The Post Office is NOT holding a package for you!
By Dean Thompson
My most recent post got a question from a reader, #David. Greenberg asking what scam I have been seeing most recently and I thought this would be good to share with the people I know because it is likely happening to them and/or their loved ones.
It starts like this. You get a text message like the ones I have in this article and they tell you that the USPS has a package for you but they don’t have your complete address information and if you don’t confirm your address within 12 hours. If you don’t do that, your package will be gone…
This scam preys on the fact that we are all getting a lot of packages these days as we do a good amount of our shopping online. Amazon, Walmart, and many others delivery using the postal service. If you ever support something like a Kickstarter campaign it will likely come through the post office. This means even if you just bought something from Amazon you may think this is your package if you quickly look at the message and start to take action but please make sure your loved ones know they need to slow down and take a look at the message and not respond.
Let’s look at the red flags.
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You can see that it comes from some email address you don’t know and in some cases they may have enough information to make it kind of match something specific to you. They have someone with the same last name as me with some gmail address it is coming from. The post office is not going to use some random gmail or email address from a domain that is not theirs to communicate with you. The second one is not even a valid domain name.
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The second flag is they are telling you that you need to act urgently. You only have 12 hours to take action. The real post office as well as UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc. are going to try to deliver a package at least 3 times and if they can’t, it will go back to the sender and you will hear from the sender, not the post office!
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They want you to reply with Y so they know they have someone on the hook, but then they want you to get out of the message and follow the link they sent. They send these to thousands of people at a time, its a numbers game, so getting you to quickly reply with a Y means they have someone who will react quickly which will enable them to start to lure you in.
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The URL’s they provide are suspect in themselves and they at times are vanity URL’s with the real address not even being what they are showing. Unless someone you know very well is conversing with you and in the course of the conversation they send you a link, i.e. you are expecting them to send it, don’t click on a link in a text message.
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The postal service delivers to your house 6 days a week (heck, packages sometimes come 7 days a week). If there was an issue, they could knock on your door to resolve it.
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We’ve all dealt with the post office. Do you think they would sign off with wishing you a wonderful day? NO! This is clearly someone who doesn’t speak English natively guessing this is how the USPS would communicate. We all know better.
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If the post office has incomplete address information the package goes back to the sender, period! They won’t even attempt to deliver when their are issues and the responsibility goes on the sender, not the receiver.
As always, please use this to educate you family and friends as education is one of the best tools we can have to stop these scammers and please repost this to your own networks so we can get the word out. We are also going to start posting these to www.retiresec.com so the whole collection is there for you to share with others. #retiresec
In my next post I’ll cover email bombing, which is not only a scam, but incredibly invasive!