The Outage Scam

It would be amazing if you got money back or a gift every time your internet, phone, or cellphone didn't work, right? Unfortunately, that never happens. Even if you get a text claiming that it does. This text is an example of a scam that we expect will be getting more common.

The Scam


Identifying Traits

  • Broken English, misspellings, and incorrect syntax. Allegedly they do this intentionally to filter out people that won't get caught by the scam but we think the scammers are just bad at spelling.

  • Unknown cellphone number. Carriers and services would send from their own numbers or their e-mail system.

  • Links to random websites that are unrelated to the service provided.

What It Does

Text scams are extremely common now. It's easy, doesn't require any work from the scammer, no awkward phone calls, and nearly everyone will receive the text while many won't answer an unknown phone call. It's even cheaper than other scamming methods costing less thanĀ $0.009 per text. Until the cellphone carriers catch up with the scam/spam techniques we'll be stuck with this one for a while.

This particular scam pretends that you've received a gift from T-Mobile for a service outage. Successful scammers are good at watching current events and making their scams relevant. You got a text about the T-Mobile outage and you had an outage? Has to be legitimate then? Nope. We can pretty much guarantee that you'll never get anything from your cellphone carrier to make up for an outage.

If you did click or tap the link (please don't do this), it would request your personal information to verify you are eligible to receive the gift. Your name, address, phone number, account credentials, and more. If you do fall prey to one of these scams, please contact your bank and the affected service immediately. They can help you lock down your accounts and limit the damage.

Credits:

This scam image came from our new friend "awkward_accountant89" on the Scams Subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/)

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