Sorry, there’s a fee to pay before we can deliver your item

Like a poll if the forum had such a thing and that thing worked :-)

Do I

a) Pay £7 to find out what I’ve been sent with underpaid postage despite the fact that I wasn’t expecting anything and probably don’t want it?

b) Save my money and forget about it?

B They can retun it to sender who can post it again if they want you to get it. £1 I might pay. Not £7.

c) Save your money and avoid being scammed.

I get a text message like that every month or two, crushing disappointment once I realise I haven’t received an unexpected package or forgotten Sigma Sports order…

Forget about it.

When i get these they send me a link to the parcel/package/letter details too, usually a photo.

B, coz it’s a scam

Extra info, pretty sure the actual real postie put the ticket through the door so if it is an all out scam then it’s one being operated by RM

Sounds dodge if you are not expecting a delivery…

How were you informed of this? Email? Text? Is it from a legitimate sender?

Might well be phishing to get you to hand over your debit card details.

They’ll take the £7 and know it’s a goer… And then hit your card for more/larger ‘purchases’.

Someone has used a non barcoded stamp. RMs latest scam is to charge you before you find that out.

royalmail.com suggests it is a small parcel, possibly with a counterfeit stamp

Small parcel

No postage paid/Counterfeit stamp      £7.00

Extra info, pretty sure the actual real postie put the ticket through the door

Not nessesarily true… I’ve seen fake ‘sorry we missed you’ cards put through letterboxes before.. It could have been hand delivered by any Tom dick or Harry.

Proceed with extreme caution.. Especially if you are not expecting anything.

Can you post a photo of the missed delivery card?

Appears you lot are all more cynical than inquisitive (or am I in fact more gullible than inquisitive)  :-)

I got one of these when I was expecting something, went and paid and the packet contained some cheap tat earrings from China. Didn’t make sense to me, but after googling it, the scam is on amazon or ebay or whatever to create a sales history to scam people later, can’t remember the exact details.

The packet I was expecting turned up a couple of days later.

Just had this, legit royal mail card through my door. Waited two weeks to see if I could work out what is was, because £8.50 would be better spent on a pair of cycling socks…

On the last day I paid and collected it, it was a missing order that had since been despatched again.  They had sent my parcel by Royal Mail when it had an Evri postage label on it!

So I got a £28 order for £8.50 which compensates nicely for the fact I waited about 10 days for it to be sent again, damaged in transit and a 3rd successful attempt!

B/c… most likely c but either way… ‘NO!!’

So many scams these days.

I’m kicking myself today for answering a call from a mobile number that I didn’t recognise.  It was a scam and I hung up in a few seconds but I’m already getting more calls from other numbers I don’t recognise as they now know my number is real.

Watch out and take care people.

I’m kicking myself today for answering a call from a mobile number that I didn’t recognise.

Just let it ring because if they are genuine they will leave a message or text you, then you can call them back.

If they don’t leave a message then it is not worth calling them back, then I block the number.

If they leave a message then you use your judgement. i.e. if they say their names are Morgan Jackson, Timothy Jones, George John, Bruce Mountbatten, Oliver Liam, etc …  you know it’s a waste of time.

there’s a fee to pay before we can deliver your item

Wish they’d just be honest and say “a fee needs to be paid before we will delivery your item”.

They could delivery it without the fee being paid, granted that removes the incentive to pay, but it’s their choice not to deliver, it’s not like they couldn’t.

Yes chewk I normally do.   But after Thames water confirmed a leak on my supply pipe and me chasing them for an appointment to fix it I thought I’d answer it just in case…..regret is me.

Clearly I’m going to have to chase Thames water again.   I’ll see if notifying them I shan’t be paying any more money until they fix the leak gets me up tnt list any.  Don’t think I’ll hold my breath though.

Sending and receiving parcels recently the postage labels used by the post office have failed to stay stuck on the parcel. They’ve got into the system at the post office but somewhere near delivery the label has come off and results in the demand for payment.

I was lucky my buyers postie delivered it anyway, but but questioned lack of postage they’d paid for, fortunately I had proof of postage.

I had to pay for a parcel from my dad that had lost it’s postage, he may have lost the receipt but not senile enough yet to have forgotten the postage.

If it was a real card put through your door by the postie, it would say to go to the local sorting office 24h later, and it is there and there alone you would pick up the item and pay the additional fee.

If its asking you to pay via email/paypal or however else then its a scam(it’s obviously a scam from what you’ve said) because the only way to receive a missed delivery other than having it rescheduled on the Royal Mail website, is to do the above and go to the sorting office to retrieve it.

