Picnic basket in a raccoon park

By Marc Robertson - Editor | September 25, 2024

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Gone are the days when we could just slam the phone down on a prank caller and feel that satisfaction of the heavy receiver crashing into the cradle.
There are generations out there today who haven’t even done that. They’ve grown up just pressing the red light on their cellphone screens to cut off someone who made an uninvited call.
Added to that, we have caller identification now and call screening, both of which help protect us from those who would intrude upon our private headspace.
Somehow, the pleasure we felt at literally hanging up on someone has been taken away. People no longer hear that brief rush of wind as the receiver descends, or even the plastic rattle immediately before the call is disconnected.
We have, however, been assaulted with increasing frequency by furtive electronic intruders who want more than just to interrupt our dinner with surveys about television programs or pantyhose brands. We are now often unwitting victims of identity theft, bank fraud, and – just lately – something called smishing, in which criminal organizations send text messages disguised as authorities who collect fees for services.
One of those, we learned last week from the Texas Department of Transportation, claims to be the TxTag group for the toll highways. Since many of us use the toll roads without giving it much thought and pay the bill when it comes in the mail (three months later – surprise!), we aren’t all that puzzled by a text message from TxTag reminding us that a fee is due.
Well, it’s not the real TxTag.
In fact, there are many fee-collecting organizations with whom we are familiar in daily life who don’t actually send text messages about unpaid bills. Hospitals, postal or delivery services, downtown businesses and most government agencies generally don’t contact us by text message to pay bills.
Opening these text messages signals to the sender that you have read them, in other words that your phone line is an active one and deserving of further smishing attention.
Clicking on any link that anyone sends you by text message means you have not just made yourself vulnerable to hackers but have effectively flung wide all your doors and windows and left the jewelry on the coffee table.
Its like abandoning a picnic basket in a raccoon park.
I have reached the point at which I will immediately “delete as junk” any text messages whose senders are not in my list of known contacts.
Alas, in a further twist, many of the criminal organizations who make literally thousands of machine-generated calls per hour to North American cellphone numbers have found ways to clone local numbers. This means that a message from a smisher in South America or Asia may appear on your caller identification as coming from your home town. Obviously, this prompts a lot of people to answer the call or click on a link because they think it must be something important from, say, City Hall or someone they know.
We used to be leaps and bounds ahead of the pirates and bandits. We recognized their ploys a mile away. We warned our children about Stranger Danger. We didn’t accept rides from people in windowless vans. We refused candy from creepy guys at bus stops. We never gave our banking information to the wives of kidnapped African princes, and we recognized that when Mrs. Dobbins from down the road emailed us that she was stuck in an Austrian ski resort with a broken leg and no wallet, she probably wasn’t.
Just as we learned in the 1970s that car doors ought to be locked, and in the 1980s that the smooth-talking paramour from Paraguay was actually charging $5.99 by the minute, we have to be aware that there are charlatans at every turn, cheaters and schemers who will rob us blind if we give them even the slightest opportunity.
This cannot be the time when we should rest on any laurels, believing we are the champions of modern technology.