The cybersecurity company has released scam text protection for iOS and Android users on its Surfshark One and Surfshark One+ plans, extending the VPN provider's scam protection hub with a real-time SMS filtering layer.
The feature screens incoming messages for suspicious patterns — phishing URLs, unusual sender numbers, and social engineering content — before the user interacts with them. On iOS, identified scam messages are moved automatically to the Spam folder in the native Messages app, with no notification sent, effectively removing the trigger entirely. Android users receive a Surfshark alert that opens the flagged message in a contained app environment.
SMS scams now account for 35 percent of all phishing attempts globally, according to Surfshark's figures. The threat is classified as smishing, a variant of social engineering that exploits mobile messaging channels where users have traditionally had little protection compared to email.
"While traditional cybersecurity focuses on malware and hacking, modern scams increasingly target human behavior through social engineering techniques that exploit trust, urgency, and exposed personal data. SMS-based sophisticated scams are very difficult to spot, especially when they have no easy, identifiable mistakes. Our tool is built to spot mistakes or suspicious patterns in order to avoid any interaction with bad actors," said Dominykas Simkus, Senior Product Manager at Surfshark.
The company is explicit that the feature does not retain message content, does not broadly monitor the device, and does not use personal data to train AI models — a point likely aimed at enterprise and privacy-conscious users who would otherwise reject a product that reads their messages. For US users, the in-app dashboard also shows an estimated money saved by avoided scams.
Surfshark, headquartered in the Netherlands with offices in Lithuania and Poland, has positioned itself as a multi-product security platform beyond its VPN origins, including antivirus and identity monitoring tools. The scam text protection is framed as the next addition to what the company calls its unified scam protection hub.
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