Is that unpaid toll text a scam?

How to spot the toll roads scam

• You are not a customer of the agency named. These go out in bulk to phone numbers, so plenty of recipients have never held an E-ZPass, FasTrak or SunPass account.
• The link is not the agency's own .gov or .com site. Endings like .vip, .xin and .top are registered in bulk for exactly this.
• The balance is small and oddly specific, with a late fee threatened if you miss a deadline measured in hours.
• The message arrives about a road you have not driven, or a state you have not been in.
• It asks for card details on the page rather than letting you sign in to an account you already have.
• The same wording turns up as a DMV notice a few weeks later. The FBI flagged the toll version first, and the FTC has since warned about the traffic-ticket rewrite, because it is one operation changing costume.

What to do now

1. Do not pay through the link. Look up your account on the toll operator's real site, typed or bookmarked, and check whether any balance exists.
2. If you are unsure which agency covers a road, search for it independently rather than trusting the name in the message.
3. Report it to the FBI's IC3 at ic3.gov, which is where the Bureau asked for these to be sent, and forward the text to 7726 (SPAM).
4. If you already paid, call your bank, dispute the charge and freeze the card. A card payment is often reversible for a while.
5. Delete the message so it is not tapped later by someone else.