The phantom package, the fine to be paid within 48 hours, the training account which expires: these traps saturate French telephones. NordVPN unveils a fraudulent SMS detector on Android. With limits, you might as well know it.
A package “being delivered” that no one ordered, a parking fine in a city where you have never set foot: the fraudulent SMS has become background noise in everyday life. NordVPN has decided to make this its next hunting ground. Since July 8, his application Android features message protection that scans incoming SMS and flags scam attempts before the thumb goes to the link on its own.
What does this new shield really do?
This is the third brick of the same project in four months: protection of calls on Android in March, extension to iPhone in June, and now SMS. The operation remains in the same vein. The tool examines messages from unknown senders and displays an alert when content resembles a known scamfake carrier, fake bank or fake public service. It runs in the background without the VPN connection being active, all within the existing application, and the company ensures that it does not retain the content of the analyzed messages.
However, you have to read the fine lines. The alert doesn’t block anything: the message arrives, it’s up to you to decide. Coverage is limited to classic SMS, without WhatsApp or Telegram, and iPhones remain docked for the moment, due to system restrictions. The first independent tests also revealed verdicts that were still uneven from one message to another, and the detection was based on already known scam schemes, which by construction left a window for new campaigns. A safety net, therefore, not an armor (your banker will never send you a link to click, ever).
Read also: Here are the 7 scam SMS messages that are wreaking havoc in France
Why has France become the favorite target of scammers?
If NordVPN takes such great care of the French market, it is because it has all the makings of an Eldorado for fraudsters. Consumers in France collect on average 12 unwanted calls per weekthe worst score in Europe, and 15% of those surveyed said they had already lost money in a telephone scam. When the trap closes, the average bill reaches 628 euros. Six out of ten French people have already dealt with a scammer without knowing it. Globally, scams accounted for an estimated $442 billion in one year across 42 countries, with 57% of adults reporting being targeted. The competition has understood this well: Bitdefender, Avast and Surfshark occupy the same niche, and Google slips its own anti-spam filters into its Messages application.
Meanwhile, the public response advances at the pace of an administrative file. The national anti-scam filter, promised in 2022, missed the 2023 Rugby World Cup, then the 2024 Olympic Games, before being enshrined in law in May 2024. A draft decree now targets September 1, with a blacklist of fraudulent sites entrusted to the Anti-Cybercrime Office (the crooks have not missed any deadline). And again: this device will warn when opening a trapped site, it will not sort the messages themselves. The two approaches therefore complement each other more than they compete, one monitors the inbox, the other the end of the link.
While waiting for the public shield, the best reflex remains free: never click, and forward the suspicious message to 33700.
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Source :
NordVPN
