Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Eww! Is This the New Scam?

Twice, a couple of days apart, I've gotten e-mails supposedly from USPS.  That's what they say.  And they're notated as "no reply."

The e-mails have a long code for what "USPS" claims it tried to deliver to my house, and it says it was unsuccessful in making the delivery.  They gave various possible reasons for the failure of the delivery, but none of them applied to me.  And the first day I got this e-mail, I had in fact already received my USPS mail that day.  So clearly, they were able to deliver mail to my house.

What these e-mails were proposing was that they would try again to deliver to me, but I would have to pay $1.99 for the second attempt.  (On those occasions when USPS needs something like a signature in order to deliver something, and I'm not home, they leave a sticker on my door telling me either that they'll try again the next day, or that I have to go to the post office to sign for and pick up whatever it is.  They have never charged money for a second attempt at delivery.)

So I wanted to see what this process was like.  If you click on whatever button it is, to say you want them to make the second attempt, and it's worth $1.99 to you to have them do it, you're taken to a screen where you enter your payment information, including your credit card number.  Yeah, right.  End of project.

The question, then, is whether this is just some latest scam (if I gave them my credit card information, would they bill me $1.99, or would they bill me hundreds or thousands of dollars?), or if it is, in fact, the result of new levels of dysfunction imposed on USPS.  And if you want to know the cause of those new levels of dysfunction, I can offer you two words: Louis DeJoy.

My more confident guess is it's the former.  But there's a limit to how much I would bet it's not the latter.

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