I had heard about this scam about a month ago or so – basically a scammer will approach a UPS truck driver and show them the tracking number on their phone and then they’ll have a photoshopped ID with their name to match the package. If the UPS driver hands over the package, then the scam worked. The question is – how did the scammer even know the tracking number and the name of the person on the package in the first place? The only people that would know that would be Costco, their fulfillment supplier and UPS. At first I thought this was a regional UPS warehouse that was leaking the info since we’ve all heard of boxes being tampered with en route. Plus I didn’t want to think it was Costco or their supplier leaking this info.
Over the last couple of weeks though, I heard this happening in the Southeast, Northeast and California. I then asked my local driver about it and he said, “Yeah, it’s happened twice in our area; one time the driver did hand the package over.” Luckily my driver knows me and wouldn’t hand my packages to a random person. This just implies that this scam isn’t happening from one specific UPS warehouse or so. This is now a national scam. And even if it’s one employee that leaked that info, how would they even find a local person to do the intercept? It just sounds very very organized.
Anyway, that may explain why Costco hasn’t released any high value items on their site lately; they are probably trying to figure out how to fix this problem.