My wife (no stranger to weird types of scams) recently received a fake text message from someone claiming to be New Jersey’s E-ZPass program saying that she had an outstanding balance from highway tolls that she owed, prompting her to visit a site so she could pay and avoid additional fines.
There was plenty of reason to believe this was a legitimate ask. Her family is from New Jersey, so we make frequent trips there, paying $20-plus in tolls along the way. We had also just completed a trip from there a few weeks prior (though I’m not sure if this was a coincidence to the timing of the spam text or not), and we both have E-ZPass accounts.
For the uninitiated, or anyone who lives in a country where taxes are paid as normal and therefore pay for appropriate road repairs, E-ZPass is a small device drivers in more than a dozen countries in the U.S. can register for so they can automatically pay tolls along highways rather than having to stop and use cash or coins, or spending a few extra minutes manually processing a transaction.
Each state or city has its own agencies that deal with E-ZPass, each with its own payment processing system and website. For this case with New Jersey, the phishing site the scammers set up was shockingly convincing and looked remarkably similar to the legitimate New Jersey E-ZPass website.
The phishing website set up by scammers (left) meant to look like the legitimate New Jersey E-ZPass website (right).Once we logged into our legitimate E-ZPass account to check to make sure we had, in fact, paid all the approp ..
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