Smishing and Vishing: Scammers are targeting your cell phone

Are you familiar with the terms smishing and vishing? They’ve been around for a few years now, but they’re not as common as email phishing and haven’t been given as much attention.

Both smishing and vishing are variations on the phish theme: smishing targets SMS text messages, while vishing – or voice phishing – uses automated phone calls.

There has been a noticeable rise in both types of schemes, and attacks are expected to increase during this holiday season.

The majority of reported scams behave like this:

You receive either an automated phone call or a text message purportedly from your bank, telling you there’s a problem with your account. The phone number used to send the message is usually localized so that your own area code appears instead of a 1-8xx number (people are more likely to find the message more believable and respond when the number is more ‘recognizable’). The message will ask you to either call a phone number or log onto a website to provide account information to resolve the issue.

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James A. Restucci is the author of this blog. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internal License.

One Response to Smishing and Vishing: Scammers are targeting your cell phone

  1. TVNews says:

    There’s a sucker born every minute.