Scam: do this before deleting the fraudulent email

Recently, there have been cases of fraudulent SMS and email attempts impersonating the Norwegian Post to steal money from unsuspecting victims.

The Norway Post itself has taken to social media to warn against fraud attempts and writes the following on its Facebook page:

“WELL NOTICE! There are several variants of fraudulent sms / mail in circulation now. Most of you see it as a fraud, but now we are sending another warning. We never ask for payment by sms / email. When in doubt, check the email address the email came from, check the web address and track the package number on our tracking app or tracking page.

This is pure fraud

Package fraud

Dinside has been sent an example of the fraud attempts that are now in circulation, which is the so-called package fraud that tries to get recipients to pay for the delivery of a package.

The scam has similarities to the methods we have seen before:

• The sender pretends to be from Norway Post or another shipping company.
• The text message indicates that the recipient has a package that is ready for delivery, but must pay a fee first.
• The text message contains a link to the “payment page”, but it leads to a completely different website.

– Report it

Jørund Heimholt, who runs Datahjelperne.no, recommends that people who receive these types of email scams do not immediately delete the email.

– If you delete the email, the email provider will never be notified. This means no action is taken, spam has a longer shelf life than necessary, and more people are fooled in layers.

Instead, it recommends that you report the fraud attempt as spam before deleting the email.

– It is important to report scams and spam emails. Then the following happens: the email provider receives a lot of reports and has to verify the reports. So they can blacklist the domain and email, which means you can stop emails, he tells Dinside.

This means that scammers have to create new email accounts, which is time consuming, he adds.

You can report emails as spam directly in the message. Depending on the application you use, you will find a button that says “Report as spam.” Touch it to report the email.