Newspapers in Australia, such as the Sunshine Coast Daily, are reporting a massive fraud scheme using SMS messages

The Federal Government’s SCAMwatch sent out a national warning.

“These hoax death threats typically involve SMS text arriving out of the blue from what appears to be an international number. In some cases the number appears to be blocked,” SCAMwatch said.

“A typical message reads: ‘Someone paid me to kill you. If you want me to spare you, I’ll give you two days to pay $5000. If you inform the police or anybody, you will die, I am monitoring you’.

“Some of the messages are long and contain all the text, while others are broken up into shorter messages.”

The Daily understands the scam started spreading over the weekend and was sent out again yesterday morning.

Reports indicate the requested amount varied from $1000 to $50,000.

Police urged members of the public not to be alarmed and not to respond in any way to the message.

The police should urge the public to forward to the messages to an official abuse desk for free.

Phone providers can assign a SMS abuse reporting number (e.g. 8888) so it funtions like reporting email abuse (e.g. abuse@providername.com). The SCAMwatch form for reporting abuse is so big I doubt most people could fill it out in less than five minutes, which means it won’t be used.

Providers also could be a lot smarter about their blocking services. If the official response was to forward fraud messages for free to the providers then far more pressure would be felt by providers to stop fraud and SMS abuse.