Billboard Insider is running a series on how to protect your out of home company from financial fraud. Last week Billboard Insider talked about check fraud. Today we’ll talk about the importance of not responding to anonymous texts.
Pig Butchering
Billboard Insider gets several of these texts per week. An innocuous request from an unknown person who isn’t a contact. Do you want to have coffee? How are you? Who is this? Haven’t seen you in a while. You aren’t responding to me… A text from an unknown number. No name attached. When you get something like this hit the delete/report junk button or block sender button.
This is a pig butchering scam. The person sending you the message is trying to learn as much about you as possible to build rapport and trust. Then they will introduce a lucrative investment or cryptocurrency opportunity. Then they will take your money and vanish. There are scam centers in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos which are full of several hundred thousand people trying to work texts to create a relationship so they can defraud people. Some scammers use banks of mobile phones powered by AI. Don’t engage. Block the caller. Report the phone number as junk.
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