MANILA — PLDT Inc. and its wireless unit Smart Communications warned their customers on Tuesday that scammers were sending unclickable links to reach new victims.

In a statement, they said they uncovered scammers' new strategy as Smart rolled out its improved blocking tool.

"Smart's much improved blocking capabilities have prevented a significant number of SMShing messages from reaching customers. But scammers keep looking for new ways to run their phishing activities," Jojo Gendrano, SVP and chief information security officer at PLDT and Smart, said in the release.

"They now send unclickable links, but with the same goal of luring customers into opening malicious domains."

Scammers replace the dots in a link with another character such as an underscore or slash and conceal the hyperlinks, Smart's investigation found, which could also be a way to evade networks' blocking tools.

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Potential victims were then asked to place the address on their browsers and replace the special characters with dots to activate the link. 

"Another method is sending what may look like IP addresses but are numeric clickable links," the investigation also revealed.

They encourage users to report suspicious messages or calls to cybersecurityincidents@smart.com.ph and cybersecurityincidents@pldt.com.ph or to Smart’s verified and official social media pages.

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