Wednesday, 30 March 2022

The scammers are coming!

I got a text very early this morning about the failed delivery of a parcel and I was invited to go to a post office flavoured website to arrange a delivery time. I vaguely remembered getting messages like this in the past. I couldn't think what parcel, although I do have a book outstanding from foreign. Maybe it was that. And maybe their computer works overnight on this sort of stuff.

So I go to the website, dressed up in Post Office clothes, and give it some details, including address and date of birth. It then asks for the modest sum of £1.48 (or something like that) by way of a redelivery fee, popping up a little window into which I am invited to put my card details - card number, expiry date and CSV. At which point I pause and ask Bing about these people, to be directed to an article in, I think, the Evening Standard, about the latest scam.

It would have been all too easy to have blithely sailed through the transaction. How on earth HSBC can be expected sort out such people from all the thousands and thousands of small but legitimate online traders who must have sprung up over the past couple of years? And the bad people now know my date of birth - possibly not very difficult to obtain otherwise, but one would still rather not.

Someone appears to have gone to a fair amount of bother to fake all this up. Maybe there is a dark web market place where you can just buy what is needed, more or less ready made?

Snapped above, with the long session identifier redacted, just to be on the safe side.

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