Why are there so many text scams all of a sudden?

A new “fraud wave” has been reported in the UK, targeting mobile phone users with texts that, at first glance, appear to be from delivery companies or government institutions.

You may even have been targeted by the text scams yourself, which often ask you to pay missed delivery charges or tax fees and are sent from numbers that claim to belong to Royal Mail, Hermes or HMRC.

While these scams are actually nothing new, there does appear to have been a sudden and dramatic increase in their volume in recent weeks, coming after the recent spike in coronavirus vaccine scams and scams targeting those seeking to buy a pet online during the pandemic.

The resurgence of text scams in the spring of 2021 also appears to be taking advantage of circumstances brought about by the pandemic – but learning more about them can help us to stamp them out.

Increasing text scams

To understand the apparent increase in text scams, we need to consider two key…