The text says you are not registered to vote. The FBI says read it twice.

A text arrives telling you that you are not registered to vote, with a link to put it right before the deadline. The page it opens looks like your state's registration site. It is not, and the FBI named this exact trick in a public service announcement on 15 October, ahead of November's midterms.

The alert lists four schemes. The fake registration page is the one after your personal details, which is an identity theft starter kit rather than a one-off loss. The other three want money. Fraudulent political action committees that collect donations and keep them. Campaign merchandise advertised, paid for and never shipped. And the odd one, "campaign investment pools" that promise a return once the candidate wins, which is not a thing that exists; a donation is a donation, and it does not pay interest.

What has changed this cycle is how good the fakes sound. The bureau points at AI-generated voices, images and written messages impersonating candidates and campaign staff, and both The Register and Help Net Security made the same observation: the clumsy spelling and stilted phrasing that used to give these messages away have gone. A cloned voice asking for a donation now sounds like the person you saw on television last night.

The defence has not changed, though. Never check a claim using the link or the phone number inside the message that made the claim. Look up your own registration at vote.gov, check a PAC on the Federal Election Commission's site, and buy campaign merchandise from the campaign's own page. If you already typed something into one of these pages, treat it the way you would a leaked password and change it anywhere you reused it. Tendvane's Privacy and accounts check covers the part on your own PC, showing which accounts exist, which are signed in, and which have no password at all.