"Smishing" or scam phone calls, spread to cell phones.
Brion Sever received an automated voice mail message on his cellphone last week that caught him off guard.
It contained an alert that his Wells Fargo bank account had been compromised.
Sever knew better. As a Monmouth University criminology professor, he has studied scams. But the one that surfaced on Oct. 9 left him both impressed and spooked.
"For the first 5 seconds, you're like, 'Oh no!' You're caught off guard," he said. "It was an automated computer voice and very well done, very sophisticated."
Sever experienced a spreading high-tech con known as "smishing."
Smishing is like phishing, a technique that uses e-mails that look legitimate to trick victims into handing over vital information, but with smishing, identity thieves ply their scam through messages to a mobile phone, not a computer.
With recent attacks in the western U.S., law enforcement and consumer affairs officials have expressed concern that similar large-scale attacks could spread nationally.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-10-18/smishing-bank-scam/50817688/1?loc=interstitialskip