The digital payment ecosystem faces mounting pressure as imposter scams have extracted $3.5 billion from American consumers, prompting the Federal Trade Commission to issue urgent warnings about increasingly sophisticated deception tactics. The regulatory agency has identified these schemes as the most frequently reported type of fraud, signaling a fundamental shift in how criminals exploit digital infrastructure to steal from unsuspecting victims. Two primary attack vectors dominate the landscape of imposter fraud. Text message campaigns falsely claiming unpaid toll charges have emerged as a particularly insidious threat, exploiting the ubiquity of electronic toll collection systems that have become standard across American highways. These messages typically demand immediate payment through digital channels, creating artificial urgency that bypasses normal consumer skepticism about unsolicited payment requests.…