‘Hey mum, I dropped my phone down the toilet’: Investigating Hi Mum and Dad SMS Scams in the UK

  • Sharad Agarwal, University College London (UCL)

SMS fraud has surged in recent years. Detection techniques have improved along with the fraud, necessitating harder-to-detect fraud techniques. We study one of these where scammers send an SMS to the victim addressing mum or dad, pretend to be their child, and ask for financial help. Unlike previous SMS phishing techniques, successful scammers interact with victims, rather than sending only one message which contains a URL. This recent impersonation technique has proven to be more effective worldwide and has been named ‘hi mum and dad’ SMS scam. In this paper, we collaborate with a UK-based mobile network operator to access the initial ‘hi mum and dad’ scam messages and related user spam reports. We then interact with suspicious scammers pretending to be potential victims. This is the first work empirically studying this particular scam. We collect 582 unique mule accounts from 711 scammer interactions where scammers ask us to pay more than £577k over three months. We find that scammers deceive their victims mainly by using kindness and distraction principles followed by the time principle. The paper presents how they abuse the services provided by mobile network operators and financial institutions to conduct this scam. We then provide suggestions to mitigate this cybercriminal operation.

Speaker bio

Sharad Agarwal is a final-year Ph.D. candidate at University College London (UCL), where he specializes in combating online financial fraud. He studies cybercrime longitudinally using a data-driven approach. His research has been published at top academic venues like USENIX Security and Financial Cryptography and has been cited in major news outlets such as The Times. Alongside his Ph.D., he works as a Product Analyst at Stop Scams UK, helping translate research into real-world impact.

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