In what has become a familiar dance of devious tricks, the scam artists have shuffled onto the digital stage with a new routine, posing as EZPass in fraudulent text messages—a performance menacing enough to prompt an alert from the Geauga County Sheriff's Office. Sheriff Scott A. Hildenbrand is bringing attention to a scam that is targeting residents with messages claiming that their EZPass account has an unpaid toll balance and laying out threats of legal action, vehicle impoundment, and registration suspension if they don't cough up the cash by the looming deadline—allegedly today.
While the signs of this scam are painfully clear to a trained eye, it's the hastily thrown together grammar and spelling errors that are red flags should be, with words like "ur" standing in for "your" and the strain in the message's voice as it tries to strong-arm victims with warnings of automatic fines, towing, and legal penalties, says the Geauga County Sheriff's Office Sheriff Scott A. Hildenbrand's social media post. The fraudulent texts might also include suspicious links that clearly do not lead to any official EZPass website, instead trying to ensnare unsuspecting users into nefarious nets cast on the murky waters of the web.
The Sheriff's Office isn't just sounding the alarm; they're also offering guidance on how to sidestep this digital shakedown. Should you receive such a message, the recommendation is clear: do not respond, do not click any links, and make your way over to reportfraud.ftc.gov to let the Federal Trade Commission know about the scam. And if there’s any uncertainty about your EZPass account, reach out directly to them through their official avenues to keep your peace of mind intact.
Remember, a healthy dose of skepticism can serve as the best shield against the arrows of scam artists; sharing this information with friends and family, as the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office suggests, might just help them dodge a costly hit. It's fair game to suggest that, as scammers up their ante in the push to separate folks from their hard-earned money, staying sharp and refusing to dance along with their underhanded choreography is a move we should all be mastering.
