Overview

• Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit agents have arrested seven suspects and seized seven SMS Blaster devices used to flood nearby phones with scam texts.
• A London man was sentenced to one year in prison this week after police discovered he was deploying an SMS Blaster from the boot of his car.
• SMS Blasters mimic legitimate 2G cell towers to hijack connections and send phishing messages without needing victims’ phone numbers.
• Google warns that disabling 2G on smartphones can prevent automatic connection to fake networks and evade carrier anti-fraud filters.
• Users are advised to filter messages from unknown senders on iPhones and forward suspicious texts to 7726 to alert mobile carriers.