Glasgow residents have been warned not to fall for fake parking fine notices that are being spammed out to them via text message.
The city council issued an alert on Friday, saying that it has shared the messages with police, and investigators from the Scottish Cyber Coordination Centre (SC3) and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
Those two agencies are currently helping the council respond to a cyber-incident revealed last week, which forced the local authority to temporarily suspend some online services.
These included the payment of parking penalties.
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“At this stage, while we can’t totally discount that this scam involves stolen data – we and our partners are confident it does not,” the council statement read. “Rather, early indications are that [it] is far more likely to be the work of either opportunistic criminals, trying to exploit the disruption to our normal online services, or a more widespread scam.”
The council confirmed to locals that it will never send text messages to chase unpaid parking fines.
“We will never call, email or message you asking for banking details – and, if you do need to pay a parking penalty, you can do so by calling the number displayed on the PCN,” it said.
The council’s IT supplier CGI discovered malicious activity on servers managed by one of its suppliers, back on June 19. A long list of online services and forms are currently unavailable as a result, including planning applications, pensions and penalty charge notice payments.
The council is still trying to establish whether any data was stolen during the incident. It is working on the assumption that information related to the impacted web forms has been taken. However, the council also confirmed that no finance systems have been impacted by the attack, meaning citizens’ bank and card data is unaffected.
Scams that use parking fines or similar lures are an increasingly popular tactic for making money. In April, researchers warned of a Chinese threat group that registered over 60,000 domains to support a global campaign impersonating US and UK toll road providers.
A separate report at the beginning of April claimed to have recorded a 604% increase in toll road scam texts since the start of the year.
Image credit: Richard M Lee / Shutterstock.com
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