Beware the seasonal spray and pay scam

[Retro]

This tends to happen mostly around Christmas when one may be expecting lots of deliveries and hence get caught out.

I remember getting something like this a few years ago and I'm pretty savvy at spotting scams. However, I was in the office, busy and concentrating on the job when I got a text claiming to be from DPD, which I was actually expecting. I was so distracted that I almost tapped on the link and was so close to doing it, but something didn't look quite right to me and raised a red flag in my mind, so I just parked it until I could look at it properly. When I did so a few hours later, sure enough it was a scam, so I reported and deleted it. An iPhone allows one to do this with a single tap.

You have landed a lot of bargains in the run-up to Black Friday and most of your Christmas shopping is done.

So when a text arrives about a delivery, it’s no surprise. A quick click on a link and you have paid the £2 redelivery charge it’s asking for.

The problem is, the package in the text does not exist, and you have just handed your bank details to a criminal gang which has been “spraying” thousands of similar messages to mobile phones around the UK after one of the year’s biggest shopping days.

Warnings have been issued by the government, mobile phone operators and delivery companies as fraud reaches record levels in the run-up to Christmas. Criminals rely on confusion as people expect deliveries, but also lose track of the details.

Shopping for Christmas bargains? Beware the ‘spray and pay’ parcel delivery fraud

Criminals send thousands of texts about an undelivered bargain buy and ask for a redelivery fee in a bid to mine your data and bank details

www.theguardian.com