In the space of a few lines they try to slip in where we are most vulnerable: in the rush, in the fear of having a case suspended, in the anxiety of a tax deadline that can get complicated. This time the pretext is there Tarithe waste tax, and the message arrives on the phone in the simplest and most insidious form of all: a dry, impersonal, alarming text message.
In Bologna and various Italian cities several people have received it in recent days, so much so that it pushed the administration to intervene with a clear public notice. That text. It’s a scam attempt.
A short, impersonal text message designed to push whoever receives it to react immediately
The message that is circulating goes like this:
The TARI position is irregular, a timely contact is requested on 89349*** to avoid aggravations.
Several citizens received it, reached by unknown mobile numbers. The Municipality of Bologna clarified that communication and invited them not to respond and not to contact the number indicated.
The mechanism is the one that now often reappears in these campaigns: few words, an urgent tone, a fiscal problem evoked without real details, the pressure to move immediately. It works because it uses very common levers. The reader fears a sanction, thinks of a practice that has gotten out of hand, and is convinced that a phone call can solve everything in a few seconds. It is precisely on this automatic reaction that the scam is based.
What to do
In these cases the rule remains simple: . The decisive point lies here: public bodies and institutions do not ask for personal data, codes, passwords or banking information via text message, especially when the message leads to an impulse reaction. The Privacy Guarantor has long remembered this in the indications dedicated to smishingthe form of phishing that passes through messages on your phone.
Smishing thrives on this: a text that seems plausible, a well-constructed alert, a quick invitation to click or call. In other cases it aims to steal credentials or payment data; in still others he uses telephone contacts which open the door to further deception attempts. The pretext changes, the structure remains the same: create pressure and get an answer before the person stops to check.
For any doubts about Tarithe only sensible path passes through the institutional channels of the Municipality and the official website, without following numbers that appeared in a text message that arrived out of nowhere. In these scams, speed always plays on the side of the deceiver. Stopping for a minute here is worth much more than a quick response.
