CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) – Have you recently received a text message claiming to be from a lottery winner offering to share their jackpot fortune with you?
If you have, chances are it’s a scam, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Experts recommend you do not respond. Consumer Investigator Caroline Hicks set out to find out why.
An example of one text scam currently going around claims to be from an actual jackpot winner that says: “I’m donating $1 million cash and a brand new car to 20 random individuals, if you got this text your number was selected randomly after an automated machine spin ball.”
We tried calling the number, and got an automated message saying it could not be completed as dialed.
Next, we followed the instructions to send a text to “the managing director” with “your claimant code.”
After doing that, the person responded immediately and soon after asked for personal information.
“Kindly provide the following: name, address, male/female, occupation, age, monthly income, married/single, e-mail, picture,” an ensuing message read.
That’s when we asked how to know we won, saying “I’m nervous about scammers.”
They responded at length with assurance that it was not a scam.
Next, we tried FaceTiming the number, but no one answered.
That’s when we got a text message from another number with a foreign area code, with a photo of a duffel bag filled with cash.
“The unsolicited text message is red flag enough,” Juliana O’Rork, with the Better Business Bureau of Southern Piedmont and Western North Carolina, said. “Just delete it, don’t respond to it.”
“You really don’t want somebody to know that it’s an active person on the other end,” she continued. “It’s probably just going to encourage them to continue messaging you, and ultimately the scammers really just want to get your personal information so that they can either commit identity fraud or they’re going to try to get you to pay them in some way or another.”
The text messages did continue but subsided after we did not respond for a few days.
Here’s what the Federal Trade Commission suggests to avoid text scams:
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