Transurban is fighting back against scam texts, after receiving nearly 130,000 reports about toll road scams in just six weeks.
SMS phishing scams using the popular toll road brands like Linkt have been on the rise over the last year, but our research shows that the majority of these malicious messages still go unreported – over 80% of people surveyed say they don’t report the texts to their toll road provider or law enforcement, while only 9% of people say they report the message to Linkt.
To encourage more people to report these messages, Transurban recently incentivised Australians to take that extra step to protect themselves and others, offering $87,000 in prizes in the hope it would encourage more people to dob in a scammer.
And one lucky Sydneysider – Rachel from Blacktown – has driven away in a brand new Hyundai IONIQ 5 Dynamiq electric vehicle, all because she was cyber aware and reported a scam text to Transurban.
In a fitting twist, Rachel initially didn’t believe she had won a car, assuming the phone call was a scam. She did the right thing by contacting Linkt directly to check if the information was correct, before happily being informed that she was going to be driving away in a brand new EV.
As a result of the 130,000 reports, Transurban worked with telecommunications providers to block over 4600 unique phone numbers and 240 fraudulent URLs over the six week campaign period.
And the annual statistics demonstrate the scale of the problem even further, with Transurban now receiving over 335,000 scam reports since July 2022, bringing the number of unique phone numbers blocked to over 20,000, and the number of fraudulent URLs blocked to 1900.
People can report toll road SMS scams to all-year-round at linkt.com.au to help protect against scammers. We’re also encouraging people to report any scam messages they receive to the Federal Government’s Scamwatch website at scamwatch.gov.au.
And remember, we will never ask Linkt customers to provide their payment details via links in text messages, and will instead encourage people to always log in directly to their account – whether that’s via the Linkt website or the Linkt app.
Not sure if a text is legitimate?
Some practical things to look out for are:
- use of incorrect spelling and grammar
- strange links that don’t look like legitimate websites
- requests that may be vague or unspecific
- the use of urgent language or threats/consequences if people don’t take immediate action.
