If you have a phone, you have had the text. "Hey, are we still on for lunch?" "Is this Dr. Patel's office?" "Long time no see, how have you been?" A name you do not know, a plan you never made, sometimes a photo of a pleasant-looking person you have never met. You reply that they have the wrong number, because you are polite. And then they do not go away.
This is the phone cousin of the Discord stranger who wanted me to download a game, and it is bigger, slower and far more expensive.
It was not a mistake
Nobody texts a wrong number and then wants to be friends. A real misdial gets a "sorry!" and silence. The wrong-number text is sent by the thousand from lists of phone numbers, and its only purpose is to find out which numbers reply. Your reply, however brief, moves you from a list of numbers to a list of people.
The second message is always warm. "Oh no, I'm so sorry! Well, it's nice to meet you anyway. I'm Anna." Then a question about you. Then another. The Federal Trade Commission put wrong-number texts among the most common text scams of 2024, and reported that Americans lost about $470 million that year to scams that started with a text message.
The long game
What makes this one different from the Discord version is patience. Nobody asks you to download anything on day one. For days or weeks the conversation is only conversation: their day, your day, photos, encouragement, a little flirting if you seem open to it, a lot of friendship if you do not. The person on the other end is usually working from a script in a call centre, often under duress, handling dozens of conversations at once. You are one tab in their browser.
Then, casually, they mention money. They have been doing well with an investment. An uncle who works in finance showed them a platform. They are not trying to sell you anything, they just want you to have what they have. Would you like to see?
The platform is a website or an app that looks like a real trading service. You put in a little, and it grows. You take a little out, and it arrives, which is the point: it proves the thing is real. So you put in more, and then a lot more, and then the platform has a tax to pay before you can withdraw, or a fee, or a frozen account that needs a deposit to unlock. By then the money was never there. The industry name for this is "pig butchering", from the idea of fattening the animal before the slaughter, and average losses run to the tens of thousands of dollars per victim, sometimes far more.
The signs
- A wrong-number text that keeps going after you say it is the wrong number.
- A new friend who is always available, always positive, and never quite where they say they are. Video calls are avoided or brief.
- A life that sounds successful and lonely at once: travelling, trading, a family far away.
- Investment talk that arrives as a favour, not a pitch. "I just want to help you."
- A platform you have never heard of, reached by their link or their app, never through an app store search or a well-known broker.
- Early withdrawals that work. This is the bait, not the proof.
- Fees, taxes and unlock deposits before you can take money out. Real brokers deduct fees from your balance; they never ask you to send more money to get your money.
The one reply that ends it
Do not reply at all. Delete the text and, on an iPhone or Android phone, report it as junk, which takes two taps and feeds the filters. If you already replied, stop now; nothing you have said obliges you to continue, and no explanation is owed to someone who sent a message to a list.
If it has gone further and you have sent money, stop sending, even if the platform says one more payment will release everything. It will not. Call your bank. Report it to the FBI at ic3.gov and to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov. Expect a "recovery service" to contact you offering to get the money back for a fee; that is the same people, back for the rest.
Why this belongs on a computer help site
Because the platform is software, and the pressure to install it, sign up with a code and keep it up to date is exactly the pressure we describe in every security article here. The rule from the Discord story holds: nobody you met by text gets to put an app on your phone, either. And because the people most often targeted are the people we most often help: older adults, people living alone, and small business owners with savings and a phone number that is on every website. If someone in your family has a new friend on their phone who is teaching them to invest, that is worth a conversation this week.
Two things that make you a harder target
Turn on your phone's unknown-sender filter, under Messages settings, so texts from numbers not in your contacts land in a separate list you can ignore. And treat your phone number as semi-public, because it is: it is in old data breaches, on your business listing and in your kids' school directory. The text will keep coming. What changes is whether you answer.