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current page: Beware of treacherous short messages
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How not to fall for the tricks of criminals.
Digitization is not only an opportunity and a challenge for society – criminal energy is also seeking its digital way to us. It reaches us by email, but increasingly also by text message or as a short message in a communication app. Protect yourself with our tips.
Harmful short messages often look as if they were sent by a well-known company. For example, a supplier announces a package via SMS, or a mobile phone provider might be granting you extra minutes. Actually, we should have already become suspicious, because the sender is a mobile phone number that may be completely unknown to us. Clicking on the link in the message can cause damage.
With so-called smishing (a combination of SMS and phishing), criminals rely on consumers unknowingly revealing their access data or downloading malware. The text messages sent with criminal intent can have many faces.
If you are wondering why the scammers got your number: Unfortunately, this can have many reasons. For instance, your contact information might have been collected from a hacked forum, a mail-order company with a data leak, or social media. Someone who had your phone number stored in their cell phone has already become a victim. Or the criminals may have just used an automatic number generation program and contacted you randomly. So, for all these reasons, you should basically think about what data you disclose and where.
Basically, the nasty scam only works if you act. As long as you do not react to the message, nothing happens. Simply delete it. By the way, simply receiving SMS messages costs nothing. Why doesn’t the telecommunications industry simply filter out such short messages? In the case of SMS, the content is protected by the Telecommunications Act in Germany, unlike e-mails, for example. The content must therefore not be analyzed and cannot simply be sorted out.
In case of an infection, put your phone in flight mode first. This will cut off contact with the malware’s control system. Now manually back up pictures, information and contacts that you urgently want to keep. Afterwards, reset your phone to factory settings. Thus, the malware will be removed as well.
Preventive on Android smartphones: Deactivate the setting: “Allow software installation from unknown source/origin”; for newer versions: Allow app installation only for Google Play Store.
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