This is more like an advisory than anything else, hopefully it is useful to someone at some point.
A friend of mine recently ordered a cellphone on Shoppee, a low priced Android for under 600 Reais, not an expensive iPhone. While she was waiting for it to arrive, she followed it impatiently on the Shoppee tracking website. It didn鈥檛 take long, but on the day of the expected delivery, there was a message in the tracking history that the delivery had failed and they were gonna try the next day again. That was bizarre, since there was someone at home the entire day, so it shouldn鈥檛 have failed. But still, things happen, so she made sure that the next day someone was gonna be there for sure, in order to not miss it again.
However, the next day, early in the morning (maybe 8 AM) she received a message from
J&L logistics, stating that she had to pay the tax before delivery was possible. It was quite obviously a scam, but it still took me quite some time to definitively tell her to not react to the message. Instead we contacted Shoppee, who (to their credit) responded within the hour and confirmed that it was a scam.
Here鈥檚 why I thought it worthwhile to write a post: this scam was so well made that even if it looked suspicious right away, it did make us hesitate for quite some time. Why? This message contained too many informations that only Shoppee or the delivery firm could have known. For example, these scammers not only had her full name, address and phone number, but also the delivery address (which was different from her home address), the exact description and price of the ordered item (like for example Samsung 520CVD, 128 Gb, and every other detail like the chosen color), and also the order date and date of expected delivery. Plus they asked for a reasonable amount that would have made sense if they were in fact collecting taxes.
For all of these reasons, I鈥檓 almost a 100% sure that someone working at Shoppee or at the delivery firm (J&L) was in on it, eg must have given someone all of these informations. There鈥檚 just no way that someone would be able to access all of this without literally hacking either the Shoppee or the J&L聽 logistics computer.
I have ordered dozens of items via MercadoLivre and never had a problem like this, however I never have my order delivered to my home address. Luckily, there is a 鈥減onto de entrega鈥 just 5 minutes away, which is extremely convenient (I don鈥檛 have to worry about anything, like being at home for the delivery , or getting it stolen from my porch). But these scams are getting ever more sophisticated, be careful is all I can say.