As largely housebound retirees who live on the Peninsula, we rarely need the device, as we avoid highway traffic jams during rush hours and go over toll bridges once every 2-3 months,
It was the first time I had received a text message that asked me to make a FasTrak payment. It had caught me off guard because it coincided with the first FasTrak use of 2025. My travel companion said that the message was a scam that had been going around.
Road toll scams that besieged the Bay Area and and other parts of the country last year have ramped up again, with insistent text messages that demand payment — and sometimes threaten penalties.Smishing---a crime that could only exist in a world with SMS text messages and toll tags, which in turn exist because the State government eliminated human toll takers. It's progress, I suppose, but we have to be on our guard more than ever.
A Chronicle reporter received three such missives since December, purportedly for not paying fees to use toll lanes. Other Bay Area drivers have shared screenshots of similar messages on social media, asking about their validity. Some say they are getting hammered multiple times a month, and note the language in these texts has evolved: fewer spelling errors, increasingly detailed instructions, and a more intimidating tone.
“In order to avoid excessive late fees and potential legal action on statements, please pay the fee in time,” one message sent on Jan. 12 said. It provided a website to resolve violations, imitating the real web address for Southern California’s toll authority but stringing a sequence of numbers and letters at the end...
Law enforcement officials have a name for the tactic: “smishing.” The term is a portmanteau of phishing perpetrated through SMS text messages, and describes an aggressive and sophisticated form of social engineering. Bridge and road toll scammers use smishing to cast a wide net, tricking people to pay bogus fines for crossings they didn’t make.
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