Sign Your USPS Informed Delivery Address Before Scammers Do It
If you have not already signed up for the United States Postal Service’s Informed Delivery service , you may want to do so now.
The service allows you to see what will soon be in your inbox. It’s good to know that the check or invitation you’ve been waiting for literally came in the mail. What if you don’t subscribe to this? You open yourself up to someone who signs up for a service like you and look at your important email before you even see it.
On November 6, the Secret Service reportedly sent an internal warning to its law enforcement partners, warning them of a scam in which criminals subscribe to other people’s mailboxes and then steal credit cards from those people’s mailboxes, KrebsOnSecurity reported .
According to the report, seven people in Michigan used the service to apply for fake credit cards and then steal those cards from their recipients’ mailboxes. The mailbox owners did not even suspect that these cards were solicited, let alone stolen. In this case, the defendants succeeded in obtaining charges of nearly $ 400,000 in stolen cards.
KrebsOnSecurity notes that any adult residing at your address can register for an account, so if you really want to claim your address, you must do it for every eligible person. It is also reported that you can completely remove your address from the service by sending an email to [email protected] , although the publication was unable to receive a response from that address.
He also suggested that the credit freeze could help prevent fraudulent registrations, as the USPS uses Equifax security questions to verify accounts. However, several readers of the site stated that they were able to sign up even though they had a credit freeze, so your mileage may vary.
And, as always, it’s a good reminder to sign up for notifications of changes to your credit report. If you have alerts set up, you will find out about fraudulent cards and loans sooner rather than later.