Subject: [Shop-talk] [OT] Scam Alert

From: Bob Spidell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2020 23:26:15 -0700

Warning: Rant follows.

I know this isn't the ideal forum, but I thought I'd pass on a new (to 
me) type of scam that I've encountered a couple times. One time occurred 
on eBay, and the other, just 'resolved in my favor' involved 
Walmart.com. The scam goes something like this:

1) You shop around, find a good price on something you need, but not 
necessarily right away. The first, for me, was on eBay was for a 
respirator I needed for pesticide applications (as the pandemic was just 
getting started a lot of identical ads/products started appearing on 
eBay). The second was a goggle/snorkel set from a Walmart I needed to 
maintain my swimming pool.

2) In both cases shipping took an inordinate amount of time; I get it, 
there's a virus going around and all services have been impacted. In the 
eBay case, I got an email from the supplier right after ordering, 
imploring me to 'contact us, not eBay' if there are any issues. Of 
course, I tracked the shipping progress, and it looked 'normal' until 
the package appeared stalled-out at one of the shipping stages (received 
order from shipper, picked-up package, etc.). Then, the shipment went 
into 'in transit' for a couple weeks. As requested, I contacted the 
shipper--instead of eBay--and got repeated "don't worry, we're taking 
care of this"messages. Now, I ain't the sharpest nail in the box but I 
can sniff out a scam pretty well and got a refund--immediately, 
no-questions-asked so they're probably aware of this--from eBay. The 
second shipment, from Walmart, looked like it would be slow so I was 
patient and didn't track shipping until I started to get pissed and 
discovered the package had made it to Lodi, CA--yeah THAT Lodi--and 
simply disappeared (it was marked 'missent' by the USPS).

Here's what I suspect: Fraudsters--yes, they are probably Chinese based 
on the broken English; we used to call it 'Chinglish,' but that probably 
ain't PC now--have found a backdoor/loophole/security breach, whatever 
you want to call it, in the USPS. They can either generate a bogus 
shipping pickup/transit, or simply hack the URL for a legitimate 
purchase (in the eBay case, they just kept sending different tracking 
#s, as if they were apparently shipping from multiple sites in the US). 
They will continue to stall until your payment is in their bitcoin 
stash; once they've gotten the money there probably isn't much the 
legitimate sellers can do.

I don't know what can be done about this; I suspect Walmart, eBay and 
other sellers are aware of this, and maybe they've just decided to eat 
the losses. Don't get me wrong, for all its problems I think the USPS is 
a valued American institution, but it's chronically underfunded and the 
'private sector,' who does everything perfectly we are told, can buy 
them out, pay themselves large bonuses then dump the corpse onto the 
stock market. Postal services have always been based, at least 
partially, on trust--any of you lock your mailboxes?--and some really 
sneaky people have figured out how to take advantage of that.

Rant off.

Bob
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