Outwith the RM, the process would be the same. You go to whomevers depot, pick it up and pay the fee there, never pay the fee and we’ll then deliver it.

royalmail.com suggests it is a small parcel, possibly with a counterfeit stamp

There was an issue with the new barcoded stamps a while ago, that was highlighted on BBC Watchdog, where people were being charged by RM for using bogus stamps, that had actually been purchased from RM counters, or legit businesses, like WHSmith. RM were insisting that the stamps were fake, although the issue seems to have sorted itself out now.

In a couple of instances, though, people had seen the printed serrated edge on the stamps, which is just part of the design, and torn the QR code part off! What can you do…?

Oh, and I regularly get emails with an order number or tracking number telling me that such-and-such courier company has a package for me, legit logos, etc, and they require me to pay for shipping or whatever; a quick tap on the email header will take me to the actual email address, which is inevitably a completely different email that’s been hacked and the address used as a mailout by scammers.

But after Thames water confirmed a leak on my supply pipe and me chasing them for an appointment to fix it I thought I’d answer it just in case…..regret is me

As an aside, if the leak is on your property ie over the boundary then I suspect that you will not get them to fix it at all hence your struggle. Any pipe work on your property is your responsibility or in the case of a shared supply you and your neighbours. You will need to find and pay for, your own contractor. If the leak is in the street though then they will be obliged by OFWAT to fix it and within a certain time frame I would imagine…

I’ve had this where I sold something, the buyer didn’t collect it, Royal Mail eventually added enough stickers to it to change the weight from 246g to 257g and then charged me to have it returned to my house as I hadn’t paid enough postage as it was over 250g.  I wasted more time than I really had to spare to claim back that £6.50, but, I couldn’t let them get away with it :-)

B, coz it’s a scam

It’s not 100% certain it’s a scam, only 99.99%. One time out of 10,000 someone is missing out on something good. If you think there’s a 1/10,000 chance that someone might have sent you something worth £70,000 but not paid the postage, it would be a reasonable gamble to pay £7 to find out.

Thanks for all the good advice……which I have ignored :-). I will update once I have my mystery package

I had 2 of the RM payment due cards in the same week recently. Both for £1.50 under payment. So they print out a card and the postie posts it through my letterbox and that’s more economical to them than just posting the underpaid item? Seems like they just do it as a slapped wrist to the recipient.

I’m kicking myself today for answering a call from a mobile number that I didn’t recognise.

Make me a winner! Is the response you need to use it the call is around 4pm and you have entered a radio competition?

I got caught by the Evri parcel scam last year.

In my defence, the text arrived at the exact moment I was genuinely expecting a parcel which was my wife’s birthday present for that very day- so I was surrepticiously clicking through the links on my phone whilst trying to talk to my wife. Even then, I managed to click on the Evri site’s legal terms and conditions link in an attempt to verify it wasn’t a spoof site- sure enough, the page showed up, all present and correct.

Anyway, it was a spoof site and I got scammed. Which I realised when the parcel in question silently arrived about 45mins later through the postbox.

The worst part of it all is I can no longer laugh at people who get conned by dumb scams as I am now one of those people.

I had 2 of the RM payment due cards in the same week recently. Both for £1.50 under payment. So they print out a card and the postie posts it through my letterbox and that’s more economical to them than just posting the underpaid item? Seems like they just do it as a slapped wrist to the recipient.

If they just delivered all the parcels with insufficient postage then there would be little incentive for anyone to pay the correct postage.

But the recipient doesn’t pay the postage. And they weren’t parcels, they were envelopes with stamps on.

Didn’t make sense to me, but after googling it, the scam is on amazon or ebay or whatever to create a sales history to scam people later, can’t remember the exact details.

It’s called “brushing.”

If they leave a message then you use your judgement. i.e. if they say their names are

I had one one time, a near-incomprehensible heavy Indian Subcontinent accent, “ello, my name ees Kevin.” It’s not, is it.

If it was a real card put through your door by the postie, it would say to go to the local sorting office 24h later, and it is there and there alone you would pick up the item and pay the additional fee.

If its asking you to pay via email/paypal or however else then its a scam

This.

The worst part of it all is I can no longer laugh at people who get conned by dumb scams as I am now one of those people.

Same. I got stung by a honeypot at work. We were told to expect a third-party email, a third-party email came through, my partner was talking to me at the time so I wasn’t paying full attention when I opened it to find it was a phishing test. In my defence it was a shitty stunt to pull but that’s not really an excuse, the bad guys don’t play by the rules. And without meaning to sound arrogant, if I can get caught out then anyone can.

I blogged a little about this, if anyone is interested.

You Do Phishing Tests? Redux

If it was a real card put through your door by the postie, it would say to go to the local sorting office 24h later, and it is there and there alone you would pick up the item and pay the additional fee.

If its asking you to pay via email/paypal or however else then its a scam

the card gave both of those options :-)