ORLANDO, Fla. — Attorney General Ashley Moody announced her office has shut down nearly a dozen websites impersonating SunPass that are linked to a widespread text message scam.
The messages targeted drivers with fake toll bills and included links to sites where payments could be submitted.
Several VERIFY viewers contacted 10 Tampa Bay in April after receiving the suspicious messages. SunPass said it did not send the text messages and that it will never ask for immediate payments or urgent actions via text.
This technique is called “smishing" — a combination of SMS and phishing, Moody said during an announcement Thursday morning in Orlando. It involves fake texts that steal the victim’s personal information like their credit card information. Clicking on one of these links can also install malware on a person’s device.
“We used to talk about phishing with email accounts, but now that Americans are using text messages more and more to communicate, the scammers know this, and this is how they’re pushing their scams,” she said.
The FBI issued a warning in April about smishing scams involving toll services after receiving more than 2,000 complaints reporting fake texts representing collection services.
The official website for SunPass is simply SunPass.com while fake websites tried to mimic the legitimate site by having URLs like sunpass-toll.com, sunpass-express.com and sunpass-florida.com.
Moody advised people to independently confirm that it’s a legitimate website by using the contact information on the official website.
Moody said her office’s Cyber Fraud Enforcement Unit is working with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to shut down the fake websites, taking down 10 so far.
In the most recent investigation, Florida Department of Law Enforcement Deputy Commissioner Shane Pollard said residents were receiving text messages saying they owed $3.95 to SunPass and were given a fraudulent link.
“Within 24 hours, FDLE was able to gain control of the scam site and post a splash page advising potential victims the websites were fraudulent,” Pollard said.
While $3.75 doesn’t seem like a lot of money, victims were potentially robbed of much more once the criminals had access to their credit or debit card information.
He said some telling signs of fake websites are misspellings on the websites and texts urging you to take action right away.
SunPass said it will only ever contact customers from the following:
- customerservice@sunpass.com
- noreply@sunpass.com
- Text: 786727
Anyone who receives scam texts can forward them to 7726, which spells out “SCAM” on a phone’s keypad.
Text message scams now outnumber phone call scams, according to a 2021 mid-year report from call-blocking service Robokiller. Texts have been the most common type of scam since August 2020.