You are three cars back at a red light when the phone buzzes. E-ZPass, it says. You owe $4.35 from a trip last month, a late fee hits Friday, and your registration could be flagged. The link sits right there under the message. Paying it would take less time than the light.
Do not pay it. Consumer Reports asked every toll agency in the United States whether it texts drivers asking for payment. Almost none do. A toll text with a payment link is not probably fake. Treat it as fake.
The $4.35 Is Bait, Not A Bill
The dollar figure is chosen the way a magician chooses a card. These messages usually ask for a few dollars, small enough that disputing it costs more than paying it. Nobody picks up the phone and calls a tollway authority over four bucks.
The payment page is the real product. It collects your card number, billing address and security code, and some versions ask for a Social Security number under the heading of identity verification. Paying also confirms your phone number is live and your card is good, so the follow-ups get bigger.
Texts about overdue tolls helped push reports of government imposter scams up 40 percent in 2025, the Federal Trade Commission said in May 2026. Imposter scams of every type cost Americans $3.5 billion in 2025.
One Habit Beats Every Spam Filter
Close the text. Open a browser, type your toll system’s address yourself (E-ZPass, SunPass, FasTrak, I-PASS, TxTag, whichever one you actually have), log in and look at your balance. If you genuinely owe $4.35, it is sitting right there and you can clear it on the real site in under a minute. If it is not there, you never owed it.
“Legitimate agencies don’t send random texts demanding immediate payment or threatening penalties without prior notice,” says Patsy Guida, senior manager of information technology at Consumer Reports, who recommends typing the agency’s URL yourself or calling its official customer service number.
Use the phone number printed on the agency’s real website, never the one in the text. And remember that no toll authority takes payment by gift card, wire transfer or cryptocurrency. If a “toll agent” ever walks you toward the gift card rack at Walmart or Target, hang up mid-sentence.
Check The Sender, Then Check The Link
Start with the number at the top of the screen. Plenty of these texts come from a sender with the wrong number of digits for a U.S. phone, or one that opens with a country code other than 1. A real scam text sent to a Connecticut driver came from a number beginning +63.
The link is the other tell. Real agencies use plain .com or .gov addresses. The fakes pad them out into something like e-zpass.com-roadioe.cc, or drop odd hyphens into the middle of a government name, or end in endings nobody uses for government business, such as .xin, .top or .vip. One message that appeared to carry a .gov address had a dash sitting in the middle of it, and the site actually ended in .bond.
What The Message Does Not Say
A real toll bill knows things about you. It has an invoice number, a plate, a date, a location. The fakes are blasted to millions of numbers at once, so they stay vague, and many arrive at people who have not been near a toll road in years.
They also get local facts wrong. A text claiming to be from the “Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles (BMV)” is wrong twice: Connecticut does not use the phrase “Bureau of Motor Vehicles,” and Connecticut does not have toll booths. A SunPass notice when you have never driven in Florida is fake on arrival.
Watch the page itself if you get that far. A toll site makes you enter an invoice number or a license plate. If the only thing it wants is a card number or a Social Security number, it is a harvesting form with a logo on top.
Do Not Reply, Not Even STOP
Some versions ask you to “Reply Y” to activate the link, which can slip past safety protocols on certain phones. Typing STOP does a similar favor, because it confirms a real person read the message. On an iPhone, replying can make a dead link in that thread clickable.
Forward the message to 7726 instead. That spells SPAM on the keypad, it costs nothing, and it reports the text to your carrier. Then delete it and block the sender. Blocking is housekeeping rather than a cure, since these operations rotate phone numbers constantly.
The Version With A Court Date And A QR Code
A harsher variant arrives as an image: a “Notice of Civil Infraction Hearing” from a district court, telling you to appear in person or pay a penalty immediately by scanning a QR code. The Michigan Attorney General flagged this tactic in March 2026.
QR codes are worse than links because you cannot read the address before you land on it. Point your camera somewhere else. Courts and toll agencies use the mail for this, and a county clerk’s office will confirm by phone whether anything exists in your name.
If You Already Typed In Your Card
Call your bank on the number printed on the back of the card, report the fraud and ask for a replacement. Then ask the question most people skip: was my card added to Apple Pay, Google Pay or another mobile wallet on a device I do not own? Stolen numbers get loaded into mobile wallets and drained later, and killing the plastic does not always kill the wallet.
Check your statement for tiny test charges over the next few weeks. Place a fraud alert with Equifax (800-525-6285), Experian (888-397-3742) and TransUnion (800-680-7289).
If you only tapped the link and entered nothing, you are very likely fine. Close the page, install nothing it offers, update your phone’s operating system and browser, and stay cold on any follow-up call claiming to be your bank’s fraud department.
Lock The Side Doors
Anyone who handed over a Social Security number or driver’s license should start a recovery plan at IdentityTheft.gov, freeze their credit at all three bureaus, file a police report, and ask the IRS for an Identity Protection PIN so nobody files a tax return in their name.
Call your cell carrier too and ask for a port-out PIN or SIM lock. Criminals holding your name, address and phone number sometimes try a SIM swap next, which hands them the text-message codes that protect your bank login. Carriers also take scam reports directly.
One more trap waits at the end. Recovery scammers contact past victims promising to retrieve stolen money for an upfront fee. Only your bank or a legal authority can reverse a transaction.
Who Is Actually Sending These
Most of these campaigns trace back to a China-based operation researchers call the Smishing Triad, which sells a ready-made phishing kit to other scammers. It is the same machine behind the fake USPS delivery texts. Google sued 25 unnamed defendants tied to the kit in November 2025.
New Jersey’s Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell reviewed toll smishing domains and found 82 percent registered through Dominet (HK) Limited, formerly known as Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce Private Limited. The same unit caught the operators making a rookie mistake: their New Jersey texts said “DMV,” when the state renamed the agency the MVC in 2003. Once researchers pointed that out publicly, the texts were corrected.
One wave tracked by Bitdefender, which has not said who runs it, spans a dozen countries, impersonating transport authorities, toll operators and parking services, and the United States is the biggest target, with California and Texas hit hardest.
Report It, Then Warn Your Parents
Texas transportation officials warned residents about messages claiming to come from the North Texas Tollway Authority or TxTag. NTTA says it does not request payment through unsolicited texts. The Dallas Police Department’s Financial Crimes Division runs a unit called the Swindle Squad, which investigates financial scams.
Reporting takes two minutes: forward the text to 7726, file at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, add a complaint at ic3.gov, file with the FCC, and contact your state attorney general if the message impersonated a court. The FBI’s complaint center logged more than 2,000 reports about toll impersonation texts from at least three states between early March and mid-April 2024, and nearly 60,000 complaints about unpaid toll scams across all of 2024. Americans reported $470 million in losses to text scams that same year.
Set the default and tell everyone in your phone: treat a toll text as fake. The agency already has your plate. If you owe, something arrives in the mailbox.
