THE public is again warned about text scam messages or text messages containing information about “winning from promos” and “asking for money or load” to claim their prizes, which have again been lately proliferating.
The National Telecommunications Commission in Central Visayas (NTC-7) gave this warning amid receiving more than a hundred complaints of victims of this kinds of scam this year.
Engineer Bill Peralta of NTC-7 said that text scams were proliferating again especially since their office had been receiving these complaints for this year alone.
“Especially residents coming from far-flung areas, they are the ones who are mostly being victimized with this kind of scam,” Peralta said.
Peralta said that there are four types of text scam that the public are receiving which include “Winning on a raffle promo,” “Texters who introduce themselves as your relative or friend and asking for a load,” “Sharing/Stealing-load text scam” and “Texters who are claiming that they’ve sent a load to your mobile number by mistake and asking you to return the loaded amount.”
“If they received this kind of messages, they can go to our office and report the number that was used by the scammers, so that we can block the mobile number,” he added.
He also said that one simple way to identify a text scam is when the scammers use an eleven digit mobile number.
Aside from text scams, Peralta said that the public should also be careful against call scams, where scammers would first get personal information of the victims before asking victims an amount of money.