SMS Scam

Hello,

I want to tell you about a scam I received last Friday on my phone. I got during the evening a text message which was a nice piece of Social Engineering. The text message said "Appelle moi urgent 0010664112011".

The text was in French, a language spoken in my social circle, so I could have been tempted to call back. It is a classic in Belgium that people without any calling credit can send you a message that looks similar to this. This is for a lot of youngsters the way they communicate with their parents over the phone since they are most of the time out of credit.

The form that it is written in is interesting too. "Appelle moi" means "call me" so that is an instruction and if you would still hesitate it says that it is urgent and thus trying to take away any resistance. It uses the feeling of guilt that we have if we don't help somebody in need.

When I researched the number online it was immediately obvious that I was not the only one and there are number of variations. The best illustration of this is anruf-info.de. They collected some data which is interesting. If you look at the 7th, the evening I got the message there are quite a lot of Belgians reporting it, when a time stamp is given it was in the evening, just like mine. This could be an indication of some form of automatization. As we can see the day after on the 8th the scam just goes on.

Unfortunately I don't have any knowledge about how to trace the origin of this number but it would be very interesting.