I received this text a couple of week ago. I don’t trust unsolicited phone calls or messages from numbers I don’t recognize and I certainly am highly skeptical of any too-good-to-be-true call or message saying that I won something. Needless to say, I didn’t respond.
I checked the number on Hiya, a call blocker, fraud detection and caller ID app that’s available from the apple and google app stores. It said – no surprise – that it was suspected spam. I don’t know why it didn’t flag it to tell me it was suspect, but it doesn’t seem to catch everything.
I also searched Google for “walmart.yourcards.”
The first hit was from scam detector. It says:
“Is walmart.yourcards.us legit? Nope. It has the lowest trust rating on our chart. Let’s take a look at it and its industry. We put to work 53 powerful factors to expose high-risk activity and see if walmart.yourcards.us is a scam.”
Scam detector gave them a score of 0.4/100 and said, “It signals that the business could be defined by the following tags: High-Risk. Phishing. Beware.”
0.4/100 is about as low as you can go.
It gives Exit78 a score of 75.4/100 and says, “This rating means the business is Standard. Valid. Common.” I can live with that.
Other hits on the search had to do with gift and other cards from Walmart. The 4th hit, though, was Fraud Alerts – Walmart Corporate. It has several pages of different kinds of frauds and scams as well as guidelines and resources for dealing with them. The first page deals with gift card scams.
It’s a shame that there are people out there who have to prey on others for financial gain. Many who might fall victim to a scam like this are those who can least afford it.
I don’t, of course, know any details of this scam past the text that I received. It may be a fraudster trying to pose as a brand you trust over email to try to trick you into sharing personal information like your account password or financial details.
