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Scams That Use Spray-and-pray SMS/Messaging

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Features Of SMS/Messaging Scam Campaigns

  • Easy to target a large number of people at once

  • Dollar amounts lost tend to be smaller (tens or hundreds of dollars, not thousands or tens of thousands)

  • Hit-or-miss detection at the phone OS level or 3rd party messaging app level (differences in how Android, iOS, Whatsapp, Telegram, FB Messenger, Instagram, etc handle these)

  • In order to engage the victim, the SMS "bait" must have a call-to-action

    • Entice the user to click or copy a link to launch a website

    • Convince the user to reply to the message ("Didn't authorize this purchase? Type NO to cancel.")

    • Convince the user to initiate a call-back via phone

    • Convince the user to reply in app

Indicators For SMS/Messaging Campaigns

Scams that have these indicators are conducive to distribution via SMS or messaging:

  • Spray And Pray / Scattered: The scammer approaches many victims at once such as through bulk email or SMS.

  • Semi-targeted Regionally: The scammer approaches people in a certain region, for example by area code (toll scam) using semi-targeted email or SMS.

  • Semi-targeted Collection: The bait (initial reachout) is sent out to people in a collection harvested online, for example from some data breach or corporate directory.

Detection Notes

  • The call-to-action provides a possible avenue for detection (e.g. a known malicious URL)

  • The mass-produced nature of these messages makes them easily detectable (same reason they are easily generate-able by an LLM)

Synthetic Generation Of SMS Spam Campaigns

Claude or other LLMs can easily generate scam SMS-style messages using a simple prompt and asking for a text file output. The following scams have synthetic SMS datasets generated for them already (marked "Synthetic SMS Messages" on these pages):