‘Convincing’ Good To Go! toll scam rears its ugly head
Jul 9, 2024, 6:03 AM | Updated: 1:35 pm
The Good To Go Flex Pass sticks to a car windshield with small Velcro tabs and can be switched for use in HOV and toll lanes on the fly. Motorcycle passes do not look like this. (Photo: Chris Sullivan, KIRO Newsradio)
(Photo: Chris Sullivan, KIRO Newsradio)
Scammers are at it again, trying to get your personal information with bogus text messages posing as Good To Go! toll reminders.
I knew our good friends were back at their scam when I received a text message at 5:41 a.m. Sunday morning. I soon discovered these texts had been going out for a few days.
“Customers and non-customers have been receiving fraudulent text messages from scammers usually making a remark that they owe some amount of money and sending them a link to a fake website and requesting payment,” the toll division’s Lauren McLaughlin said.
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My text message read that I had an unpaid toll invoice. To avoid additional charges of $66.70, I needed to pay my balance of $6.67. There was a URL to click.
It read “mygoodtogotoll.com.” That’s not the real website.
“They’ve been getting kind of close with some of these URLs, but MyGoodToGo.com is the only official Good To Go! website,” McLaughlin said. “That’s the only place we’d be requesting payment from anyone.”
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“If you’re a Good To Go! customer, you may get an email saying ‘Hey, check your account. There’s a message there,'” she said. “If you’re not a customer, it’ll be a bill that comes through the U.S. mail. We generally don’t send texts.”
An example of the scam text posing as Good To Go! tolls local residents are receiving. (Photo: Chris Sullivan, KIRO Newsradio)
And the texts certainly wouldn’t come from the 263 area code, which is in Montreal, Canada.
The toll division is actively trying to shut these websites down, but the owners are hard to track.
“We’ve definitely been contacting the domain hosts of these websites and requesting they take it down saying ‘hey this is fraudulent,’ but then it’s in their hands,” McLaughlin said. “We’re also encouraging people who are contacted to report these contacts to the Federal Trade Commission.”
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You can also report the texts as you delete them.
McLaughlin said this isn’t the first time this scam has surfaced, and it won’t be the last. She is asking people to be aware when their inbox chimes.
“Getting the word out trying to tell people that these are scam messages,” she said. “Don’t click links you don’t know, but each time a new scam message goes out, we have to share that message again with a whole new group of people.”
If you ever have any questions about your toll bill, just go to the real website or call the call center. Don’t fall for the scam.
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