November 11 Mobile Phone Identity Theft Prevention Advice, Part 1

Companies that communicate with their customers using text messages could leave those same customers wide open to identity theft by fraudsters. Dan Perrin, business development manager at BulkSMS.co.uk, a provider of desktop and web-based mobile messaging solutions, explains why companies need to ensure that their customers are made aware of the types of text messages they send out, and what, if any, information they might request via the mobile phone channel, to reduce the risk of the customers falling victim to text message fraud.

Technology is used to protect people and companies against fraud but unfortunately it can also be used to assist fraudsters during a scam, especially when certain technologies are used widely among businesses to send communications. Increasingly, reckless communication practices by companies play into the hands of fraudsters. All it takes is one irresponsible communication that fraudsters can replicate and a company’s integrity will be at risk and its customers’ defrauded.

This is true for email where the most common techniques used to defraud people are phishing scams, an attempt to trick a person into revealing personal information such as credit card details or bank account information by sending an email with a fake web address or telephone number, and ‘419 scams’, so named after the section of the Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud schemes, where a person is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in return for larger financial gain.