Spam has become epidemic. Corporations and government agencies report that 80-95% of all email they get is spam: unsolicited messages either trying to sell something, or attempting to steal something of value (corporate or government secrets, confidential or private information), or compromise individual computers with malware so that hostile third parties can take them over.
While corporations and governments have staffs to try and thwart these problems, people do not, and most of the malware-infected computers around the world belong to individuals. That is bad.
But so is the following SMS (Short Message Service) message texted to my phone recently. Apparently the cyber crooks decided that sending email was old-fashioned, so they sent a message (with an invalid phone number) to my phone, careful to include all the necessary information in 160 characters or less. All I needed to do was contact “Barr Cyrus Dillion” (presumably Barr was short for “Barrister”) and some transaction, presumably financial, could take place:
