Url looks suss. Seems kinda sophisticated for the usual ups fishing scam. Here’s the text message I got leading here.
“Wishing you a bright and sunny day!” Lol, I almost want to help this guy by explaining that UPS and American companies in general have disdain for their customers and would never wish them to have anything that would not benefit the company.
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An official company is not going to use an URL shortener.
That’s only used when you try to hide the URL, or if you think the user is going to type it out manually.
- 3rd party URL shortener, immediate red flag
- Non-USPS.com domain once you tapped it (which you shouldn’t have)
- National service sending from a South Carolina area code instead of a short code or a toll free number
- Does USPS even have your phone number tied to your delivery address?
They give you the package info. Just ignore their email and input that into the USPS address manually. Kind of like the FedEx and UPS scams. You don’t have to use their link to “check the status” of something. Go to the real site, enter number, see fake, ignore!
Yes.
100% scam
I seriously doubt USPS bought a domain like gflrml dot cyou for their business. It’s 300% a scam.
Reminds me of my previous bank.
They changed some system countrywide, so I got an email that I need to update some data and go to a website to do that.
If was something like “update-[bankname]-data-now.tld”.
It was sent to a unique mail address I used for them. But still though it was phishing.
Turns out: No. It was real. Whoever came up with the idea to not host that stuff on at least a subdomain of the bank really needs to get fired. and each and every manager who was part of the decision process.
Ugh. I work in the public sector and let me tell you, there are SO many companies that send the most dogiest, scammiest looking emails telling you to follow a link, only for it to turn out to be perfectly legitimate.
I honestly can see now why people end up falling for these things when even legitimate companies send emails looking just like phishing scammers
Had that happen, too. We all try to educate users to NOT click on some dubious phishing/scams and put in qute some effort to explain it over and over again, and then there are companies doing things like that. It’s just sad.
lol I have to go back to the bank (when there’s a manager, because there wasn’t last time🤦♀️), to turn online banking back on for my account.
It got turned off because I didn’t pick up some spam call they made.
Also, is it common for a legitimate government agency to use a third-party link shortener like bitly?
You mean (uint32_t)-1 %
Yes, and usps is never going to text you. Be careful about what links you click. This link could have passed through tracking and flagged your number as someone who clicks their links. At the very least they know it’s an active phone number, and at worst they start targeting you more frequently (or sell a list to other people to target you).
This is why you shouldn’t ever respond, click on, interact with, or even read scam messages. Same goes for emails btw. Disable auto-loading images in emails since that is another way they can track active emails.
But, good job second guessing the message and asking about it. I mean it. Some scams rely on you not talking to anyone so it is good to ask others if you’re unsure/uncomfortable. This is especially true if someone tries to tell you not to talk to anyone else since that is a common practice scammers use as well and should be an instant red flag
You clicked a random link from an sms message?
That’s a bold move, Cotton.
Kinda sad to see some of the comments being assholes about OP clicking a link. Like, how do y’all think phishing works? People click. Get over it and just educate people on why not to. Explain the risks and how to spot the scam. Do any of you think this person would have clicked if they knew for sure? Or if they knew the issues that can occur? It’s super easy to sit in the comments and act holier than cos you knew and they didn’t.
Yeah it’s a scam. Most people get these quite often. Your Telecom company probably blocks these quite often. Someone else went through all the details of the scam like the fake domain, where to report etc.
Some of these links allow people to track who clicks. If you click once, they can provide data that you did and they can target you using other numbers and other scams. Might not be the case with this one, but they can also get your device details from accessing the site, using google analytics, ip data, geolocation stuff, etc. Or they ask you to allow notifications but the notifications are also scams.
General rule of thumb is don’t click when you don’t trust the source. If youre sceptical, just walk away for a bit. Cops, the government and postmen know where you live, and they won’t miss you. It is always okay to trust your gut, be it in a call, messaging platform or on the Web.
Also, no one is too smart to be scammed and a lot of scammers rely on people thinking they’re too smart to be scammed. Really smart, highly-educated, very successful people get scammed all the time. That’s how Jack Abramoff was able to pull of his crimes for so long. That’s how Theranos became a massive company.
Also, in case of any doubt, contact whoever supposedly sent you this directly.
In this case, contact USPS and ask if this is correct.
A tangent:
What annoys me is when legitimate companies use non-standard URLs in their hyperlinked emails. For example, if you get a message from Facebook taking you to facebookemail.com, that’s actually a domain controlled by the real Facebook.
They’re essentially teaching their customers to click on links in emails which use unfamiliar URLs which are superficially similar to the usual one.
They probably want to separate their customers from getting up to stupid spammy behaviour and getting the domain blacklisted from their ability to deliver their own official Facebook email notifications. There probably ought to be better ways to do that, but the fact Facebook went “yeah, we gotta register the shitty domain facebookemail.com” makes me think they’re working around a crappy limitation of smtp email.
There ought to be no limitation with, say, email.facebook.com. Sure, have the domain facebookemail to prevent bad actors grabbing it, but only use it as a redirection.
