HOUSTON — There’s a text message going around warning people not to click on a certain phrase because it could put a virus on your phone. Someone asked the VERIFY team if this real or just a hoax.
The text reads, “Don’t open anything on your phone or computer that says Trump arrested. It’s a virus. Pass it on.”
Trinia asked us to verify.
Our source for this is John Shier, senior security advisor and research scientist for Sophos, a company that produces software and hardware to protect against cybercrimes.
“My first thought about that particular one (text) was that it's just a fairly run-of-the-mill scam,” Shier said.
Shier said these types of messages are known as virus hoaxes, messages with false information that are otherwise harmless.
“From what we've seen, the amount of mobile malware that can actually take over your phone and do something bad on it is fairly slim,” Shier said.
But there’s no denying these messages can be a nuisance. They are known as sweepstakes chains, memos that typically tell the recipients to forward a link to everyone they know causing a storm of unsolicited ads to randomly pop up on your screen.
“A lot of these are just basically part of ad networks. And the more people that see them, the more people that potentially click on them, the more revenues can be made by the scammers,” Shier said.
As for this text, Donald Trump has not been arrested, and we have not seen any reports of an actual virus threat connected to it.
So we can verify it is false.
Shier said if you do click on a link and start getting a bunch of unwanted ads, you can usually get rid of them by closing your windows and restarting your phone. If you’re worried your phone may have been compromised, it’s not a bad idea to download a tool that scans for viruses and malware.