The ACCC has put out another alert as thousands of Aussies continue to report an influx of scam texts flooding their inboxes.
The ACCC has put out another alert for mobile phone users, warning Aussies the annoying text messages telling them they’ve been tagged in videos online are continuing to come in thick and fast.
The ‘Flubot’ scam first arrived in Australia in August 2021, characterised by a text from an Australian phone number that enticed users to click on a link that would then infect their device with malware.
Bitdefender Labs wrote that “while investigating Flubot, researchers also discovered a Teabot variant being installed on devices without a malicious SMS being sent”. They linked the scam to a “Code Reader – Scanner App” that’s been “distributing 17 different Teabot variants for a little over a month”.
The development is concerning given the proliferation of Flubot scams since they first emerged. In the first eight weeks, 13,000 Australians made a formal complaint to the Scamwatch division of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
In a Tuesday release, Scamwatch reported there are a large number of different types of Flubot text messages and scammers are “updating them all the time”.
In some cases, if someone’s phone is infected with malware, their number is then used to send out more of the dodgy texts, much like a regular virus. The multiplying sources of text messages makes it extremely hard for experts to…
