Royal Mail delivery scam

just luck you ae paranoid .....i

Scott has brought this to us :

..and if you answer, you are then put on a hot list. Numbers which repeatedly waste their time, go onto a blacklist.

More likely if you send out 100,000 spam emails these are likely to get a lot of coincidental hits where the recipient has ordered something to be delivered.

RM always leave a card...

Dave

...usually inviting you to collect the parcel at the local sorting office.

I never knew so many Indians lived in Bristol:-)

Maybe. Was it an international shipment or something with postage due?

My wife sent me a cable once in a Jiffy bag but was unaware of the maximum thickness rules for letters. ISTR they left me a can't deliver you were out card saying some extortionate fee was due on it. They charged it as a parcel plus some enormous admin handling charge.

They do the same sort of ransom demands for granny's oversize kids birthday cards too. Large vs normal letters and with pricing cunningly arranged so that second large is more than first small (or was).

I have had the same thing happen once or twice with stuff (non-books) coming from the USA if customs take an interest in it.

I doubt if Royal Mail even know your email address though.

I do get a lot of fake random courier could not deliver parcel notifications that are very good forgeries these days and live in fear of getting one from the right carrier for an urgent delivery I'm expecting. It would be all too easy to click on a hostile link.

Much easier to play along for a bit and then declare it too difficult so you will go and get Fred who knows about computers and then leave them hanging on the open line until they get fed up. That way you are preventing them from mithering someone who might be taken in.

not usual at all

mine get taken back to the local post office

not that SO would be a problem round here, given the density of population it's likely to be quite near and with comprehensive bus service accessible by bus

I appreciate that accessibility of SO is often a problem in mid sized towns

Still easier just to put the phone down!

That's what I do and we get very few junk callers, I don't know whether there's some sort of correlation there.

Yet another good reason for not using a GUI program! My text mode program shows me the actual URL/E-Mail and it's usually pretty obvious when it's fake. (It converts HTML to text by feeding it to Lynx)

That depends, a lot of their people in market place use Royal Mail. However I've never had emails from them, normally they do it through amazon. Its easy to check for scammers simply open up the message source and look at the headers and if you can the original address the links point to. Its often a pretty obvious unknown address. Brian

Here a bloke down the road walking his dog shovesome mail through on a sunday, since it had been delivered to the right number but in the wrong road. This is what happens when sorting is done out of area of course. Brian

But that's a comparatively new idea. It only happened here when they closed the local sorting office.

Not sure that's the only reason; more the postman getting stuff in teh wrong order.

I am forever taking stuff round to number 45 in the next road, delivered to us instead. It's the previous road we lived in, but I doubt that's why.

(yes, we moved about 200 metres)

Not nesser-celery. I included a mode in my client which shows the actual URL underneath any link.

Yes, I realise it isn't something that *can't* be done in a GUI mail reader, but it tends to default to not showing the actual URL whereas mine defaults to showing it.

it is with mine

but it's not a normal feature

it's one that you have to specifically look for in a phone

on a white list or a black list basis?

The scammers are wise to the latter and now will often spoof some random number to get around it

and the former is a PITA for genuine callers who you haven't yet added to the list