The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently announced the passage of a new bill requiring wireless companies, including carriers, to block fraudulent text messages.
The FCC press release as follows.
"The report and executive order passed today require carriers to block text messages that appear to be fraudulent and prohibit text messages from invalid, unassigned or unused numbers. The ban also includes numbers that say they never send text messages, as well as numbers identified by government agencies and other high-profile entities as not being used for texting."
The FCC says complaints about scam text messages have increased from 3,300 to 18,900 per year from 2015 to 2022. the FCC notes that unlike scam bot calls, which are easy to ignore, people who receive text messages will almost always read them immediately. If a user interacts with them, it could lead to malware being downloaded to the phone, or the user being attacked by a phishing scheme.
According to a report released this month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Americans lost $10.3 billion to various online scams last year (currently about 70.658 billion CNY).
The report shows that the most common type of crime is phishing, with 300,497 victims falling for this scam and more than $52 million in fraud. “Phishing” is when unknown emails, text messages or phone calls claim to be from legitimate companies and ask victims to provide personal, financial or login information. Phishing is often successful because the phishing emails often resemble those sent by someone the victim knows, prompting them to click on an unsafe link.
