Maybe you've been getting these for a while on your cell phone but it's only been the last month or two that mine has received them. They're fake messages, mostly pretending to be from AT&T, trying to get me to click on a link that will take me…
…well, since I've been wise enough not to click, I don't know where any of them would take me but I think "to the cleaners" is a likely possibility. Or maybe Computer Virus Hell. Or maybe to a festival of data-mining and/or an avalanche of additional spam. Whatever it, is, I'll bet it's not good for me.
This one wants me to click and claim some sort of money they're holding for me. The one before told me there were serious problems with my bill and I needed to click on the provided cyberlink to sort things out. The one before that said, "As requested, your cellphone account will be disconnected and deleted in one hour" and then it gave me a link to click if this was not what I wanted. And so on. How did I realize it was a fraud?
- It has a real phone number, portions of which I have redacted. AT&T does not need a standard ten-digit phone number to send me a text message.
- The link they want me to click to is not to an AT&T address.
- AT&T giving me back money? Are they kidding me? Are they freakin' kidding me?
And also, I keep getting these. They have me on High Alert.
I'm not sure if there's anything I can do except to block their numbers. I have an app that lets me report voice calls I shouldn't be getting and while I'm not sure that does any good, at least I feel like I've done something to fight back. That's why these are more annoying.