After the phishing scam that hit this week using text messaging, this question has come up. The banks involved want to assure consumers that they are not selling cell phone numbers. They banks don't even necessarily have your cell number unless you gave it to them as a primary or secondary contact number. We in law enforcement can vouch for that.

We believe these scammers just generate random cell phone numbers. Once they know what prefixes are used in a certain area, that's fairly easy. For example, in Jeff City, 353, 230 and 619 are some of the cell phone prefixes. So a scammer has software that cranks out cell phone numbers starting with those prefixes. Obviously, he'll hit a lots of numbers that don't exist and lots that don't accept text messages. But he'll also hit a lot of real live people.