Is the text scammer era at an end? Comreg implements SMS registry for firms

When my phone pinged to let me know I had received a new text message from my bank, I ignored it. Like many people would these days, I imagine.

There had been rash of messages lately claiming I needed to contact my bank, that a transaction had been declined because the bank had flagged it as suspicious activity, or that a purchase I had no recollection of had gone through. And if this wasn’t a legitimate purchase, could I please contact them via this website to flag it.

In most cases they were, of course, phishing messages, trying to trick me into handing over information that could be used fraudulently at a later date. They were easy to spot in most instances, even though some looked like they were coming from an official source.

One message came from a bank I had never held an account at, for example. Others contained obviously fake website addresses. If I had followed the link, all I would have been doing was handing over my personal details to a con artist to use against me.

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But this particular time, it was different.

A short time after getting the message, and taking no action, I got a call from the bank to follow up. Being naturally suspicious of the whole process – scammers can use phones too – I declined to hand over the required personal data to verify my identity, and chose to call them back.

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Someone had tried to charge my account, but the transaction hadn’t gone through. The bank had prevented several hundred euro being taken.

It was a similar story for a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago. Again, a message claiming to be from her bank, saying a transaction through eBay had completed for a few hundred euro, giving a card identifier. The details matched up but the transaction didn’t. She immediately suspected it was a fake message.

But a quick call to the bank revealed that it wasn’t – and that fraudsters had managed to get some money from her account before the bank flagged it.

It shows how little we trust the messages that arrive on our phones these days. Warnings via the very channel that is supposed to protect us from falling victim to fraud are, ironically, being ignored as coming from potential fraudsters.

The suspicion of SMS is warranted. There was a stark warning from Bank of Ireland last week about the rise in fake texts targeted at its customers, luring them into calling fraudulent phone lines. The bank said there had been a spike in reports and calls about the messages over a 24-hour period that was 10 times the weekly number reported in April and May.

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The messages follow the same pattern: they claim to be from the bank, flagging suspicious activity – logging in from a new device, a declined transaction, a hold placed on a car – with a number to call if there is an issue.

The end result was to dupe victims into transferring funds to a “safe account” controlled by the fraudsters, because their existing accounts had been “compromised”.

So it is understandable, amid a barrage of fake messages, that we might ignore a genuine text or two.

Things may be about to change, however. The communications regulator is trying to tackle the problem through a registry that aims to help weed out the scammers and hopefully stop people from falling prey to this particular scam. Businesses and organisations that use SMS sender IDs – those short names that identify your bank or delivery company – must register with ComReg.

From next month, any text messages coming from unregistered senders will be flagged as “likely scam”, giving consumers the heads up that we need to be on our guard. From October, those messages will be blocked from reaching consumers, giving businesses a few months to get their ducks in a row.

ComReg won’t just be taking a company’s word for it. Each of the registrations will be validated in some way to make sure that only legitimates sender IDs are registered.

In theory, that means you can reasonably expect when a message arrives that says it is from your bank, it actually is.

But we should still be on our guard. If the registry is a success, scammers, being scammers, will inevitably try another avenue to try to defraud people. And with the development of even more powerful AI technology, it is becoming harder all the time for consumers to tell the real from the fake.