Scammers are texting drivers about unpaid tolls, causing chaos amongst some consumers

If you’ve received a text claiming you owe unpaid tolls, you’re not alone.

If you’ve received a text claiming you owe unpaid tolls, you’re not alone. Over 60,000 complaints were made to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center last year about unpaid toll scams. People all over the country are being contacted, mostly via text messages, and being told they owe money for highway tolls. Some of these texts appear to come from phone numbers that appear real but feature fake email addresses. “The texts may include a link that looks like it’s from the state’s toll service and may include a phone number,” according to the FBI. Consumer protection service McAfee found scam texts nearly quadrupled from January to late February this year. Steve Grobman, executive vice president and chief technology officer at McAfee, said the toll scam is effective because it hits all the correct social points for a consumer. “They’re able to use the recipient’s location anything from as simple as their area code, but also with a lot of the data breaches over the last few years, they know physically where people live or have lived, and can then target them with location-relevant toll scam,” Grobman said. McAfee found that 76% of messages from January and February had links, many using URL shorteners like bit.ly to hide where links actually go. These scam websites also use domains like “.vip,” “.top,” and “.xin” to trick people into thinking they are official websites.