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  Geebo 8:00 am on May 5, 2020 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: deed transfer ( 13 ), economic impact payment ( 21 ), identity theft ( 105 ), phishing ( 75 ), porch pirates, Scams ( 1,354 ), stimulus checks ( 19 )   

  Scammers are using stimulus check confusion against you 

  

  The scammers are still at it during this crisis. Here are a few more scams that are using the coronavirus pandemic to their advantage.

  There is still a lot of consumer confusion around the delivery of the economic impact payments, or as they’re better known stimulus checks. The scammers are taking advantage of this confusion to try to steal your identity. Some reports say that scammers are sending out emails that look like they’ve officially come from your bank. The emails offer to give you the status of your stimulus check but instead, they take you to a link that asks for your personal information. As of right now, the only place where you can find out the status of your stimulus payment is from the IRS’s Get My Payment website. If the IRS needs to contact you, they will send you a letter through the regular mail.

  Another scam we just recently heard of is the deed transferring scam. It seems that scammers are telling people struggling with their mortgage payments to transfer their deed to a third-party. The scammers say that this will allow the homeowner to no longer be responsible for their mortgage payments. This is false. In reality, the new deed holder could potentially evict you from your own home. In turn, this could cost the homeowner untold costs in legal fees for just trying to stay in their own home.

  Lastly for today, there are reports coming out of the state of Washington about a new porch pirate scheme. Investigators there say that a group of porch pirates are dressing up as nurses to try to take your deliveries without being questioned by authorities. We assume that the trick here is that in many states there are still stay at home orders and medical staff are considered essential workers and no one would question a nurse being out during the quarantine. Most delivery services have options where you can be notified when your delivery arrives. If you enact these options you’ll have a better idea when to bring your deliveries inside and foil the porch pirates’ plans.

   

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  Geebo 9:00 am on December 3, 2019 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Christmas shopping ( 22 ), holiday shopping ( 15 ), online shopping ( 33 ), porch pirates, secuirty ( 4 ), USPS ( 13 )   

  Is your city in the porch pirates’ top 10? 

  

  Another type of Grinch that wants to ruin your holiday season is the heartless porch pirate. This is the term used for thieves who will steal package deliveries straight from your porch or mailbox. With more and more people eschewing brick and mortar stores for online Christmas shopping, the problem of stolen packages is becoming more and more prevalent. It’s gotten so bad that there’s not a lot of what police departments can do once a package is stolen. If you’ve had a package stolen from your porch, you may think that your city is the worst. However, a study done by a home security company claims to have found the top ten cities where porch pirates are most prolific.

  According to home security company Safewise, they have looked at not only FBI statistics but also web searches for things like stolen or missing packages. They’ve determined that the top ten cities and metro areas for porch pirates are San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Portland, Baltimore, Seattle-Tacoma, Chicago, Austin, Denver, L.A., and Sacramento. Not surprisingly, a number of these cities are large tech hubs where more people tend to buy things online than in stores. Also, California is more represented on this list than any other state.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31lSHr25FL4%5D

  It’s better to prevent porch theft than it is to try to recover a stolen package. While a doorbell camera or home security camera may catch the thieves in the act, it doesn’t seem to discourage them from stealing your deliveries. Instead of having packages left at your doorstep, you may want to consider having them delivered to your place of work, or to a neighbor’s house who is home more often. With their permission, of course. You may also want to consider renting a post office box at your local mail supply store. Not only does this give you a street address to use for deliveries, but they can also sign for packages for you. If you’re having an item shipped directly, try to have it delivered at a time when someone will definitely be home. Also, the US Postal Service has many free services available to you to prevent porch piracy such as having your mail held so you can pick it up at the post office.

  Just a few preventative steps will help you have a theft-free Christmas.

   
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  Geebo 8:00 am on April 12, 2019 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Amazon ( 108 ), Amazon Go ( 8 ), cashless stores ( 2 ), Jeff Bezos ( 3 ), porch pirates, walmart ( 24 )   

  Amazon fighting porch pirates, Amazon Go to accept cash, and Amazon taunting Walmart 

  

  Previously, when we’ve discussed packages being stolen from your porch or property we’ve been told to notify the police but in the long run, there’s not much they can do about the thefts. That is unless Amazon themselves get involved. According to Motherboard, Amazon worked with a number of police departments during last years holiday season in order to combat those who have been dubbed ‘porch pirates’. While these Amazon assisted sting operations didn’t take place in major cities like New York or Los Angeles, they did take place in fairly prominent urban areas such as Albuquerque and Jersey City. However, Motherboard was unable to uncover how many arrests actually took place during these sting operations.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AxRlyzHerg%5D

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  If you’ll recall, Amazon Go was supposed to be a completely cashierless store. Customers were supposed to just walk into the store, grab what they needed and have their purchases billed to their Amazon accounts through their smartphones. No cash was ever supposed to change hands. But as the saying goes the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Many state and local governments have come out in opposition to cashless stores as they feel it further disenfranchises low-income families who may not have access to a bank account. New Jersey and Philadelphia recently outlawed cashless stores and San Francisco may be doing the same. More recently, it’s been reported that Amazon Go stores in certain locations will, in fact, accept cash for transactions. In these markets will cash transactions reduce Amazon Go to just another convenience store or will they still mostly attract those who would prefer to pay without cash?

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  Lastly today, it seems the country’s two largest retail giants, Amazon and Walmart, have engaged in an almost schoolyard-like exchange of dares. It started out with Jeff Bezos publicly challenging WalMart to give their workers a better starting salary.

  “Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage,” Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders.

  “Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.”

  WalMart has long been criticized for underpaying their employees but they didn’t take this lying down.

  On Thursday, Walmart’s executive vice president of corporate affairs, Dan Bartlett, tagged Bezos in a tweet which said: “Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are 😉) how about paying your taxes?”

  This was in reference to the fact that Amazon has been accused of structuring their company in such a way and getting significant tax breaks that they pay little to no federal corporate income tax.

  Meanwhile, both companies have been long criticized for allegedly treating their most hard-working employees down in the trenches unfairly. Both corporations have been accused in the past of abusing their low ranking employees by creating a climate of inadequate pay and benefits combined with a climate of fear where employees are afraid to make any concern known without losing their jobs.

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  Geebo 10:00 am on December 20, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Informed Delivery, mail theft ( 11 ), porch pirates, USPS ( 13 )   

  Help prevent porch pirates with this free service 

  

  Mail theft is an ongoing problem that has been on the rise over the past decade with the increase in online purchasing. These thieves have been dubbed ‘porch pirates’ for the way they pilfer packages that have been left on your porch or doorstep by your mail carrier. Even if you have the latest security or doorbell cameras, that might not be enough as in some locales police might not have the time and manpower to pursue any purloined packages. However, you don’t have to go as far as building your own NASA-engineered glitter bomb to help prevent package theft, but you can sign up for a free prevention service provided by the US Postal Service.

  USPS provides a service known as Informed Delivery service. All you need to do is to go to the USPS website and sign up for the service. It only takes a few minutes to register your address. Once registered, the USPS will start providing you with emails that contained scanned copies of the mail you’ll be receiving that day. That way you can be on the lookout for important and valuable mail and have a record of it in case it turns up missing.

  However, as shown by the video above, porch pirates can use this service to their advantage as well. If they’ve signed up for the service in your name, the emails from the USPS could be sent to thief’s email instead of yours. As has been mentioned, this service provided by the Post Office is free and could save you from a potentially disastrous situation. Isn’t that worth the price of just a few extra emails a week? It’s not just good for the holiday season but for all year-long.