If you’ve gotten a text message lately claiming you have an unpaid traffic violation and threatening to suspend your driving privileges, delete it. It’s a scam.
The Tennessee Department of Safety and Tennessee Highway Patrol are warning residents that these messages are not real, and that the department will never send messages about overdue traffic fines, fees, payments, or license suspensions.
The fraudulent texts are sophisticated enough to look official. They identify themselves as coming from the “Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security,” reference a “Final Notice of Pending Traffic Case,” and threaten serious consequences if you don’t act fast — typically within 24 to 48 hours. The threats include revocation of your vehicle registration, restriction of your driving privileges, and — notably — adverse effects on your credit record. That last threat is designed to make people panic. Don’t.
The link included in these messages directs to addresses like tn.nduab.life/pay — which is not a Tennessee state government website. Official Tennessee state government communications come from addresses ending in @tn.gov. Anything else isn’t the state.
Assistant Commissioner Russell Shoup was direct: “If you were to receive any kind of documentation related to a ticket, especially as it relates to your driver’s license and any action that we would be taking on your driver’s license, we would never send that through a text.”
The playbook here is straightforward: create urgency, impersonate authority, and hope you click before you think. This type of scheme — known as “smishing,” or SMS phishing — has been making the rounds nationally in various forms, with scammers swapping in different state agencies depending on the target.
If you receive one of these messages: don’t click, don’t pay, don’t reply. Delete it. If you’ve already interacted with the link, report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov and to the Tennessee Attorney General’s Division of Consumer Affairs at tn.gov/consumer.
When in doubt, go directly to a state website yourself. Nobody from the Tennessee Department of Safety is threatening your credit score over a text message. •
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