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A total of 37 percent of all Norwegians have been exposed to text messages from fake senders in the past year, according to a NorSIS survey.
In just one day in August, Telenor stopped more than 45,000 fake or fraud-related text messages.
– We must learn not to blindly trust who appears as the sender of an SMS, says cyber expert and senior advisor Vidar Sandland of the Norwegian Center for Information Security (NorSIS).
– Very few know that it is almost as easy to send a fake SMS as a real one, he continues.
45,000 fraudulent SMS stopped in one day
According to the National Communications Authority (Nkom), Telenor blocked 45,000 text messages related to fraud in one day in August.
One of the scam techniques that causes the message to stop is a fake sender, called “SMS spoofing.”
“Spoofing” means that the scammers imitate Norwegian phone numbers.
– The actors who engage in this type of illegitimate manipulation of the return address are often located outside of Norway, says senior advisor Johannes Vallesverd at Nkom.
In total, around 20 million text messages were sent through the Telenor system on this day.
Fake text messages are primarily used to trick the recipient into providing their username, password, or credit card information.
Warn again
Most vulnerable Android
– You may also be asked to download a program that, in the worst case, gives criminals full access to your camera, microphone, files, and text messages. It’s only the imagination that puts an end to the use of this, says Sandland.
It emphasizes that downloading monitoring apps in most cases is a challenge associated with Android phones, to a greater extent than Apple phones.
Apple phones do not accept application downloads outside of their own distribution platform. Android phones do.
FBI: increasingly sophisticated
Phishing is also one of the scams the FBI has warned against in the past, among increasingly sophisticated methods that are increasingly difficult to detect.
– Be extremely skeptical
In 2019, the FBI posted fraud losses of NOK 32 billion.
Among the forms of fraud that the FBI has received the most alerts about are several regulars we recognize from Norway, including phishing, spoofing, corporate email fraud, and love fraud.
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Demanding to distinguish the real from the false
Fake text messages may have a sender number that you know, it may be companies like the Norwegian Health Directorate, a supermarket chain, the Norwegian Post, the Tax Administration or others, possibly an unknown mobile number.
Dinside has also written about this repeatedly, when these fraudulent SMS have appeared, last week when Norway Post warned against fake SMS and emails.
Authorities also warned of fraud related to the corona pandemic.
This is pure fraud
According to NorSIS, SMS fraud can be more difficult to detect than email fraud, because the actual link in an SMS is a short link:
If you hover your mouse over a link in an email, you can often see the full address of the page that it is being sent to. In a text message, you don’t have the same opportunity for this, Sandland explains.
– Serious players do not request payment via link in SMS
According to NorSIS senior advisor, there is really only one sure way to avoid being scammed by a fake SMS.
“Serious gamers will never ask you to pay anything or provide personal information through a link in an SMS,” he says, adding:
– It is also important to remember that it is not the click on the link that is dangerous. It’s when you later provide information or agree to download a program that you can run into serious problems, Sandland concludes.
