Yesterday, while driving, I received a text message. I seldom receive text messages, so I thought this must involve something important. To my surprise, the message was from Walmart—or so the message said. The text message read as follows:
“Dear Walmart shopper, your purchase last month won a $1000 Walmart Gift Card. Click here to claim.” The message then gave a website address for me to use to “claim” my supposed gift card.
Here’s the bad news for Walmart shoppers—there is no $1000 gift card. The message isn’t from Walmart. And because this is a text message, it might have cost you money to find out you got a bogus message.
What Walmart says about this text message scam
Walmart has information about current scams on their website. They referenced this scam back in March when the frequency of messages began to rise. “There has been a sudden increase in scam text messages referring people to a site where they can “claim a Walmart Gift Card” by entering certain private personal information. These attacks that take place through SMS text message technologies to personal mobile phones are scams and are in no way sponsored by or affiliated with Walmart.” Learn more on the Fraud Alerts page on the Walmart website at walmart.com.
How easy it is to be fooled by scams
Most of us weren’t raised to be suspicious of every communication we received, yet the proliferation of Internet, email, and text message scams is rapidly training many of us to become suspicious of every single message we receive. Sadly, that’s what it takes to avoid getting scammed. Be skeptical of anything that sounds too good to be true because in most cases, it is.
