Postal Service Warns Idaho Citizens About Dangerous New ‘SMISHING’ Scam

Whether it was school supplies for your kids or you impulse bought the Taylor Swift eras tour outfit that’s been chasing you around Instagram, chances are you’ve done some online shopping in the last month. If point and click is your favorite way to shop, the Federal Trade Commission and United States Postal Inspection Service have a warning for you. 

Most workplaces where employees spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen require their staff to undergo some sort of training program to learn about “phishing” scams. Their hope is that by familiarizing employees with what a phishing scam looks like, they’ll prevent gullible employees from clicking a link or downloading a file that opens the entire organization to some cyber security problems. 

KEEP READING: STOP Mailing Checks in Idaho

While having to go through the training might seem like a waste of time, your company’s actually doing you a favor because these scams don’t just happen in the workplace. Hackers frequently target online shoppers with e-mails that look like an official looking shipping or delivery attempt notification.

They’ll spoof common companies like Amazon, Home Depot or Walmart, hoping that you’re just too busy to really stop and think if you actually purchased an item recently. Curiosity may not kill the cat if you click the link, but you may have just turned over your username, password or credit card number in an attempt to stop your package from being “returned to sender.” 

USPS Being Targeted By Similar Scams

While they’re not perfect, spam filters do a pretty good job of thwarting phishing attacks and scammers don’t like that. That’s why they’ve started running the same game via text message. Rather than calling the spam texts “phishing” the scam is called “smishing” since a text is set via Short Message Service, also known as SMS. 

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In this version of the scam, the USPS has found itself being spoofed an uncomfortable amount of times, which is why they’re warning Idahoans what to look for. The text messages may look something like the one we received: 

The USPS says they will never reach out to you with one of these delivery texts without you asking them for something like a tracking number. You have to opt in for their tracking services and once you do, they say that their text messages will NOT contain a link. 

They’re also actively trying to take steps to shut down these scammers, so if you get a “smishing” text they want you to copy the body of the text into an email and send it to spam@uspis.gov. They’d also like you to include details like the number it came from, if you did actually click the link and if doing so resulted in a loss of money or impacted your credit. 

Legitimate USPS tracking notifications, that you ONLY receive after you’ve requested them, are associated with the number 28777.