THOUSANDS in Cyprus have received spam SMS messages from a lonely woman called Angela telecoms authority CyTA said yesterday.
“Many of these messages start “with a seemingly innocent SMS sent from ‘Angela’ to ‘Irene’ but those who have answered the message – mostly male clients – would usually get another message encouraging them to send messages with a higher charge to a four-digit SMS number, which led to a dating service,” CyTA’s information security officer Petros Pantjaris yesterday said.
The message , which has been doing the rounds reads: “Irene, how are you? We’ve lost touch! Me? Where do I start…I broke up four months ago, I’m lonely and I’m searching for myself! Shall we meet up for coffee tomorrow to catch up in person? Angela”
“If they respond, clients might then receive a message from an ‘Aliki’ who is married and is looking for someone discreet or else from an ‘Alexandra’ and so on,” Pantjaris said.
CyTA discovered the scam after they started investigating a high volume of messages from random call centres.
“We’ve already blocked them but [the scammers] keep finding new call centres which we’re watching in order to stop further nuisance to our customers,” said Pantjaris.
Customers are advised not to list their mobile phone number online before reading a website’s terms of service carefully.
Free offers and lucky draw participations tend to come in tow with subscription services and customers should read the terms of service so that they understand what it is and how much it costs, CyTA warned.
In addition to avoiding sending text messages to four-digit numbers, customers are also advised not to text or call messages with numbers starting with 900 or 909.
The scam has been going on in Greece for years, Pantjaris added by scammers who “have been doing exactly the same thing using the same message and content,” he said.
People who have already answered Angela’s message should not worry too much however.
“Those who ended up answering the original message will only incur the standard local cost for SMS messages and/or calls,” said Pantjiaris.