![]() ![]() Postal Service Headquarters staff from Corporate Communications and Delivery and Retail Operations provided instructions to employees at USPS retail facilities on how to direct customers to sign up. Postal Service rolled out Informed Delivery, a free feature which allows customers to digitally preview their letter mail and package delivery via email notifications, online dashboard, or mobile application. When it becomes available, you want to make sure your salespeople can tell customers about it…right? A thief may have beaten you to the punch.Say you run a business – a big one – and you come up with a new product, one you believe can benefit millions of potential customers. So, if you receive one and you have not signed up, contact the postal service immediately. The USPS does mail out notices to the addresses of people who have enrolled in Informed Delivery. “You typically don’t know (if someone is trying to open an account in your name) unless you’ve got some kind of alert setup or you’ve got a credit freeze.” “I regularly check my credit history now, and I have alerts set up and I’ve got credit freezes,” Hutchins said. This will block someone else from signing you up.Īnother way to help stop thieves is the approach Ben Hutchins has taken. If you do not want to use Informed Delivery, another option is to opt out of it entirely with the U.S. This is one of those situations where the first person who signs up with that name at that address is the one that gets the account registered and controls it.”Īlso, sign up your spouse, roommate or any adult in your home so their identities can be protected, too. “It’s (Informed Delivery) not hacked and you should sign up for it,” elaborated Jorgensen. So, how can we protect ourselves? Jorgensen says start by beating the bad guys to the punch. “That information is being sold on the dark web and people can use that as well.” How to protect your mail and identity All of those sort of things have this information out there and a lot of it is indexed by Google,” Jorgensen explained. There’s tax records, there’s voting records. There are sites that have credit information. “There are sites that have directory information. The flaw with KBA questions is the answers are typically found through data brokers, social media and information leaked in data breaches. Jorgensen, who directs Utah Valley University’s cybersecurity program, said these are knowledge-based authentication (KBA) questions. To do that, you will answer four multiple choice questions that could involve a previous address, a previous job, and old phone number, where you went to school and the like. But, you are asked to confirm online that you really are who you say you are. You do not need a lot to set up an Informed Delivery account: name, address and email. The information leaked from data breaches like Equifax and others can be enough for scammers to sign you up for Informed Delivery. It’s a question of when, not if, in terms of having their information being used against them.” “You have to assume that your information has been stolen. “I actually am pretty positive that my identity was compromised during the Equifax breach,” said Hutchins. However, someone did open several fraudulent credit cards in his name and came close to draining a bank account. To be clear, Hutchins does not believe identity thieves hijacked his Informed Delivery account. “It feels like a really strong violation of, you know, you feel violated and it’s frustrating,” explained Ben Hutchins of Lindon, Utah. The risk from data breaches and social media Investigators in Florida said crooks signed up several people in the same Orlando neighborhood for the service to intercept packages and commit identity theft. Michigan authorities recently arrested seven people accused of using Informed Delivery in their scheme to rack up nearly $400,000 in fraudulent credit card charges. They can apply for a credit card in your name and then use the service to find out when the card has been delivered so they can swipe it before you have a chance to get the mail. It turns out the bad guys are signing up for other people’s Informed Delivery accounts so they can monitor mailboxes for valuable mail. ![]()
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