More than 6500 reports from residents in the month of March alone. And over half a thousand blocked links in a period of almost a year. As fraudsters pretending to be Lithuanian Post continue to rampage and attack mobile users with messages, the company calls on residents to remain vigilant.
According to Andrias Varnelis, head of the Safety and Prevention Department of the Lithuanian Post, the company immediately responds to all messages in which its name or brand is fraudulently used.
"During the campaign alone, we forwarded and promptly blocked 145 fraudulent links to the National Cyber Security Center. In less than a year, we have already blocked more than 500 such links. All of them led to pages allegedly created by fraudsters of the Lithuanian Post Office, with the aim of extracting payment card data and taking possession of money. Despite the fact that thousands of residents who are still trying to connect to them are protected every day by blocking links, fraudsters are constantly creating new links," says A. Varnelis.
In response to residents' reports and illegal use of the name and brand, Lithuanian Post has already handed over 13 statements with analytical material to the law enforcement regarding more than 2000 scammers' attempts to defraud. The last report was forwarded to the General Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Lithuania with a request to assess whether all possible measures are being taken to protect residents and to prevent such crimes.
Residents receive short messages on their phones almost every day, which usually inform about the supposed suspension of delivery due to an inaccurate address. The message asks to update the address within 24 hours by clicking on the link created by the scammers.
A. Varnelis notices that messages with this or similar content are sent en masse through the RCS channel provided by Google, used on Android devices, or the iMessage channel used on Apple devices. The fact that fraudsters use messaging protocols offered by international companies, rather than regular SMS messages, makes the fight against them much more difficult. As a result, this problem will have to be solved by communicating with the representatives of the mentioned companies, especially since such frauds, using RCS and iMessage messages, are also carried out massively in other countries of the world.
Due to the extremely large scale of such messages, there are cases when they are actually received by residents who are waiting for parcels. This not only increases the chances of fraud, but also creates false fears for some customers about the security of their data. However, the Lithuanian Post representative emphasizes that such rare cases are coincidences, and all customer data is safe in the company.
"Lithuanian Post feels obliged to protect residents from this type of fraud as much as possible. As a result, we have already initiated more than one discussion on this issue with the National Cyber Security Center, the Communications Regulatory Authority, and mobile and internet service providers. We aim to find the most operational solutions that would allow us to prevent the use of fraudulent messages and online links", says A. Varnelis.
He points out that the actual messages sent by the company never ask residents to enter payment cards or personal data, and there are no links to direct payments.
You can pay for the services provided by Lithuanian Post only by connecting to the self-service portal lpexpress.lt and using electronic banking. Customers can conveniently track the status and journey of shipments on the company's official website at addresses post.lt or lietuvospaštas.lt.
In addition, Lithuania Post never sends SMS messages that indicate a numerical phone number, regardless of whether it is foreign or Lithuanian.
In order to prevent the rampage of fraudsters, Lithuanian Post continues to invite residents who have received suspicious messages with the company's name to report them to [email protected].
The company always forwards information about the actions of fraudsters to the responsible authorities and initiates the blocking of the links used by them.
