Kevon Felmine

Chair­man of the Postal Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion (TTPost) Michael Seales says their sys­tems are se­cure from cy­ber­crim­i­nals but scam­mers are us­ing the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s name to car­ry out smish­ing scams.

Smish­ing is the fraud­u­lent prac­tice of send­ing text mes­sages pur­port­ing to be from rep­utable com­pa­nies to trick in­di­vid­u­als in­to re­veal­ing per­son­al in­for­ma­tion, such as pass­words or cred­it card num­bers.

Seales ad­vised cus­tomers to ver­i­fy in­for­ma­tion about pack­age col­lec­tion by con­tact­ing TTPost at cus­tomer.ser­vice@ttpost.gov.tt or the 800 POST (7678) hot­line.

“Even if you feel that you are sup­posed to get a pack­age, whether you are get­ting a pack­age or not, reach out to our 800 num­ber and we will pro­vide ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion for you,” he said.

Seales’ com­ment fol­lowed a com­plaint by a Cen­tral woman who was the vic­tim of scam­mers who sent her an SMS claim­ing to be from TTPost. The woman said she had a pass­port to col­lect for her son and the text mes­sage in­formed her that she missed de­liv­ery be­cause ei­ther no one was at home or her ad­dress was in­cor­rect.

The mes­sage pro­vid­ed a link for her to ac­cess the web­site, and make a pay­ment of $2.04 for an­oth­er de­liv­ery. How­ev­er, the web­site di­rect­ed her to an­oth­er site which she thought was Sco­tia­bank, to en­ter her cred­it card in­for­ma­tion and a code sent to her email.

Af­ter mak­ing four at­tempts, she checked her bank ac­count and re­alised some­one had made four pur­chas­es to­talling $50,000 us­ing her cred­it card. The ac­count showed pur­chas­es in the Unit­ed States, Dubai and In­dia.

Sco­tia­bank has de­nied any in­volve­ment in the ac­tiv­i­ty, say­ing it does not have an e-com­merce plat­form to fa­cil­i­tate what the woman de­scribed.

The vic­tim is now fear­ful, as the web­site has all the in­for­ma­tion she sub­mit­ted to the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion for pro­cess­ing the pass­port and de­liv­ery from TTPost.

Seales said the pass­port de­liv­ery and couri­er ser­vices pro­vid­ed by TTPost do not in­volve SMS mes­sages to alert peo­ple about de­liv­er­ies.

“That is some­thing to­tal­ly far and apart in terms of what is hap­pen­ing at TTPost,” he said.

Seales said checks by the TTPost IT team showed it has not been in­fil­trat­ed by cy­ber­crim­i­nals.

“I do not even want to share all the in­for­ma­tion about oth­er in­sti­tu­tions hav­ing the same prob­lem where peo­ple are lured to give their de­tails, think­ing they have reached the bona fide sites of oth­er busi­ness in­sti­tu­tions, on­ly to be scammed of mon­ey,” he said.

He said if a site asks for in­for­ma­tion it should al­ready have, it is most like­ly a scam. He al­so ad­vised against shar­ing cred­it card in­for­ma­tion with third par­ties.