Quick post to publish details of a fairly convincing fraudulent SMS text message received stating “Your Argos credit card has a refund of £270 from an overpayment”. This is followed by a link that when previewed almost looks legitimate and takes you to a spoofed Argos Login page to try and scam your username and password. What’s most convincing about this scam is that the SMS appears to come from “Argos” no number used and appears below a list of older genuine SMS from Argos for previous purchases. This in itself might be sufficient to convince most people to click the link and enter their details in the hope of a refund.
Things to look out for to know it’s a scam
Do you have an Argos Credit Card? In fact does one even exists? If not then straight away you know it’s a scam.
Are you expecting a refund from Argos? If not then you know it’s a scam. Don’t hold out hope that Argos is refunding you and you’ve got free money.
Look at the URL carefully. It doesn’t end Argos.co.uk it has a hyphen and then has -existing-customers etc on the end.
Don’t even click the link, you’d be surprised how much information they can gather from your browser just from cookies on their scam site.
It looks like there’s a bug with software version 1.1.3 that affects most people but only under a few certain conditions:
If you send short SMS to people and they reply very quickly
The clock on your iPhone is set slighlty off true “atomic” time (GMT) in my case.
I have taken a few photos to demonstrate this to you but to give an overview, the new software seems to sort outgoing SMS by the iPhone time it was sent but sorts incoming messages by the time on the SMS server of the 3rd party. If you’re iphone time happened to be 1 minute behind the time of the SMS server, then if your 3rd party replies and you send another message out in under 1 minute, initially the SMS will look ok on the screen, but exit to all SMS list and then re-view the thread and your messages will all be out of sync.
Trust me it’s much easier to visual in the photos and try replicating by sending yourself some SMS:
I then tried updating my iPhone clock to exact GMT but it doesn’t allow me to set seconds, although seconds may set to zero when hitting save. As you can see in the last two image, I must have set the phone a little ahead of GMT as the problem was reversed with my messages grouping after the replies!
