Anxious man looking at his phone

Look out for new delivery scam

Crooks pretend to be Royal Mail trying to rearrange a delivery

There’s a new delivery scam that we should be on the lookout for.

The scam uses fake chatbots to sign us up for expensive subscriptions that we don’t want.

Scammers pose as Royal Mail or other delivery firms and send us phishing emails. Then they invite us to ‘start a chat’ to track down a lost delivery.

The Royal Mail scam is pretty convincing. It gives us a delivery tracking number and shows us a photo of a parcel, saying the label is damaged.

And it then asks us to reschedule the delivery. But clicking the link takes us to a different site that asks for our name and bank details.

If we add these, we’re actually signing up for a subscription that costs £59 every 30 days.

The scam is nothing to do with Royal Mail. But they have some tips on staying safe when waiting for a parcel.

They say they will only send us emails and texts if the sender of our parcel has used a trackable service.

And if we need to top up postage costs, we’ll get a grey ‘fee to pay’ card. They won’t ever ask us to pay by email or text.

The only time we’d be asked to pay over email or text is if there is a customs fee if our parcel has come from abroad. In this case we don’t have to click on any links but we’ll be given a web address to type in ourselves.

We can report scam texts by forwarding them to 7726 (it spells SPAM on a phone keypad). Sending scam texts to this number is free.

And we can forward phishing emails to report@phishing.gov.uk.

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