The text was sent from a mobile telephone number and reads ‘UBER: We have identified that you made an overpayment on your last trip. Please follow the link to process your refund https://refund-ref067(dot)com‘
As with the EE message above, this message is bogus and is just a ploy to trick you into inputting personal information or installing malware to your device.
Smishing messages are usually sent on a large scale to ensure that some of the recipients will be customers of the organisation being mimicked. And in turn the scammers may receive responses from a proportion of those customers who don’t spot that it’s a scam.
Many people receive messages purporting to be from companies that they do not deal with and will immediately recognise them to be fake. But where you are a customer of the company in question it can be difficult to know whether to ignore the message or whether you must act.
The simple advice is to never click on a link in a text message that you were not expecting. If you are a customer of the company in question and you are not sure about the communication, always contact them using a number, e-mail address or chatbot you know to be correct to find out if the message is genuine. Remember the link given in a text message might look like a genuine web address but it is very easy for fraudsters to give a link a false identity in their communications.
Forward suspicious texts to 7726, free of charge.
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