Traffic to the malicious sites was typically on par with traffic to the actual USPS website — a popular service since it includes tracking information — and even exceeded legitimate traffic around the holidays, when the scams ramp up to take advantage of a surge in package deliveries.
“We saw an extraordinary amount of malicious traffic, which makes the true impact of these impersonations astonishing,” they said.
The top malicious domain, usps-post[.]world, received more than 169,000 queries over a five month period, with the next most popular seeing about 150,000.
Typically, the texts include a link that takes people to a spoof site for the postal service. Often the site will ask people to pay a “redelivery” fee for their purported packages, requiring them to enter their payment information.
The USPS and the U.S. Postal Inspection Services have pages on their websites about smishing scams, where the latter encourages recipients to report them to spam@uspis.gov.
Despite public awareness announcements, the texts clearly are still having an impact.