Why the parcel scam only asks for £1.99

Escudo guide · Updated July 2026

Almost everything about this scam is designed around one number, and it is a small one. A pound, ninety nine pence, thirty five pence. To understand why it works on people who would never fall for a "you have won the lottery" text, you have to understand why the fee is so low. So let us start there.

The smallness is the weapon

Think about the last time a bank charge or a shop overcharged you by a few pence. You let it go. It was not worth the phone call. Scammers know this about all of us. A demand for £2,000 makes you stop and think. A demand for £1.99 slips under the part of your brain that checks things, because the loss feels too trivial to bother scrutinising. You are not weighing up two thousand pounds, you are just clearing a nuisance so your parcel turns up. That is exactly the frame of mind the scammer wants.

But the fee is never the prize. The moment you tap through and type your card number, expiry and security code onto that page, you have handed over the thing they actually came for. They can run it up for hundreds, or sell the details on to someone who will, sometimes within the hour. So the rule flips the way you would expect it to work: a surprise "small fee" by text should make you more suspicious, not less. Real money trouble does not knock this politely.

What Royal Mail, Evri and DPD actually do

Now the genuine article. When a real courier misses you, they leave a card through the door or send you to their own app, and if there is genuinely something to pay, a customs charge on a parcel from abroad, for instance, it is handled through the official Royal Mail process, not a random text with a countdown. A real Evri or DPD update names the specific item and the shop you bought it from, because it knows. The scam text cannot. It just says "your parcel", because it was blasted to a million numbers at once and hopes some of them are waiting on a delivery. Most of us usually are, which is why it lands.

The web address settles it. Royal Mail lives on royalmail.com and nothing else. The scam lives on royalmail-fee.info, evri-redelivery.info or dpd-reschedule.online. A word hyphenated onto the courier's name, a strange ending like .info or .online, either one and it is fake, no matter how tidy the page looks after you tap.

What to do instead

1. Leave the link alone, even out of curiosity. Curiosity is what the page is built to reward.
2. Check the tracking yourself. Open the courier's own app or go to royalmail.com directly, then use the tracking number from the shop you actually ordered from. If there is no real parcel, there is your answer.
3. Trust the doormat over the text. Genuine "we missed you" notes come through the letterbox, and real charges live in your courier account, not in a message with a link.
4. Report it and set it aside. Forward the text to 7726, free, which spells SPAM on the keypad. On iPhone you can also report it as junk.

If you already paid the fee

First, the fee itself is not the worst of it. The card details you typed are. Move quickly on those.

• Ring your bank now on the number on the back of your card. Ask them to freeze the card and watch for charges, and tell them where you entered the details.
• Expect a follow up. Once they have your number and address, the same gang often rings back pretending to be "fraud support" to finish the job. Hang up and call your bank yourself on the number on your card.
• Change any password you happened to reuse on the fake page.
• Report to Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040. In Scotland, report to Police Scotland on 101.

For the unhurried, step by step version, see you already tapped a scam link. And if that follow up call comes claiming to be your bank, it is running the fake bank text playbook, which often arrives the same week from the same people.

The one your mum will half believe

This scam is dangerous precisely because it is dull. No lottery, no prince, just a boring little charge on a parcel she probably is expecting. That is what slips past someone who would laugh off anything dramatic. The very same delivery script runs in Spain as fake Correos "paquete retenido" texts and in Brazil as fake Correios ones, only the courier name changes. It is one playbook, translated per country. To see the operation sending millions of these a day, read how SMS scam gangs actually operate.

This is where the Escudo app helps. It filters known scam patterns on the iPhone and sets the parcel fee text aside in a junk folder before it is read, so the boring little charge never gets its two seconds in front of your mum. It cannot judge whether one specific parcel text is real, and it does not pretend to. Nothing is deleted, it is only set aside, and your messages never leave the phone.