A SERIES of bogus SMS messages that claim recipients have won huge sums of money are part of a fresh wave of scams on the Cyprus market, police said yesterday.
Police said the text messages informed people that they had received large amounts of cash and appealed for them to respond to collect their alleged prize.
“All the messages contain similar content but for obvious reasons the identity of the sender is not revealed. The aim of the messages is to encourage recipients to get in touch with the sender, who will then ask for money in order to send the supposed prize. In cases where people are persuaded to send cash, the sender terminates all communication,” police said.
Due to the anonymity of the messages, and the fact that phone numbers and email addresses were not stored in any service provider’s database, tracing the senders was a very difficult task, the authorities warned.
The police said the latest scam was not unlike similar internet scams that referred to monies won from lotteries in Spain, the UK or Australia, or from money left behind from people who’d passed away abroad.
“The public is asked to be particularly careful when receiving such misleading messages on their mobile phones and to ignore them because they are a scam,” police said.
This week, the Office of Fair Trading sent out thousands of fake text messages in a bid to raise awareness among 18 to 24 year-old mobile phone users of the latest scams.
The messages were sent on February 15 as part of Scams Awareness Month.
The first message read: ‘Urgent! U may have won £1k cash with ‘2 Good 2 B True’. A second text explained that the message was part of a scam education exercise.
“Young people can fall for exactly the same types of scam as anyone else, often delivered through the latest technology,” said Mike Haley, director of consumer protection at the OFT.
“We hope that our innovative approach of sending fake scam text messages will remind young consumers to be on their guard if they receive a suspicious offer.”
According to the OFT around six per cent of scam victims are aged between 15 and 24.
Scams Awareness Month is part of a wider international initiative organised by the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network.
Two years ago, a Beijing resident named Wang hit the headlines after a text message cost him more than $18,500.
The message informed him that he had bought items with his credit card that totalled more than $2,200. He said he had not used the card.
Anxious, he dialled the number that the message left to contact the bank staff, and he was asked on the telephone to leave his card number and password for further identification.
Later, Wang found the spending limit on his account had been reached. When he redialled the contact number, there was no response.
Wang’s case turned out to be high-tech fraud, and he is only one of many who were cheated.
China has more than 370 million mobile phone users, and hundreds of millions of text messages are sent every day, making it a profitable value-added service.
But mobile phone subscribers are frequently inundated with unsolicited SMS transmissions, from lewdness and sexual services real or virtual to cheap airline ticket ads and other marketing ploys.
