Why so many people are getting scam texts saying they have unpaid tolls

A rise in text messages telling people they have unpaid toll fees is emerging as the latest iteration of a ballooning form of fraud.

It's called "smishing" — a portmanteau of "phishing," the practice of tricking people into sharing financial information or downloading malware, and "SMS," the software protocol used for text messages.

Scammers can not only extract cash from victims but can also gain access to their devices and steal their financial information or identities. The FBI In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 60,000 complaints reporting the unpaid toll scam.

The scam is enabled by the rise of cashless highway toll billing and the fact that more and more Americans use their phones to conduct all kinds of business.

Text fraud can center around just about anything: unpaid phone bills, credit card bills, undelivered packages, even phony anti-scam warnings or cybersecurity alerts. Scammers, increasingly employed by large international criminal syndicates, can use sophisticated computer and software setups to spray out texts to thousands of people.

The toll scams are just another variety, but the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, state governments and transit agencies all over the country have issued warnings about the risk.

"We have been bedeviled by these scams for over a year now," said John Goodwin, assistant director of communications at Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a government agency that oversees toll points in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. "It began early February of 2024. The scamsters kind of mutate every few weeks with different messages. The messaging has become more sophisticated over time. The messaging has become more aggressive over time."

Investigating these cases is difficult. Most of the phone numbers used to send the messages are international, and catching criminals requires a great deal of international cooperation, said J. Michael Skiba, a veteran cybercrime investigator who has worked with the FBI, United Nations and Interpol, among others.

The crimes are also likely vastly underreported. A lot of victims are either too embarrassed to report the crime, or suffered a loss they don't consider expensive enough to bother.

"I personally think it is astronomical," Skiba said. "I think it would be so alarming to know what the true, the true cost is."

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