Friday, February 10, 2023

ACMA should do more to prevent and trace scam SMS messages

Like everyone I'm sure, I receive regular SMS messages and calls which are clearly scams. While I think I'm pretty good at recognising them it wastes my attention and I worry about people less able to realise what they are.

This morning ACMA announced a penalty for a Telco who was allowing customers to send SMS messages with text names without having processes in place to check that they weren't being sent as part of a scam pretending to be a trusted organisation. I have received messages that appeared to come from NAB.

The ACMA scam page is worth a read. Here's a few recent messages I've received (The numbers are certainly fake and may belong to real people so please don't harass them):












OK, maybe that last one isn't strictly a scam...

Surely we have the technical capability to trace who is sending these and either prosecute or at least block them? I see the ABC has a report on this.

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