Claim: Cards from a "Parcel Delivery Service" notifying recipients of parcels awaiting delivery were part of a premium rate telephone scam.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, 2006]
If you receive a card through your door from a company called PDS (Parcel Delivery Service) saying that they have a parcel awaiting delivery instructions and can you contact them on 0906 6611911 DO NOT call the number as this is a mail scam originating from Belize.
If you call the number and you start to hear a recorded message you will already have been billed £15 for the phone call.
If you do receive a card with these details, then please contact Royal Mail Fraud on 02072396655 or ICTIS at http://www.icstis.org.uk or your local trading standards office. This is a genuine scam.
Origins: Although many scams involve the use of telephones to contact or extract information from potential victims, a few varieties of fraud target telephone service itself as a means of obtaining ill-gotten revenue from unsuspecting prey. One common variety of telephone service fraud involves obtaining information or employing trickery that allows the scammer to place long-distance calls and bill them to someone else (as in the #-9-0 scam), and another common variety involves duping consumers into running up hefty fees on their own telephone bills (as in the 809 area code
scam).
In December 2005, many UK residents were targets of the latter variety of scam, one that attempted to lure them into placing calls to a premium rate number and keep them on the line for several minutes. (Premium rate or "pay-per-call" numbers typically generate revenue by providing information or entertainment in exchange for a per-minute fee, which is billed to the caller's phone number. Such services are commonly known as "900 numbers" in North America and "090 numbers" in the UK, although other prefixes may be used as well.) The bait for this scam was the distribution of official-looking postcards bearing the name "Parcel Delivery Services" (PDS) to residences, each card proclaiming that a package was awaiting delivery (usually one said to contain a digital camera) and that the recipient needed to call PDS to obtain a "security confirmation code" to effect delivery of the parcel. What many consumers failed to notice (or heed), however, was the small print on the card informing them that the phone number provided was a premium rate number with a whopping £1.50 per-minute fee. As the BBC Wales X-Ray consumer investigation service found when they placed a call to the PDS number:
When you ring up, the recorded voice promises you will shortly be give the 'security confirmation code' but first you're asked a series of rather personal 'market research' questions about your marital status and how often you drink alcohol. In fact, six tedious minutes pass before you're finally given the code for your camera. It's a classic technique — and it's just cost you £9.00. Expensive call!
Not surprisingly, investigators failed to turn up any complainants who actually received digital cameras from PDS, and PhonePayPlus (formerly the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information, aka ICSTIS), the group that oversees premium rate services in the UK, removed access to the service (which was using up to 20 different phone numbers) on 29 December 2005. (PDS was run through Studio Telecom, a service provider registered in Belize, which had previously been fined and barred by PhonePayPlus for using misleading direct mail promotions to generate calls to their service.)
Because the Internet-circulated warning did not just up and go away in December 2005 once the problem was solved, folks continued to spread the alert in e-mail, prompting PhonePayPlus to post this explanation to its web site in October 2007:
A STATEMENT FROM PHONEPAYPLUS ABOUT THE CURRENT 'POSTAL SCAM' CHAIN EMAIL
PhonepayPlus, the phone-paid services regulator, is aware that a chain e-mail about an alleged postal scam is being circulated on the internet. The email refers to the Royal Mail, Trading
Standards and ICSTIS (PhonepayPlus’ former name).
PhonepayPlus appreciates that recipients of the email may want to find out more information about the alleged scam and has therefore issued the following statement:
The chain email refers to a service that was shut down by us in December 2005.
We subsequently fined the company that was operating the service, Studio Telecom
(based in Belize), £10,000.
The service is NO LONGER running and has NOT been running since December 2005.
The email refers to a £15 charge for simply being connected to a recorded message.
This is NOT TRUE — a £15 connection charge does NOT exist. The service in question
actually cost £1.50 per minute and lasted six minutes, making a total cost of £9 if callers
stayed on the line for the full six minutes.
You do NOT need to contact us, or the Royal Mail, about this service as it was stopped almost two years ago.
If you receive a copy of the email warning you about the alleged scam, please do NOT forward it to others. Instead, please forward this statement from PhonepayPlus.
Please go to www.phonepayplus.org.uk/pdfs_news/ConsumerGuide.pdf for useful information about how to recognise phone-paid services and understand what they cost, and some simple tips to help you enjoy using services with confidence.
For more detailed information about our work, please visit www.phonepayplus.org.uk.
Although the specific warning e-mail reproduced at the head of this page is out of date, it represents a common form of telephone fraud that has been used in the past and will likely be used again, so the public is well advised to be aware of it. UK telephone customers who find unexpected premium rate charges on their phone bills can obtain more information by looking up the associated phone numbers via the number checking facility on the PhonePayPlus web site, and they can file complaints about premium rate services through PhonePayPlus' online complaint form. U.S. residents can file complaints about premium rate services through an on-line form available on the web site of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Additional information:
Parcel Delivery Service (BBC Northern Ireland)
Last updated: 21 October 2007
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/fraud/telephone/pds.asp
Parcel Delivery Service (BBC Northern Ireland)
Sources:
