Big Spike in New Type of Los Angeles White Collar Crime?

Los Angeles white collar crimes are just getting more and more diverse. We spend a lot of time on this blog dissecting crimes like medical fraud, insurance fraud, and petty theft in Southern California. But today we’re going to shake things up a bit and explore some innovative terrain to help you put your crime — and your possible defensive options — in perspective.

We’re going to look at computer crimes in L.A.

And one of the “hot new trends” in the world of computer crime is something called “smishing.” This is a cousin to the email crime known as phishing, in which a criminal uses spam and other “email lures” to get users to give away personal information, financial passwords, etcetera. Whereas “phishing” takes place in the arena of email messaging; “smishing” takes place in the arena of text messaging – a.k.a. Short Message Service (SMS) messaging.

A Pew Internet & American Life Project study has found that smishing rates are spiking. Young adults (18 to 24) send approximately 110 text messages a day, on average; and trillions of texts are sent globally per day.

Increasingly, many of these texts are spam texts or “smishing” texts.

There are many varieties of smishing. For instance:
• Some bogus texts entice cell phone users to click on links, which then download viruses and other “bad stuff” onto their phones;
• Other smishing attacks troll specifically for credit card or bank login information;
• Some texts entice cell phone users with promises of gift card giveaways or “$1000 cash prizes” and urge them to visit bogus websites to enter information to claim their prizes (which, of course, never show up).

Southern California cyber crime analysts believe that smishing schemes will only diversify and increase as text messaging becomes more and more culturally common. In short, this new development in cyber crime presents all sorts of challenges for everyone involved.

Smishing Criminal Defendants — What to Do to Clear Your Name?

If you are a defendant in a smishing case, you could face a battery of scary charges, including jail time, felony fraud charges — which could result in the permanent loss of your rights and ruin your professional reputation — and worse. If you worked with a group of other people to create and deploy the smishing scam, and your associates committed other crimes, you could find yourself linked to their crimes and facing even more serious charges – even if you played no direct role in those crimes!

To craft the right defense for your situation, no matter what kind of Los Angeles white collar crime you allegedly committed, you need a deep understanding of Southern California criminal defense law. Fortunately, the well respected team at the Kraut Criminal & DUI Lawyers has developed powerful processes and great relationships to help criminal defendants battle back and protect their freedom.