Americans’ inboxes face a daily deluge of unwanted spam. Phishing texts claiming that tolls haven’t been paid or packages can’t be delivered, calls from solicitors promising to erase debt, malware emails offering winnings from a sweepstakes that no one ever entered.
The youngest and oldest among us, even, have developed a way to manage the sheer volume of messages, often by hitting “delete” the moment something looks like it slipped past their spam filter. This instinct, however, comes with the risk of missing real, urgent messages, something one California resident learned the hard way.
Ashley, 47, said she had been receiving texts from a number claiming to be The Toll Roads, the administrator of tolling in California, stating that the balance on her electronic toll payment method, FasTrak (similar to other systems like E-Z Pass, SunPass and TxTag), was getting low.
With everyone from the federal government to the tolling agency itself advising that consumers delete phony text messages about owed tolls from their phones, she did just that.
More: Toll road scam: More transportation authorities warn of fake texts in multiple states
