I had written about the Costco UPS shipment intercept scam a few months ago. You know that saying where you don’t think it’ll happen to you until it actually does… well it happened to me yesterday. I had noticed an unfamiliar car drive past my house around 3PM who then parked at my neighbor’s house. I remember driving past it around 5PM looking inside and not seeing anyone inside. Well a few hours later, my UPS driver shows up and was like, “Oh shit, someone just tried to impersonate you and say these packages were for him. I told him, “You’re not Vinh…” and then he tries to take out his phone (which I assume is a fake license of me.) I told him to beat it.”
He said the guy was Asian and that he was sitting in the backseat of the car. My driver took a pic of the car’s plates, but when we both looked at the picture, it seemed the plates were fake/tampered. Anyway, he’s going to report it up the UPS chain and we’ll see where that goes. He did mention that this happened to another driver recently in the area.
I think this definitely rules out Costco’s supplier being the leak since these packages were shipped from the Costco headquarters in WA and not from the supplier. I think you can possibly rule out Costco being the leak since earlier in the day, Fedex also made some Costco deliveries and they weren’t there to try to intercept those packages. Now I have heard of 2-3 stories of this happening to Fedex deliveries too, so you can’t fully rule out Costco.
Anyway, I plan to divert all shipments to my PO Box now since these scammers know my house and this could easily escalate to a robbery/home invasion. At the end of the day, miles and points aren’t worth this type of risk.
Just thinking out loud I’m not sure shipping to a PO Box is any safer in regards to avoiding packages being stolen. if it will not fit in your PO box it’s going to be held in the back and all they have to produce is some sort of ID stating that a package is waiting for them which is what they currently have forged with your info on it.
not even…one of those yellow package slips would be enough, or potentially even just giving the box number depending on the PO
Let me be clear – I don’t mean a literal USPS PO Box because those are aweful. I already had like $3K of GCs stolen from the locker and USPS wouldn’t take accountability. I mean a mailbox type of place that the owner knows you and recognizes you. Like a UPS store would work, although of course if a box ever goes missing, then yeah you’re SOL. But better to lose a package vs having scammers know your home address and what you order?
Ah ok that makes sense. It may take some trial and error because Costco is picky about shipping addresses and won’t ship to anything they consider a “Mail Drop” or freight forwarder