Dear editor,

I fell for a very clever scam yesterday that I want to warn others about.

In these times of COVID, we are buying things online like drunken sailors. I wake up and don鈥檛 even remember what I have ordered. (Luckily, I haven鈥檛 got a home tattoo yet.)

So when I got an email notice that a delivery could not be made because no one was home and it could not be left on the doorstep, I believed it. And while, now that I think of it, packages are left on the doorstep all the time, I am waiting to receive a rather special tung drum that I assume is as precious to the delivery company as it is to me. So I pressed on the 鈥渞eschedule delivery鈥� button and was routed to a very official-looking DPD (Canada) website where I put in my credit card information to pay $3 to reschedule the delivery to the next day. The next day, I put a note on the door to the delivery person to ring the doorbell because we were painting in a room with the door closed, and I rang the doorbell to make sure it worked.

Well, all day, I was home, watching my sister help me paint the room. No one rang the doorbell, and my dog didn鈥檛 bark at anyone coming to the door.

I checked my email at 4 p.m. and there was another of the same notices, saying another delivery had been attempted and no one was home.

So I wrote an email saying that we were home and that maybe they had gone to the wrong house, or had the wrong person and what company was the package coming from? I thought it a little strange that the email had a UK address, but the company called itself DPD (Canada).

This morning, I checked my email for a response and there were all these weird 鈥淯ndeliverable: PARCEL - DELIVERY鈥� messages from Microsoft Outlook to email addresses I am not familiar with, except perhaps now through the common experience of being scammed. I checked my credit card statement, and sure enough, a payment for $260 had gone through to MONEYGRAM. The jerks!

I see that DPD is now the manager of my email account so no more mass distributions for me. And I foresee a new credit card and email address in my future.

Judy Johnson,

Comox