Text scams

A friend’s father was recently caught by a phishing text. He lost more than $150,000 and it was unrecoverable. His daughter spent the better part of a week working to unwind the damage, freezing accounts and contacting banks and filing reports. He received a message that looked legitimate at exactly the wrong moment, and by the time anyone realized what had happened the money was gone. 

The Federal Trade Commission reported $470 million lost to text scams in 2024, more than five times the 2020 number, and seniors alone lost $4.8 billion. For every 44 cases of elder financial fraud only one is reported to authorities because shame more than anything else keeps people from asking for help.

Among the hundred-plus screenshots I received, a few categories showed up over and over. We are in the Bay Area, so FasTrak toll texts were the most common locally and California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued multiple consumer alerts about the surge: FasTrak does not request payment by text and you should always tap the “delete and report spam” button in the text thread if your phone has it. Nationally, fake USPS package delivery messages remain the most reported text scam. Bank impersonation texts that mimic fraud alerts from your financial institution create just enough panic that you click before you think. 

Then, have you heard of pig butchering? Yes, it is actually called pig butchering by law enforcement — texts that look like a stranger accidentally messaged the wrong person. These seemingly harmless text messages can be the opening move of a scam where a friendly exchange over days or weeks builds into a fake investment opportunity with an average victim loss of $177,000 and where the people sending the messages are frequently trafficking victims themselves held in compounds across Southeast Asia. 

And increasingly, scammers are using AI to clone voices from short audio clips pulled from social media, calling family members with fabricated emergencies that sound exactly like someone you love, feeding off emotionally driven anxiety and hasty decision making. The Federal Trade Commission now recommends that families establish a private safe word exactly for this reason.

The question a lot of people asked in response to my post was how scammers get their phone numbers in the first place. The answer is data brokers, companies that collect and package and sell personal information harvested from public records, social media, commercial transactions and data breaches. Your phone number, address, age and purchasing habits can be assembled into a profile and sold for as little as a dollar. Services like DeleteMe (joindeleteme.com) will submit opt-out requests to over 750 data broker sites on your behalf, however, the process is ongoing because brokers tend to relist. I’ve been a customer for the past few years and it’s been a game changer in reducing phone and message scam calls to near zero.

There is also a free option that most Californians don’t know about yet. State Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, who represents our district, authored the DELETE Act that created a tool called DROP (privacy.ca.gov/drop) that went live in January 2026. DROP allows any Californian to submit a single deletion request that applies to every registered data broker in the state. Data brokers are required to begin processing those requests by Aug. 1 and face $200-per-day penalties for each request they fail to act on. 

So there you have it: Never click a link in an unexpected text, go to the official website directly if you think something might be legitimate, set up a family safe word for phone calls, freeze your credit with all three bureaus if you haven’t already (it’s free and takes minutes at each) and register for DROP. But the most underused tool is also the simplest one which is to talk about it. Forward the suspicious text to someone you trust, bring it up at dinner and ask your parents what they’ve been getting. Scams work best when people are too embarrassed or too uncertain to say anything, and the fastest way to break that is to make the conversation normal.