In recent weeks, mobile phone operators have begun trialling new software and filters in hopes of eliminating the growing problem of scam text messages purporting to be from legitimate financial institutions such as HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).<\/p>\n
According to a report in The Telegraph<\/em>, numerous telecoms companies such as O2 are now using \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d in order to \u201cidentify common characteristics of scam messages\u201d and filter-out scam texts before they are received by mobile phone users.<\/p>\n The news comes after a recent study found that people in the UK are nine times more likely to fall victim to a text message scam than to an email phishing attack.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the latest figures from Financial Fraud Action UK suggest that the overall scale of financial fraud in Britain rose to \u00a3768.8 million last year, up from \u00a3755 million in 2015.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, HMRC began trialling its own software to counteract the problem.<\/p>\n The Revenue recently introduced new measures to protect its so-called \u2018alpha tags\u2019 \u2013 words which can replace numbers as the \u2018sender addresses\u2019 of text messages \u2013 forcing cyber-criminals to use less convincing \u2018tags\u2019 in their messages.<\/p>\n HMRC claims that its efforts have already managed to reduce \u2018fake\u2019 HMRC texts by as much as 90 per cent.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, email phishing scams purporting to be from the tax authority are still at large.<\/p>\n