Those Unpaid Toll Texts You Keep Getting Are Just The Latest Scam

If you have a phone, you probably get more texts from scammers and political fundraisers (wait, is there really a difference at this point?) than you get texts from actual people you know. It certainly isn't the worst part of living in 2025, but it sure is annoying. To make things worse, they keep coming up with new angles, and this time around, it's apparently unpaid toll charges. By some miracle I only got my first one recently, but as it turns out, they're so common now that CNBC's already done an entire story on them. And yes, those text messages claiming you have to pay unpaid toll charges are 100% scams. Shocking, I know.

Why text message scams need names like "smishing," I don't know. Sure, it's a portmanteau of "SMS" and "phishing," but the term makes me physically uncomfortable, and you can't make me use it. As you can imagine, the goal is to get people to hand over their information or download malicious software that allows the scammers to take far more than the small amount of money they initially claim people owe. I would hope you're savvy enough not to fall for it, but that's the thing about scams — the easier they are to spot, the more likely it is that the people who still fall for them will let themselves get taken for massive amounts of money. So, especially if you have older relatives who still drive in areas with toll roads, it's probably a good idea to make sure they know.

It doesn't help that license plate-reading tech is much more common these days and used to send toll charges to drivers who don't have an E-ZPass in their car, nor does it help that so many people do everything on their phones these days. The state isn't going to actually text you a link to pay a fine, but it's at least plausible if toll roads exist where you live. Maybe you just forgot at some point, right? And while these texts aren't really any different than the undeliverable package texts that are also all scams, they've gotten so common, the FTC, FBI, state governments and even transportation departments have had to address them directly.

"We have been bedeviled by these scams for over a year now," John Goodwin, an assistant communications director for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area, told CNBC. "It began early February of 2024. The scamsters kind of mutate every few weeks with different messages. The messaging has become more sophisticated over time. The messaging has become more aggressive over time."

The bad news is, as previously mentioned, because many of these scammers are overseas, shutting down their operations isn't easy and requires working with law enforcement in other countries. The worse news is that it's unlikely the Trump administration has any interest in the kind of international collaboration required to put a stop to the endless stream of scam texts you get every day. Still, the more we talk about it, the less likely it is that other people in your life, especially older folks, won't get taken for all they're worth. If they ever do, though, maybe give Jason Statham a call. I hear he hates scammers.