Yet another email scam to be on the lookout for.

Today, I got an email message from UPS Quantum View . On the surface, it looked almost legit. There was the from field, which certainly looked legit and a subject of “UPS Delivery Notification, Tracking Number CDE31400FCA9E1A9.” That didn’t sound right to me — I’ve never had a UPS tracking number that started with the letter “C.”

I first saw it on my iPad, so that’s where I opened the message. When I read the contents, I knew something was wrong. It was a plain text message that said:

You have attached the invoice for your package delivery.

Thank you,
United Parcel Service

*** This is an automatically generated email, please do not reply ***

I’ve never received any communication from UPS that wasn’t in HTML. And I’ve never received one with poor English (note first sentence). And finally, I’ve never received any communication from UPS that included an HTML attachment — this one was named invoiceCDE31400FCA9E1A9.html.

Of course, to verify my suspicion that this is some sort of scam, I had to open the attachment. I wanted to do that on my Mac, but not with a Web browser. Instead, I used a plain text editor, TextWrangler. Inside, I found the usual collection of HTML code that would display UPS-looking text and graphics. But most of the links inside the document were to the domain www7apps-myups.com. A quick Whois lookup revealed that the domain is registered to someone in China.

Not UPS.

Other than a bit of javascript at the end of the message that appears to be some sort of counter, the attachment looked harmless enough. I can only assume that clicking the links within the attachment is what triggers whatever this scam attempts to do.

I can imagine someone more gullible than me getting this email message and wondering what package UPS was telling them about. They open the linked file, see what looks like a legitimate UPS communication, and click the link to learn more about the mystery package. Their computer then becomes infected with some sort of virus or perhaps the page itself attempts to get information that the scammers can use for financial gain. I don’t know. I’m not about to try it. You shouldn’t either — not on a computer that isn’t quarantined for this kind of work.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Don’t open file attachments you aren’t expecting, especially from people you don’t know. Don’t click links from strangers.

Oh, and if you get one of these, forward it to fraud@ups.com.