It’s a couple of days until Christmas and everyone is super stressed because they left their shopping to the last minute, and now they’re waiting on 17 packages to arrive from AusPost in the next 48 hours. At least, I think this is the general vibe — I’m a Virgo so all my shopping was done by November.
Anyway, my stunning organisational flex aside, a huge part of the population has parcels in transit right now with AusPost. Which means, of course, scammers are capitalising on this. Honestly scammers, what did your mothers do to you?
AusPost issued a warning this week about two types of phishing scams doing the rounds.
The first AusPost scam to look out for is the text-based scam. It’s not super sophisticated and looks fairly dodgy, however if you’re busy, highly stressed and only half-looking at your phone it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking it’s legit and clicking on the link.
There are a few different versions of the text-based AusPost scam, but here’s one I copped this month.
The gist of this kind of AusPost scam is that you receive a text from a random number and it says that your package is waiting for collection or prompts you to arrange redelivery. Sometimes it asks for a very small fee to be paid.
Scammers hope that you will click on the link and enter your details, which they then use for their nefarious plots.
Earlier this year there was a version of this scam that came from AusPost’s actual official number, which was even more fucked up and hard to discern as a fake.
The other type of AusPost scam to look out for comes via email. I was first alerted to it by my colleague Issy who said she felt silly for almost falling for it. But these email ones are quite convincing. Clearly graphic design is the scammers’ passion.
Other types of email scams clearly resemble actual AusPost email formats as well.
Issy explained that she actually did have some packages waiting at the post office at the time, so immediately thought the message was related. She got suspicious when she realised the email addressed her by her surname and asked her to pay money.
Per AusPost’s warning, it will never:
- Call, text or email you asking for personal or financial information including password, credit card details or account information
- Call, text or email you to request payment
- Ask you to click on an email link to print off a label to redeem your package
So let that be the red flag every time you get an “AusPost” message. Stay safe out there people, and may all your Christmas packages arrive on time and unscathed.
