As soon as I sat down to write this, I got a text that simply said, “Hi.” In another era, I may have been intrigued by the mysterious message from an unknown number. Maybe I would’ve been curious about who wanted to say hello, and texted back. But this is not my first time playing this game.

Scam texts are a growing multibillion-dollar industry. As robocalls become less common — thanks, in part, to a 2009 law that forced phone companies to do more to stop them — complaints about text scams increased 500 percent from 2015 to 2022. While it’s hard to nail down an exact number of spam messages sent in a given day, the problem is getting worse. It’s not just that you’re getting bombarded with more text scams than ever. The texts are also starting to get really sophisticated.

I’d like to say I’ve never clicked on a link in a spam text, but I’d be lying. Maybe it was about an issue with a mysterious package or an unpaid parking ticket or some political thing — it doesn’t really matter. With so much of our personal data now appearing online and with the help of AI, text scams are getting smarter, more targeted, and more dangerous. The software we need to stop spam texts is being outpaced by the software used to generate them, which does not bode well for our ever-evolving relationship with technology.

So that’s the bad news and the worse news. The good news is that humans are, so far, smarter than the machines. With a combination of savvy and software, you can reduce your exposure to text scams or, at the very least, your likelihood of actually becoming the victim of a scam.

Robocalls don’t seem so bad in retrospect

Another text scam I got this week involved an alleged unpaid toll, with a link to pay and a friendly sign-off (“The Toll Roads team wishes you a great day!”). As it happens, I probably do owe somebody money for an unpaid toll, but it’s not “The Toll Roads team.” The link in the text, which ended in “.world”, was the biggest red flag. I did not click this link, but if the text had been more personalized — perhaps by using my name or mentioning that the toll was in the state of New York, where I live — maybe I would have.

This is where we’re heading. Common scams, like those involving unpaid fines, job recruiters, the IRS, and undelivered packages, can become exponentially more dangerous if they include your personal details, including your email and home address. And following years of data breaches, a growing amount of data about you

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