Some of the scam messages will claim that unless you take action within, say, 120 seconds, your SIM card will be permanently damaged, or your photos will all be deleted, or your information will be leaked to the Dark Web.
All lies, meant to frighten you into dropping your guard, and becoming the criminal's next victim.
I really love the ones that have the exact number of seconds until your hardware is damaged, complete with a big animated count-down timer. As soon as you start asking yourself a few questions like these:
- How is the malware supposed to be able to damage hardware?
- How did the supposed "good guys" know about the presence of malware on your phone or computer, at exactly the right time to send you a warning message with a countdown timer accurate to the second?
- If someone did write malware to trash your phone's hardware, and it was capable of doing that, why would the vandal have programmed in a grace period? Wouldn't they just have programmed the malware to destroy your phone right away?
the absurdity of the scam message hits you like a 2x4 to the head.
