'Hey mum, I dropped my phone down the toilet': Investigating Hi Mum and Dad SMS Scams in the United Kingdom
No ratings
Presented at USENIX Security 2025 by
SMS fraud has surged in recent years. Detection techniques have improved along with the fraud, necessitating harder-to-detect fraud techniques. We study one of these where scammers send an SMS to the victim addressing mum or dad, pretend to be their child, and ask for financial help. Unlike previous SMS phishing techniques, successful scammers interact with victims, rather than sending only one message which contains a URL. This recent impersonation technique has proven to be more effective worldwide and has been named