The Sweetwater County Sheriff's Office is warning people to be on the lookout for text message or Short Message Service [SMS] scams.

The scams are also known as "smishing'' schemes.

The senders of such messages often pretend to represent a bank, government agency or other entity with the intention of getting your personal information. The sheriff's office says legitimate banks, government agencies and companies will never ask you to provide sensitive personal information via a text message. That includes such things as usernames, passwords, or credit or debit card numbers.

The agency says you should also never open links in unsolicited text messages, because doing so may infect your phone with viruses or malware designed to steal your personal information. You should also never call phone numbers in such messages, even to tell the messager to stop contacting you.

Doing so verifies that your phone number is active and that you are willing to receive such messages, which will probably increase the number of such messages you receive in the future.

An example of one such scam is shown below:

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