Currently, countless Swiss mobile phone users receive an SMS threatening them with a fine, sometimes in the name of the police.
A bizarre SMS is making more and more Swiss phones vibrate in recent days. On the website cybercrimepolice.ch, the Zurich cantonal police explain:
“The message makes recipients believe they have committed a traffic offense and demands immediate payment of a fine. To exert additional pressure, shippers threaten late fees or even legal consequences for non-payment.
These messages obviously do not come from the police, but from scammers looking to obtain personal data and credit card information.
Fake SMS messages look like this:
The scam is easy to spot thanks to the confusing language and the British prefix.
If you click on the link contained in the short message (RCS or iMessage), you land on a fake website, designed in the design of a Swiss police force. There, “personal information and then credit card data are requested,” warns the police.
If the phishing method is successful, an unauthorized charge to the credit card is immediately initiated, bypassing two-factor authentication.”
KAPO Zurichcybercrimepolice.ch
Since short messages are not, strictly speaking, unencrypted SMS, but encrypted RCS or iMessage messages, fake messages cannot be filtered by mobile operators.
Anyone receiving such a phishing message should therefore report it as spam in the corresponding chat application. Apple, Samsung, Google and others will be able to better recognize other fake messages and automatically filter them as spam, as with unsolicited emails.
Phishing messages can be reported as spam with just one click in the Messages app (RCS-Chat or iMessage).image: watson
And besides, if you don’t have a car at all, the latest phishing episode might remind you of this ad from the 1990s, as one X user aptly commented.
(was)
Translated and adapted by Noëline Flippe
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