It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show.

Our mission is to serve you and empower you to make better financial decisions in your

life.

Today, I want to warn you about something that sadly has become so very common.

Text message scams.

I continue receiving messages supposedly from companies I do business with that are

fake.

When should you click?

When should you delete?

I'm going to tell you.

Also, I often hear from generous listeners who want to give money to a family member, but

you don't know how to do it.

There's a great way to do this without messing up anybody's taxes.

So a couple of things on text messaging.

One is it's become very common because it costs nothing for predictive programs that

people have on computers to send out blast text messages.

They will come typically from your own area code or one near you and they'll have a very

simple thing like, hey, or just want to check on you see how you're doing whatever.

You don't recognize the number.

Do you click on it?

What if it says, Bill, I really need to talk to you about your illness or Bill so and

so's hurt or Jane blah, blah, blah has happened.

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