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  • 2022-05-31 (xsd:date)
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  • 'USPS' Text Message Scam Claims Delivery Problem, Asks for Personal Financial Info (en)
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  • Consumers should beware of a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) text message smishing scam that sends unexpected alerts about a supposed package delivery issue. Smishing is the term the Postal Service uses for a kind of text message fraud, combining both SMS (an abbreviation for Short Message Service) and phishing into one word. Such scams seek to compromise personal and financial information. Never click the links in these text messages. The best course of action is to delete them. The incidents can be reported to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), which protects the U.S. Postal Service and enforces the law that ensure public safety within the nation's mail system. The Postal Service text message scam usually claims there's an unspecified problem with delivering a package, and, because of that issue, it cannot be delivered. In order to resolve the issue, the messages ask for payment or fees (sometimes $1.99 or $3), and for the recipient to update their personal financial information on a scammy website. The texts usually include a link to one of these scammy websites that might show letters from the USPS acronym, such as USP, in its URL. Such websites have been designed to look just like the official post office website, USPS.com. However, unless a website's URL contains the exact spelling of USPS.com, it's likely a scam. Common language in the text messages found in these scams include several different variations. Below are text messages that social media users reported receiving in May 2022, all of which led to fraudulent websites. We bolded the USP that's included in many of the linked websites' addresses. All of the text messages we reviewed in the Postal Service scam appeared to have been written with poor grammar. Further, messages that mentioned a specific owed fee either didn't include a dollar sign or placed the symbol after the price. Both of these writing characteristics indicated that people outside of the U.S. might be running the scam. We collected several examples of the text message scam that Twitter users had seen in May: The Postal Service does send legitimate text messages to alert customers of delivery steps, but only if customers request such notifications. There is an official webpage on the matter with the below-transcribed examples of genuine messages. (Note that these four examples of authentic text messages don't include links to websites but simply provide package delivery updates.) In sum, we recommend caution when receiving a text message that claims to be from the U.S. Postal Service (or USPS) and ask for payment or personal financial information, as it might be a scam. Keep this in mind especially if you aren't expecting a package and/or you didn't recently ship one. Additional reporting on the matter can be found on various local news websites, including on WWMT.com, KCRG.com, KFVS12.com, CBS6Albany.com, KLEWTV.com, and WPXI.com. The Better Business Bureau (BBB) also published tips on how to avoid falling victim to package delivery scams. (en)
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