Have you received a text message stating something along these lines? “This is your final notice regarding the unpaid toll balance on your account. You must settle the balance within the next 12 hours to avoid severe penalties.”

If so, you are one of millions of Americans who have been sent such spam texts in recent years. And a new Wall Street Journal report shows that we are receiving them from Chinese organizations.

The Chinese can bombard Americans with millions of these messages each month, thanks to their use of “sim farms”—facilities filled with boxes of networking devices. Each device is loaded with dozens or hundreds of sim cards.

These facilities enable a single operator to send tens of thousands of text messages each day. The Chinese have some 200 sim farms operating inside the United States, thanks to U.S.-based gig workers they hire to set them up. Once running, operatives in China control the farms remotely and begin throwing their poisonous bait out to as many Americans as possible.

Rather than unpaid tolls, some texts warn about delinquent postal fees or perhaps outstanding traffic violations. The overarching threat is always the same: If you don’t click the link in this text and enter your credit card information and pay up right away, you will face steep penalties or legal action.

Most recipients recognize these messages as spam and either ignore or delete them. But the fraction who are frightened into clicking are brought to Chinese phishing sites. As they type in their credit card information, along with a one-time code from their bank, the Chinese use spyware to capture every keystroke.

“It’s the easiest system I’ve ever seen for making phishing sites,” Gary Warner, Dark Tower’s director of Threat Intelligence, told the Wall Street Journal.

The Chinese enter the person’s credit card and bank information into digital wallets on their own smartphones. “Having these cards put into digital wallets is so powerful because multifactor authentication is never needed again,” Ford Merrill of Sec Alliance said. “You’ve effectively told your bank that you trust this device.”

From there, the spending spree begins. It generally continues until the credit card is flagged or maxed out.

The scheme has enabled the Chinese to steal more than $1 billion from Americans over the past three years, according to an analysis by the Department of Homeland Security. If you spent $1 each second, it would take you more than 31 years to spend $1 billion. It is enough money to fund 150 U.S. schools for one year. That is how much these scammers have stolen mainly from elderly Americans and others with low digital literacy.

In addition to financial losses, these scams place immense emotional and psychological burdens on many of America’s most vulnerable people. For those already contending with significant challenges, the robbery deepens feelings of hopelessness, anxiety and despair. “It makes me disheartened, especially with the economy that we have now,” said Makayla Crumedy, an elderly victim of this scam in Huntsville, Alabama.

Victimization is also linked with elevated blood pressure, higher rates of hospitalization, greater likelihood of entering nursing facilities, and lower survival rates over the next five years.

The Wall Street Journal specifies that those carrying out this widespread theft are “Chinese criminals.” But it is well established that the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) often works with criminals and other nonstate actors to accomplish its dark ambitions.

• When ccp members wanted to quash Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests in 2019, they didn’t deploy soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army—the optics of that would have been problematic. Instead, they quietly directed triad gangs to assault the demonstrators and told Hong Kong police not to interfere with the violence.
• When the Chinese sought to flood America with fentanyl to kill hundreds of thousands and destabilize its society, they didn’t do it overtly, but instead worked with and through Chinese criminals in Mexico, who were in league with the nation’s hypermilitarized cartels.
• When China’s leaders wanted to cement their global monopoly on rare earths by asserting control over Myanmar’s caches, it again worked with Chinese criminals and local warlords to accomplish it.

These activities are all part of the Chinese Communist Party’s gray-zone warfare, using criminals and other nonstate actors to further the nation’s rise to global dominance.

With the unpaid toll scam, thousands of perpetrators are operating inside China to keep the theft going. Between the Chinese Communist Party’s Orwellian surveillance state, iron grip on online information flows, and draconian justice system, it is unlikely to be unaware of the expansive operation. At the very least, the ccp turns a blind eye as American wealth is transferred into Chinese hands and as the families of its main adversary are further destabilized. It is more likely that the government is backing the operation.

In his March 30, 2018, Key of David episode, “The Times of the Gentiles,” Gerald Flurry said: “Surely if we stop and think about this, with China doing all that and making all these deals and paying all that money, what is their goal? What is their ambition? Surely we must see a strong motivation there to take over the world, to conquer the world, and some of the Chinese leaders will even tell you that.”

That episode’s title comes from Luke 21:24, where Jesus Christ warned that in our modern age, the world would enter into a dark new epoch: the times of the Gentiles.

The Scriptures make clear that this new period would happen when the power of the Israelitish nations of America and Britain erodes and others like China rise to global dominance. We are in that era now, and the toll scam is just one of a thousand areas where the Chinese are working to attack the U.S. and empower and enrich themselves.

In His warning about the “times of the Gentiles,” Christ said that as China and other nations continue to weaken America and fortify themselves, “men’s hearts [would fail] them for fear” (verse 26). He provides comfort in the following verse, saying the fear will not last long and that there is great cause for hope.

To learn more, watch Mr. Flurry’s program on this vital topic.