If you own a cellphone, there’s a good chance you’ve gotten The Text: a random recruiter, sending a friendly message with an incredible job opportunity to make a lot of money for just a little bit of work. If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. It’s an employment scam.

If it feels like you’re being inundated with these spam texts right now, you aren’t imagining things. There’s been a huge spike in these scams since 2020, and that’s because they work. Being scammed can feel really embarrassing, but you should know that if it’s happened to you, you aren’t alone. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received nearly 250,000 reports of text scams. And Americans lost about $500 million to them.

On the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we discuss the origins of these scams.

According to Matt Burgess, an information security writer for Wired, that text in your inbox is likely from a group known as the “Smishing Triad.”

“They are one of several groups of scammers that are known as smishing syndicates. These groups use SMS texting to trick people into giving up their address, banking, and other personal information. They’ve been estimated to be sending 100,000 messages per day,” Burgess told Vox. “They develop their own software, and they sell it to other cyber criminals who may be able to use that software to then go and scam people further. The amount of messages they’re sending per day is huge, and the amount of people that they’re trying to target is colossal.”

Those of us receiving the texts aren’t the only victims of these crime syndicates. The people sending them are often the victims of human trafficking, lured to

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