Hacking the U.S. Post Office
This is clever:
Many USA ecommerce shops don’t send their goods to Russia or to the countries of the Ex-USSR.
Some shops send but delivery costs differ greatly from the homeland ones, they are usually much bigger.
So what did some Russians invented? They got a way to fool the delivery.
It’s no secret that many bigger shops use electronic systems processing orders. So in order to see if this address is in USA or Canada it uses ZIP code, state or province name and words “USA” or “CANADA”.
So what was possible to do is to put totally Russian address in the order delivery form, like: Moscow, Lenin St. 20, Russia in the address fields, usually there is a plenty of space to enter long things like this, and in the field country they put Canada in the field ZIP code Canadian zip code.
What happens next? The parcel travels to Canada, to the area to which the specified ZIP code belongs and there postal workers just see it’s not a Canadian address but Russian. They consider it to be some sort of mistake and forward it further, to Russia.
Fraud Guy • April 23, 2007 1:20 PM
Working for ecommerce companies, many have address comparison programs for US & Canadian addresses, and so this trick will fail. The usual method will have the order pop on an address exception list and, once it is determined to be to an undesirable destination (Russia, not Canada), the order will be cancelled. Small shops on auction sites and the likes may, however, be taken in by this, although even they can use usps.gov to check addresses that look snarky. This trick would only work if you have automated a portion of your process but do not have the sophistication of exceptions screening.