How to Avoid ‘Wrong Number’ Text Scams

Such scams often succeed, because criminals are skilled at exploiting their targets’ friendliness. “You would be surprised at how many people who get a wrong number text are amenable to trying to help the person who they think has dialed a wrong number,” says Erin West, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County, California, who has organized a coalition of law enforcement officials to combat crypto-related scams.

But what seems like an innocent mistake by the sender actually is the first move in a long con, according to West. Once the scammer gets a person to respond, more messages usually follow. “It goes on over a period of weeks, or even a month, where this scammer will develop a relationship,” she says. “It could be a romantic relationship, or a friendship, or a mentor relationship with the victim.”

Money enters the discussion

Once that bond is formed, experts say, the criminal usually transitions to luring you into a crypto investment scam. The scammers pretend to be living a high-end lifestyle, West notes, “then they say, ‘The reason I’m able to afford this is because I invest in cryptocurrency. Have you ever considered doing that?’”

By that time, they’ve also gleaned plenty of personal details from conversations about your personal finances — whether you own a home, for example, or have relatives who might lend you some cash — that indicate how much of a payday you might provide.

In crypto schemes, they’ll typically try to convince you to invest in what looks like a legitimate account; it may even indicate that you’re getting a huge return on your investment. In reality, those funds are simply stolen, West says. When you try to withdraw money, she adds, you might be told that you need to pay “taxes” on it first.

Tech-savvy criminals

Though they’re posing as regular people who’ve clumsily hit the wrong keys on their phones, the scammers who run fake wrong-number text scams actually use extremely sophisticated technology to commit their crimes.  

“It would not surprise me if the initial messages are automated, as they are nearly all identical,” Chester Wisniewski, field chief technology officer for applied research at cybersecurity firm Sophos, says in an email exchange.

When Sean Gallagher, a senior threat researcher for Sophos, received a fake wrong-number text — “Hey Jane are you still in Boston” — last October, he played along so that he could study the scam, which he later described in an article for the Sophos website. “Harley,” the flirtatious young woman supposedly sending the texts, claimed to be the manager of a family-run winery in Canada who owned a Ferrari sports car. Instead, she apparently was just the face of a team of scammers in Cambodia. The criminals had searched the internet for information and photos and fashioned them into a detailed, seemingly plausible life history for the fictitious character, according to Gallagher’s account.

When “Harley” eventually pitched him on a cryptocurrency investment, the Sophos researcher, of course, didn’t go for it.

But others targeted by wrong-number text scammers sometimes end up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars: “This is a scam designed to absolutely clean out every last penny that a victim has,” West says.