Scammers posing as Texas DMV looking for prey

The best place to find the black-arts brujas/brujos is down near Campeche on the Yucatan, but don’t have the time to go there looking for one, so the border area will have to do.

The Advance is looking for a bruja or olds-chool brujo, who even scares his neighbors, willing to work on the cheap to place a curse on the scam artists sending out these bogus texts to poor, unsuspecting people, pretending to be the Texas DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).

Usually, the black arts are nothing to mess with, but how else to get back at the scum of the earth trolling on poor people who will fall for such deceptions?

Two weeks ago, The Advance got a text that’s going around to multiple people, which reads:

Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)

Final Notice: Enforcement Penalties

Begin on August 27th.

According to our records, your traffic violation remains unpaid. Under Texas Code § 21-801.1, if your fine is not settled by August 27th 2025, the following penalties will be enforced:

1. Official DMV violation recording

2. Revocation of vehicle registration from August 30th

3. Driver’s license suspended (30 days)

4. Debt referred to collections (35% additional fee)

5. Risk of legal proceedings and adverse credit reporting

Pay via Texas DMV Online Services:

Then the text offers a link to click. What happens after that, who knows. Some scared people will pay. Whether or not the link will also put a virus on your cell phone, who knows.

Texas DMV Says Beware

The problem with this, is the older we get, the more susceptible we are to these sort of scare tactics and con artists. I saw it with my father-in-law not long before his passing in 2010. Here was a guy who had been sharp as a tack his entire adult life, or at least for the many years I knew him, but after two strokes, a broken hip, months of recovery, and a wife who was suffering from an advanced stage of dementia, his ability to think logically had slipped. Being stressed to the max only exacerbated the problem.

That was before smart phones had become so common.

So one day, a scammer calls him pretending to be the IRS and says that if he doesn’t immediately wire "X" amount of money (the exact amount escapes me, but it was in the thousands), the government was going to freeze his bank account and do all sort of nasty stuff to him, including fines and interest.

Thankfully, we caught him as he was about to get into his car and drive to the bank.

Today, under that same scenario, all he would have had to do was click a link, or any other scam link sent to him via a text posing as a legit agency, and there goes the money.

Considering that there are approximately 70 million Baby Boomers, as opposed to the approximate 35 million from my father-in-law’s generation, that’s a lot of possible people to scam.

The oldest of the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, turns 79 this year.

This summer, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) warned drivers about fraudulent toll notices.

The state agency said that individuals posing as “TxDMV” or “Texas DMV” are trying to collect unpaid toll fees.

They are not legit, said the DMV, and the state does not operate toll roads or manage collections.

Clicking any similar text links may put a person at risk for identity theft and/or financial loss.

Same rule applies if someone gets a similar text from a number claiming to be TxDOT (Department of Transportation) or TxTag.

Don’t click the link and report the text to your cell phone carrier.

The challenge for adult children is to help our parents navigate those difficult years when cognition begins to slip, but it’s not always easy to discern. Nor do most want to listen to their children. Admitting they need help isn’t always easy, because their remaining dignity still counts for a lot.

No one, however, based on age, health, underlying conditions is immune to scams.

AI has just made it that much easier for the scammers to increase the pool of would-be victims, sad to say.

Now, time to find a brujo, bruja, put a curse on these scammers and teach them not to prey on the vulnerable, the weak.