“Hi, mum. I dropped my phone in the toilet so I have this temporary number. I really need your help with my lost contacts and photos. Save this number when you see this (kissing emoji).”
Upsetting, isn’t it?
A child in a pickle.
Except this message was suss: my grown-up offspring are professionals, independent, tech savvy and they certainly wouldn’t ask me for help with their contacts or photos.
Clearly, the message was not from my child.
It was from some person who presumably bought my phone number off that mysterious, sinister marketplace called the dark web.
A personal message like this might present as warm and fuzzy, but really it is cold, hard fraud.
The fraudsters have thrown their mud far and wide, in the hope some will stick.
Experts might have given this conduct cute names such as phishing, angling or whaling but it is not sweet at all – and the messages seek things that we previously did not consider valuable such as information, images, personal brand preferences.
Many scams are so slick, they do not tip off the unwary.
But in the new age, personal data is the equivalent of old-school nuggets of gold.
There are scammers in seemingly every digital nook and cranny.
They are known to pop up within minutes of a person posting an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace, offering the amount you asked for but explaining they are out of the area and if you would just arrange and pay for shipping, they will electronic transfer those extra bucks in the transaction.
Yeah, right.
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My Beloved received a warning about an unpaid toll soon after he had driven on the named road, and even he – the most organised, ordered person I know – second-guessed the scheduled automatic top-up.
He was smart enough to check, and fortunately realised it was a scam.
But so many are not that lucky.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch recently reported that the grubs managed to steal $664,000 nationwide in the unpaid toll scam last year.
No wonder we get nostalgic about the days of paper bills and face-to-face interactions.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer. The views expressed are her own.
