Text messages claiming a driver owes an unpaid toll and must pay immediately to avoid a penalty are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a scam, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The messages impersonate state and regional tolling agencies from coast to coast, using invented balances and fake links to extract both a payment and, if the link is clicked, personal information such as a driver’s license number. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has logged more than 2,000 complaints about the pattern since March 2024. Neither agency has tied the scheme to a single group or state, and the wording of the texts changes just enough from one wave to the next to keep slipping past spam filters built to catch the last version.
A text that looks like an overdue toll
The federal fraud-complaint center has cataloged the typical wording: a message claiming an outstanding toll of about $12.51, paired with a threat of a $50 late fee unless the recipient visits a link within a set window to settle the balance. The dollar figure is usually small and oddly specific, calibrated to feel more like an annoyance to clear up than a scam worth questioning, and the deadline is always framed in hours rather than days.
That example, drawn from an FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center advisory, illustrates the format scammers rely on: a precise but modest balance, a looming penalty, and a web address built to resemble a real state tolling agency’s name closely enough to survive a quick glance on a phone screen.
More than 2,000 complaints since last spring
Complaint volume tells its own story. IC3 counted more than 2,000 reports in barely a month after the scheme first surfaced, spanning at least three states, and noted that the pattern of originating phone numbers suggested the operation was moving from state to state rather than staying put in one place. Virginia’s transportation department said it was not aware of any state residents who had received the fraudulent messages at the time of its own review, even as neighboring states were already reporting an active wave.
Real toll agencies don’t text first
When an account genuinely falls behind, most tolling authorities do not reach out by text at all. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission says flatly that it does not text its E-ZPass or Toll By Plate customers; a real notice about a significant unpaid balance starts with a letter in the mail, and only an authorized collections partner that identifies itself by name and account details will ever text a customer directly. The commission tells anyone who gets a suspicious link to check a balance instead through its own E-ZPass website, its Toll Pay app, or a phone call to its published customer-service line. Its guidance also urges people to “resist the pressure to act immediately,” on the reasoning that a legitimate business, unlike a scammer, always allows time for a financial decision.
The FTC’s advice matches: verify any balance by contacting the tolling agency directly through a phone number or website already known to be legitimate, never the one printed inside the text itself, and delete or report the message rather than replying to it. Both agencies frame speed as the tell — a real toll bill can wait a day for a phone call; a scam text is built around the assumption that it cannot.
Money and identity theft in one click
Clicking the embedded link does more than authorize a bogus toll payment. The FTC warns that the linked page can also harvest personal information such as a driver’s license number, opening the door to identity theft well beyond the cost of the fake toll itself.
The financial stakes extend beyond any single fake bill. Tennessee’s share of nationwide internet-crime losses alone topped $190 million in a recent year, according to the FBI’s annual complaint-center tally, with residents 60 and older accounting for roughly a third of that state’s losses. Rebekah Hammonds, of the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s public-private partnerships division, said drivers unfamiliar with a given toll facility should treat any demand for immediate payment with default skepticism. Asked whether an unfamiliar text could really be how a toll operator collects its fee, she said “there’s always a question of is this how they’re going to have me pay the user fee, and the answer is more than likely no.”
IC3’s count of more than 2,000 complaints from last year almost certainly understates the problem, since it only reflects people who filed a report rather than everyone who quietly paid, clicked, or simply deleted the message and said nothing. Neither the FTC nor IC3 has published an updated national total since, leaving the true scale of the scheme an open question two years after the first wave of texts began circulating.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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