam isn’t particularly sophisticated, but it does try to create enough doubt about your parking ticket history in your city so that you can take advantage of them. The first question you should ask yourself is whether you’ve used paid public parking lately, and if not, this is an obvious clue.
However, even if you have a question about whether the city government can send you a message about an unpaid parking fee, look at the number from which the message came. While official (legitimate) text messages typically come from five-digit senders, phishing texts often come from full phone numbers, international numbers (prefixed like “+44”), or even email addresses.
Additionally, other signs of a scam include instructions to copy and paste or type a web address into a browser or to reply to the text itself. URLs without hyperlinks are a clear bribe, but you should also be wary of clicking on links in any text from unknown senders and always go directly to official government websites. Parking fee scams also include misspelled words and missing or misplaced symbols, such as a dollar sign after the amount.