Postage scams have been around for as long as the postal service itself, with famous cases occurring as far back as the 18th century. However, the proliferation of online shopping and the accompanying increase in package deliveries have made post office scams an even more popular approach for many fraudsters.
What do common post scams look like, and how can you avoid them?
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What Do Postal Service Scams Look Like?
In general, postal service scams will involve someone claiming to be from a delivery service, whether that be USPS, Amazon, DHL, or another provider, asking you for personal information or payment to complete a delivery. In practice, this can take a variety of forms.
Impersonation Scams
Very often, scammers will contact you pretending to be from the delivery service and will ask you to provide personal information to release or reschedule a delivery. Alternatively, they may ask you to provide account information to make a payment to cover taxes or other expenses to release a package. These scammers might contact you via phone, text, or email.
Legitimate businesses should never ask you to provide personal details via insecure means or ask for additional payment once a transaction is complete.
Phishing Emails and Smishing Messages
Another common scam involves receiving an email citing an issue with your delivery and providing you with a link to remedy the problem. If you click on the link, it may trigger a malware download that gives the scammer access to your device and personal information. Alternatively, it may take you to a fraudulent website where you are asked to provide personal information to rectify the problem.
These kinds of fraudulent emails are known as phishing emails. When similar scams are received by message or phone they are called smishing.
Suspicious links are a major red flag when it comes to scams. You should always navigate to official, secure tracking or payment portals from the legitimate business’s main website.
Red Flags for Identifying Postal Service Scams
It can be challenging to determine whether a communication is legitimately from a business to resolve an issue or a scam. Below are five red flags that may indicate a post scam.
- Requesting personal information: USPS and other legitimate businesses won’t ask for this information.
- Suspicious links: Links with suspicious URLs should indicate a scam; you should be able to navigate to the official page from the legitimate business’s main website.
- Payment requests: Payment requests come from the sender, and postal services will not reach out to recipients asking for payments.
- Urgent or threatening language: Scammers apply pressure to get you to act without thinking, which a professional service will not.
- Poor grammar and spelling: Post scams often originate overseas and therefore may have inconsistencies in their language use.
Post office scams involving USPS should be reported to [email protected], and non-USPS-related scams can be reported to the Federal Trade Commission.
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When my sweet old grandmother got caught up in an Amazon gift card scam, I decided then and there that I needed to do whatever I could to inform as many people as possible about the grifters of the world. That’s what I do here – writing about modern scams so you don’t get caught out.
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Still waiting for my Harbor Freight Multi Tool set, but probably soon now, I see they’ve debited my bank account for the shipping…gee where are they shipping it from?
Ive been getting that usps fake package scam about 6 times a week..
Its like, are they just trying to wear me down?
French please