Overview
- New figures highlight the risk, with Evri reporting nearly 10,000 delivery-fraud cases during last year's Black Friday period and City of London Police recording £11.8 million lost to online shopping fraud over the festive season.
- Criminals impersonate couriers via phishing texts and emails and steer victims to counterfeit websites to harvest data or collect bogus charges, and Evri says it never asks for a redelivery fee.
- The government says work with mobile networks has blocked more than one billion suspected scam texts, and industry efforts have taken down over 32,000 malicious scams.
- Police describe Black Friday and the festive period as prime time for offenders and warn that scammers increasingly use AI to make fake sites and messages look convincing.
- Shoppers are urged to follow Stop! Think Fraud guidance, avoid clicking unexpected links, contact firms through official channels, use credit cards where possible, enable two-step verification, and report suspicious texts to 7726 or emails to report@phishing.gov.uk.