Text scams grow to steal hundreds of millions of dollars

FTC data indicates that U.S. consumers lost at least $470M to text-message scams in 2024, with the report highlighting five prevalent vectors—package delivery, fake job offers, fake fraud alerts, toll fee scams, and wrong-number lures—and recommending defenses such as enabling text filtering, using Malwarebytes Text Protection on iOS/Android, and reporting scams to ReportFraud.ftc.gov and 7726.