Fake GOV_UK SMS Fines Being Sent

This morning, several people are reporting that they had received a text message reporting that they had been fined. These are fake as at this moment in time, the above SMS has been the only confirmed SMS message that has been sent out by the Government. Although the Government did mention that fines will be issues, these are believe to be spot fines issued by the police: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52022417

Below is an example of one of the fake text messages people are receiving and if you are one of these, please, do not click on the link and do not reply to the text.

Certain messages have confirmed the link is genuine, but it isn’t worth the risk. I would suspect that if the links are in fact real, they are testing the waters to see who they can get to reply or get in contact. If they someone does contact them, I imagine that more Phishing attempts will come their way.

My advice is to simply ignore, or delete. Never click on the links and always go direct. For example, if you wanted to check on the GOV.UK website, open a browser such as chrome and manually type it in.

Phishing attacks like this will continue to grow, so please stay alert. Malicious parties know that whilst we are fearing/focused on our health for ourselves and family, we may make rational choices or be more prone to these types of attacks.

I’ve covered more examples here should you wish to read: https://securethelogs.com/2020/03/19/malicious-parties-phishing-with-the-corona-cure/

Addtional info: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN21C31Q