Url looks suss. Seems kinda sophisticated for the usual ups fishing scam. Here’s the text message I got leading here.
“Wishing you a bright and sunny day!” Lol, I almost want to help this guy by explaining that UPS and American companies in general have disdain for their customers and would never wish them to have anything that would not benefit the company.
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I seriously doubt USPS bought a domain like gflrml dot cyou for their business. It’s 300% a scam.
The text message is the big red flag, that’s obviously a scam and has been happening for at least a year. Most scam texts are filtered on my phone, but a few of these slip thru.
I guess they’re just trying to tie phone numbers to addresses so they can sell the phone list for more info.
Especially with people keeping their cell number while moving states, tying an address to the number and verifying it’s that person would be a tidy profit.
Link shortener (not their own at least) is another massive red flag, same with typos (‘number number’ in page)
Unfortunately I can think of one company in particular that uses tinyurl when you sign up for shipping updates on their website (looking at you Samsung!).
At least with that one:
- you know you signed up for it
- they send a text right when you sign up for it
- they use an official short SMS (5 digit) number.
Also, is it common for a legitimate government agency to use a third-party link shortener like bitly?
Reminds me of my previous bank.
They changed some system countrywide, so I got an email that I need to update some data and go to a website to do that.
If was something like “update-[bankname]-data-now.tld”.
It was sent to a unique mail address I used for them. But still though it was phishing.
Turns out: No. It was real. Whoever came up with the idea to not host that stuff on at least a subdomain of the bank really needs to get fired. and each and every manager who was part of the decision process.
Had that happen, too. We all try to educate users to NOT click on some dubious phishing/scams and put in qute some effort to explain it over and over again, and then there are companies doing things like that. It’s just sad.
lol I have to go back to the bank (when there’s a manager, because there wasn’t last time🤦♀️), to turn online banking back on for my account.
It got turned off because I didn’t pick up some spam call they made.
Ugh. I work in the public sector and let me tell you, there are SO many companies that send the most dogiest, scammiest looking emails telling you to follow a link, only for it to turn out to be perfectly legitimate.
I honestly can see now why people end up falling for these things when even legitimate companies send emails looking just like phishing scammers
You mean (uint32_t)-1 %
Why the fuck did you click a link like that in the first place? That first message is basically screaming at you that it’s a phishing attempt.
Best opsec is to delete and block, ideally without opening it at all to avoid read receipts (if that’s a function in your phone). If you think it might be legit, go to the website on your own and find a way to confirm independently. If that’s still too much to follow through with, at the very least don’t click random links sent to you unprompted.
Hey dude, you had an opportunity to educate someone and instead you belittled them. As someone who works in cyber, please don’t do that. People get stigmatised against cyber and IT professionals and they stop trusting us. Users don’t know what we do, so be kind to them the way you should be kind to anyone learning new things. https://xkcd.com/1053/
Could someone educate me on the possible damage clicking a link can bring, assuming I’m not interacting with the website any more than that?
Not doubting there’s damage, just curious. I’d think they’d get some maybe usable info from fingerprinting or something? Could javascripts lead to more serious problems?
If you do nothing but click the link and then close the resulting website without clicking anything else, all that will happen is that they’ll know you’re someone who clicks such links and you’re likely to get more of them.
The least it wil do is confirm your email to be in use for further scams.
There could theoretically be a vulnerability in your browser that would allow them to infect you with viruses, but such vulnerabilities are much much more valuable used elsewhere (or cashed in through security research bounties). One I’ve seen is that the page further phishes you into downloading and installing an “update” to your browser that’s really a virus, or they simply try to phish you out of money, for example by asking you to pay the shipping costs again.
It’s also a way to build lists of who actually clicks the links, that they resell to the next sucker (scamming is suckers all the way down, they all buy The Next Big Technique from some guy), ensuring you will get further spam in the future.
There’s actually a fun technique to do to avoid further spams when it comes to voice calls. A little know fact is that elevator call buttons are actually just phones that have a phone number, and if you dial the number, it will automatically answer and you will hear whatever is in the elevator (generally nothing). If you pick up but don’t say a word, their automated systems will flag you as an elevator phone number and they will stop calling in order to stop wasting resources on calling numbers that won’t lead to money.
Yes, I get them constantly.
Very well known scam. Some details that give it away:
(1) They used a url shortener that doesn’t let you see the actual domain. (bit.ly)
(2) Website domain is not legitimate.
USPS’s website is usps.com. If the URL doesn’t end in usps.com (meaning usps.fakewebsite.com is still fake) then it’s not legitimate.
(3) Tone: The USPS doesn’t text you like you’re their friend.
(4) The number they’re texting you from is not an SMS short code number (usually 5 digits). Instead you’re getting a text from a 10 digit number with an area code, which means it’s a person/individual rather than an application or service.
source: used to work as cyber sec analyst
That’s interesting I didn’t think about that fourth point, but whenever I get a verification SMS it does always come from a 5 digit number.
That one is not hard evidence though, for example delivery drivers from FedEx in my area send text messages from their actual phones announcing an upcoming delivery.
The messages are still standardized, so I’m assuming they are company phones and send pre-programmed messages from templates, but if I call that number, I’ll actually speak to the person handling my delivery.
I’ll add how is it that they could not know the address of the recipient, yet would know their phone number?
Either the recipient is totally unknown or they know the address. The last thing they would know about a recipient is the phone number.
(5) grammatical error(s): “We will ship again in” instead of “we will ship again on”
Edit: more subtle errors and phrasing that feels like it was written by a non-native English speaker.
You’re absolutely right, of couse, but keep in mind that communications is still mostly done by people and people are generally fucking stupid.
Yeah the first bullet copy with the comma and wrong preposition is clearly unprofessional. These scams always use poor contrasting red warning text as well.
I heard a theory that they put mistakes in intentionally to filter for dumb people.
Doubt that’s true, but it’s a funny idea.
It’s absolutely true, they want to make sure the victim won’t realize it’s a scam partway through and bail.
Why would they care though?
If it takes a couple hours to extract money from somebody they don’t want to waste an hour on someone they can’t close.
Scams are still businesses that care about efficiency.
(6) USPS tracking numbers are like 65 digits long, because they expect to track every hydrogen atom in the known universe individually.
Lmao I got this exact scam message and reported as spam as you should
your first clue was the link in the next - no shipper is going to miss having its branding in the url. the second if that the url it redirects to its obviously random bs and if you do a whois you see its def not owned by usps.
got a few of these phishing attempts myself over thanksgiving. holiday gift shopping season has begun, the scammers want to catch the less savy among us.
In case of USPS, the only URL that looks suss is “usps.com”, what are you thinking about? :)
Hell my paranoid ass would reinstall windows and change all my passwords after visiting an obvious scam site like that.
They can’t figure out your address, but somehow they can figure out your email?
USPS will never text you unless you have your account set up that way. My mom sends me these texts asking if they’re legit, and I always ask, “Did you order something?” No. “Well, then why would you have a delayed package?”
Again, USPS will not text you like this, and they use a .gov domain.
Even if you were set up like that, if they can’t make out the recipient address, then they wouldn’t even know to contact you.
100% yeah. The browser URL doesn’t have ups in it.
Ups is not usps
Scam. I get messages like this everyday and I know I don’t have any USPS packages coming. Also a bit.ly link is super suss
How could you not? Do you buy things so often that that happens a lot? Ignoring the grammatical error of in instead of on, are you actually expecting a package with that numberwhich is not a typical USPS tracking number
Look at the domain name in the url. Not legit
100% scam
