DVSA warns drivers of new scam texts about parking fines

18th Oct, 2024

Just as with email addresses, sometimes personal phone numbers can be unnervingly easy to obtain. And since a large proportion of the adult UK population are drivers, scammers don’t necessarily need to know much about your driving history in order to target you – all they need is a phone number and an educated guess. That goes some way to explaining the basic tactics behind each new spate of spam texts that appear every so often.

The latest ones to circulate are purporting to be from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), trying to panic their recipients into paying for fake penalty charges. Now, the real DVSA has sent out an official warning to drivers, telling them to be on the lookout. Here’s a bit more about what these texts look like, how you can steer clear of the pitfalls, and what to do if you think you might have fallen afoul of them.

What are these spam texts saying?

Most spam texts are mass-sent to hundreds or even thousands of recipients, so if you’ve received a text along these lines, there’s a good chance that it goes something like this:

“Dvsa notice for you: You have a parking penalty charge due on 2024/9/30. If you do not pay your fine on time, your car may be banned from driving, you might haeve to pay more, or you could be taken to court.”

It will then proceed to warn the recipient to “Check and pay parcking penatly charge” and give you a web link at the end of the text. (For obvious reasons, we’re not reproducing that here.) If the text is ignored, as it should be, it may then be followed up with reminders to make it seem more legitimate, and add to the sense of urgency. Some will also warn the recipient that their “car will be banned from driving on the road starting tomorrow”.

It’s all quite unnerving, and at their core they’re classic scam tactics – it’s all about creating fear and urgency to prevent people from properly thinking things through.

How can you tell them apart from genuine texts?

The good news is that scam texts like these can be quite easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for, and relatively easy to check even if you don’t.

Let’s start with the most important one: first and foremost, the DVSA does not issue or deal with parking fines. So that’s a major clue right off the bat. They also typically don’t text people – their preferred method of communication is a letter or email. If you’ve had a text like this, then, those facts alone should set you on your guard immediately.

Lots of these texts also bear a lot of tell-tale signs, some of which are specific to this scam, and others which are usually reliable indicators of scams in general.

Here’s a quick (non-exhaustive) rundown of some of the things to watch out for:

• Grammatical errors. For examples, the DVSA will always capitalise its name. (There’s also supposed to be no capital letter after a colon, if we’re going to be really pedantic about it. And you can bet people in actual government departments are, too.)
• Spelling errors. Official communications very rarely contain spelling errors, and it’s almost unheard of for them to have more than one. (And if they did, it wouldn’t be parcking penatly.)
• Americanisms. In the example listed, the date is in a US format. That’s a classic sign of a scam. As an official agency of the UK government, the DVSA studiously uses British English in all its official communications, and using US grammar or language is a good tell-tale sign that a message may well have originated from someone else.
• It’s a private phone number. If it looks like it’s been sent from a personal mobile number, there’s a good chance it’s a burner phone.

And of course that age-old rule still applies – trust your instincts. If something seems suspicious, it probably is. You can always contact the DVSA yourself to check. Don’t forget that most legitimate organisations doling out fines deliberately give you quite a long window to pay, mostly in the region of a few weeks to a few months. It will never just be a few days (unless they’ve tried to contact you before), and certainly won’t be a matter of hours.

What to do if you get a spam text about parking penalties

First and foremost, don’t respond to it, or acknowledge it directly in any other way. You don’t need to tell the DVSA, but it is a good idea to report it to the National Cyber Security Centre. If you’ve already responded or you think your information may be compromised, there may still be actions you can take to protect yourself. You can go over to the official site to read the National Cyber Security Centre’s advice directly.

We’ll leave that side of things to the NCSC. As for us here at Scrap Car Network, we’ll stick to what we do best – getting you the very best price when you scrap your car. All you have to do is enter in your car reg and postcode onto the fields in our homepage, and in virtually no time at all you’ll be looking at your very own instant scrap car quote. It’s all go from there!