SMS scams are nothing new and range from mild annoyances to convincing scams that are ripping off Australians by the thousands. From today, Telstra network users can take an extra step to report SMS scams, which will help Telstra’s network block these messages from being sent to other users.
If you receive a junk SMS, you can forward the message (only the text of the message, not the sender’s mobile number) to 7226, which reads as SCAM on the phone keypad.
Telstra’s system will then use the forwarded messages to build and improve a database of suspected fraudulent SMS so that fraudulent SMS can be blocked in the future.
There are other steps that users who receive scam messages can take, for example a popular scam tactic is to impersonate Australian motorway operators (Linkt being the main one) and often these operators provide a direct way to report scams through their websites to they can try to accept. action against cheaters.
In addition to messages, you can also block numbers from scam messages, which can prevent future messages from coming through, but usually scammers use different numbers each time, so this may not be particularly effective.
Do you often receive scam messages? What steps are you taking?