Smart Communications has reiterated its warning to the public to be wary of unsolicited SMS messages that contain links, as investigations have shown that these are sent by scammers through the use of “fake cell towers’.
Using ‘fake cell towers’, scammers are able to bypass telco networks to send SMS directly to mobile users, and can even use legitimate company names as the sender name.
“When a person’s mobile phone unwittingly comes close to or within a certain radius of these machines that masquerade as cell towers, these machines are able to record or capture the mobile phone’s unique ID called IMSI, or international mobile subscriber identity. Once the machine has caught your mobile phone’s IMSI, scammers become able to push messages directly to your mobile phone without having to go through your cellular network,” said Roy Ibay, vice president and head of regulatory affairs at Smart.
Additionally, these fake cell towers can also create and use fake or masked message sender names or numbers, further deceiving subscribers into thinking that the SMS is coming from legitimate companies.
“We are actively collaborating with the National Telecommunications Commission and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center to ramp up efforts to clamp down the illegal use and importation of these fake cell towers. These scammers had to circumvent the network safeguards that we have in place, so they have resorted to these illegal machines to continue victimizing people through phishing and other similar fraudulent activities,” added Ibay.
“We urge all our customers to #BeCyberSmart and continue to be vigilant against SMS scams. They can report these incidents to this address: https://smart.com.ph/huliscam, they simply need to take note of the sender’s mobile number or any alphanumeric characters if it is shown, the date when the message was received, the actual message, and the location where the message was received. We actively investigate these messages and permanently block those we find to be fraudulent,” added Ibay.
In September, Smart said it prevented more than 200 million SMShing messages from reaching its customers. Over 37,000 mobile numbers found to be involved in illicit activities have also been permanently blocked from the Smart network for the same period.