I don’t think there’s mail server software in existence that would choke on a subdomain like that. There might be a few mail admins too easily confused to be able to set it up, but I doubt there are any of those at Facebook.
That said, most people aren’t going know that a subdomain is safer than a legitimate looking alternative, so maybe it’s all moot.
Tangentially, it seems that someone has squatted on facebook-email.com (note the hyphen), so I expect that Zuck’s lawyers are crawling all over whoever’s done that.
It’s been a while since I’ve been in tech. Is there any kind of DNS reason why you’d want email coming from a different domain? Like to skip steps in DNS resolution by going straight to a domain name instead of resolving a subdomain to the main domain?
Technically, it might be faster, but that’s not usually the reason. Email servers generally have to do a lot of work to confirm email messages are not spam. That work usually takes significantly longer than any potential DNS savings. In fact, that spam checking is probably the reason you see the secondary domains used.
When the main domain used for many purposes (like servers, users, printers, vendor communications, accounting communications, and so forth) It leaves a lot of room for misuse. Many pre-ransomware viruses would just send out thousands of emails iper hour. The mass communicating server could also reduce the domain reputation. There are just so many ways to tarnish the reputation of your email server or your email domain.
Many spam analysis systems group the subdomains and domain together. The subdomains contribute to the domain score and the domain score contributes to the subdomain score. To send a lot of emails successfully, you need both your servers and domains to have a very strong and very good reputation. Any marks on that reputation might prevent emails from being received by users. When large numbers of emails need to be controlled, it can be hard to get everyone in the organization to adhere to email rules (especially when the the problems aren’t users, but viruses/hackers) and easy to just register a new domain, more strictly controlled domain.
Some of the recent changes in email policies/tech might change the game, but old habits die hard. Separate domains can still generally be more successfully delivered, have potential security benefits, and can often work around IT or policy restrictions. They might phase out, but they might not. The benefit usually outweighs the slight disadvantage that 99% of people won’t see.
tl;dr
Better controlled email reputation.
A lot of things that don’t make sense 99.9% of the time make sense at the scale of Google and Facebook. Whether this is one, I can’t say.
Congratulations, you belong to the 3% of users who know what a domain is and why that matters. Everyone else uses Google (or DuckDuckGo because “Google bad”) to search for their favorite websites every time.
Google has one that is the most suspect url in existence, I don’t remember what it was but I verified it three different ways to be sure.
UPS apparently subcontracts their hiring to fucking Indonesia so you’ll get people working in a phone bank overseas asking for personal information.
Yes, I get them constantly.
100% scam
Yes. Don’t click on that link, it’s been obscured using an URL shortener
Very well known scam. Some details that give it away:
(1) They used a url shortener that doesn’t let you see the actual domain. (bit.ly)
(2) Website domain is not legitimate.
USPS’s website is usps.com. If the URL doesn’t end in usps.com (meaning usps.fakewebsite.com is still fake) then it’s not legitimate.
(3) Tone: The USPS doesn’t text you like you’re their friend.
(4) The number they’re texting you from is not an SMS short code number (usually 5 digits). Instead you’re getting a text from a 10 digit number with an area code, which means it’s a person/individual rather than an application or service.
source: used to work as cyber sec analyst
(5) grammatical error(s): “We will ship again in” instead of “we will ship again on”
Edit: more subtle errors and phrasing that feels like it was written by a non-native English speaker.
(6) USPS tracking numbers are like 65 digits long, because they expect to track every hydrogen atom in the known universe individually.
Yeah the first bullet copy with the comma and wrong preposition is clearly unprofessional. These scams always use poor contrasting red warning text as well.
I heard a theory that they put mistakes in intentionally to filter for dumb people.
Doubt that’s true, but it’s a funny idea.
It’s absolutely true, they want to make sure the victim won’t realize it’s a scam partway through and bail.
You’re absolutely right, of couse, but keep in mind that communications is still mostly done by people and people are generally fucking stupid.
I’ll add how is it that they could not know the address of the recipient, yet would know their phone number?
Either the recipient is totally unknown or they know the address. The last thing they would know about a recipient is the phone number.
That’s interesting I didn’t think about that fourth point, but whenever I get a verification SMS it does always come from a 5 digit number.
That one is not hard evidence though, for example delivery drivers from FedEx in my area send text messages from their actual phones announcing an upcoming delivery.
The messages are still standardized, so I’m assuming they are company phones and send pre-programmed messages from templates, but if I call that number, I’ll actually speak to the person handling my delivery.
I got one of these today too.
Something tells me the USPS wouldn’t be using bit.ly.
100% a scam.
The USPS won’t text you, they’ll leave you a notice in your mail box. They’re the only people besides you allowed to open your mailbox legally so it’s their best avenue.
Well, they claim they couldn’t find your house. So that wouldn’t be an option. Still a scam though
They can’t find your house, but somehow they know your phone number…? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had to use a person’s email address or phone number when I was mailing them a letter or package, just their physical address or post office box.
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Expecting them to have my phone number but not my address is a mental leap I cannot fathom in the first place.
USPS tracking numbers are never “US000000” they are only digits.
