The holidays are coming and that is such a special time...for scammers. Yep, it’s their hot season. They ramp up scam production and use all the tricks of the trade. There is yet another scam that people have been reporting on my community neighborhood blog so I wanted to share it with you as well.

Not surprisingly, this one is through USPS. I told you a few days ago that the postal service is a treasure trove of identity theft because crooks are waiting for you to use those stand-alone blue boxes you see at shopping centers and street corners. Just to recap, they wait until after the last pick-up of the day and anything that is mailed after that will be unattended until the first pick-up of the next morning. Thieves are going through the mail to steal peoples' identities. The USPS actually put out a press release about it. You can read more about that and the solution here.

The other scam circulating right now is a text message coming to you that appears to be from the United States Postal Service. The text will say something to this effect,

“Your package could not be delivered because of an incomplete address. Please supply the address and pay $3.00 for a re-addressing fee via any major credit or debit card.”

The United States Postal Service will never ask you for information or payment over text messages. If you get this scam report it to the police and do not engage with the exchange.

A neighbor got this text and almost clicked on it to update the address and then she stopped and realized that she did not mail anything. She stopped just in time. With the holidays coming, what if they DID mail something? So many people will be mailing packages to their loved ones and in this “self-serve” era many people will simply comply.

I blame the world of self-check-outs at grocery stores and automated phone systems for this. This lack of human interaction and ultimately morphing into artificial intelligence leads people to believe this is how USPS would handle something like a misaddressed package. There is no human to be a gatekeeper or the voice of reason anymore. As a result, scams like this will become more and more successful.

Please be careful, and never give your information out to anyone. While you are at it, consider freezing your credit until you need to buy something like a car or home, then you can temporarily un-freeze and then freeze it again. Be proactive and not reactive about protecting your sensitive info.  We are all targets, especially the richest families in America.  Most of these families hire a team of specialists just to keep their wealth and identity protected from online crooks.

25 richest families in America

To find out which clans hold the most wealth, Stacker compiled a list of the 25 richest families in America using 2020 data from Forbes.

LOOK: What major laws were passed the year you were born?

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