Royal Mail Revenue Protection are the people who try to stamp out postage label fraud. There are two main types we’ve seen used by sellers over the years – printing a label twice and sticking it on two different packages and printing a label, cancelling it and then using it anyway.
There are other types of fraud of course, such as under-declaring the weight of individual items or mail bags and fudging the number of items sent via PPI, but it’s the label printing that Royal Mail appear to have taken recent steps to address.
Printing a label twice for two different packages has been somewhat eliminated by the use of Royal Mail 2D barcodes. Royal Mail will be all too aware if the same label is in their network twice and this will quickly become apparent then they scan the label at the point of delivery.
Cancelled labels are more tricky to catch, but if you cancel a label today you’ll get a message warning you that the information will be automatically shared with Royal Mail Revenue Protection. If the label be used and identified within the Royal Mail Network, you’ll be charged for it on your account plus get hit with an additional handling fee (which will probably be around a tenner – more than you probably would have paid for the label in the first place).
“Please be aware labels generated on orders which are then reset are no longer valid and must be destroyed. If you wish to despatch this order, please generate a new label and attach it to your item.
Cancelled label information is automatically shared with Royal Mail Revenue Protection, and should a cancelled label be identified on an item in the Royal Mail Network, you will be charged on your account and an additional handling fee applied.”
– Royal Mail Cancelled Label Flow
One might speculate that there are some sellers who cancel a proportion of labels and use them on a regular basis. One might even think that this is a commonplace practice for some groups of sellers. Be warned however, if Royal Mail Revenue Protection start adding hundreds of handling fees to your account it will have been a lot cheaper just to pay for your postage like everyone else.
15 Responses
I wonder why it is more tricky to catch a cancelled 2d barcode label, after all their system knows which barcode has been cancelled so it could store it for say 90 days and then if it is scanned throughout their network it would find it on the cancelled items database and trigger a notification.
really?
this is a little like every one doing more than 70mph on the m25 will be prosecuted,
or everone who fails to declare total income for tax,
they need to stamp [pun intended] this out at source its their out of date inefficient systems that
allow the dishonest
for instance
if you use clip and drop with an account
the label fails to show weight or size, paid for
though personal click and drop labels show the weight and size clearly
Why does Royal mail still have PPI?, not sure why people are still using it ?. The 2d bar codes are a God send.
This warning starting coming up ages ago on click and drop, whenever you need to re-apply postage.
It’s a bit insulting and patronising, when all you’re doing is correcting a mistake. I probably do it a couple of times a week. When you’re in the zone, churning out RM48 labels, it’s easy to do it again when you should have selected RM24.
But if you remember babz media, then you know why they have to do it. It’d just be better if they could do it in a less accusatory way.
I don’t do this fraud but I am a victim of lost parcels put through click and drop scanned and not scanned. Property staff and vet the system before targeting the customer as there are better couriers out there.
Revenue protection is also concerned with misuse of stamps and use of forged stamps.
A significant number of eBay sellers are using stamps, especially 1st class Large, which have not been bought from Royal Mail, post offices, or other retailers. Many of them are bought on eBay as ‘discount postage’. See https://blog.norphil.co.uk/2018/12/not-so-much-forgery-as-blatant-fraud.html
If RP spot them (they don’t always as they are very convincing forgeries) then it is the eBay BUYER who is surcharged. Sellers get away with it, although they may not know that what they are using on their packets are forgeries because just buying at less than face value is not in itself a crime.
Some of the problems are the buyer.
We recently sent out an item wrongly to a customer so we apologised profusely and sent them a fully tracked returns label to get it back. When it arrived we sent them the correct item with some free items.
But the item did not fit so they asked to return and said we must send them a returns label as the ebay system was telling them they had to pay for the return. After explaining they vanished for a few days.
But then they took the original returns label we had emailed and printed it again and stuck it to the parcel. But their post office refused it as their system said it was null.
Great but no they took it to another post office and again were told it was null so they finally put it in the post box with no receipt and when it arrived back here we were billed for the label and a penalty charge. I rang our account manger who explained all the issue as of course we could not see any of this and there was nothing we could do.
The only saving grace was the buyer had no proof of posting and we never refunded the item to them (serves them right Karma!!!) luckily that meant we were not out of pocket but a low cost item we would have lost out.
“The only saving grace was the buyer had no proof of posting and we never refunded the item to them (serves them right Karma!!!) luckily that meant we were not out of pocket but a low cost item we would have lost out.”
Karma has a habit of comming back and biting you on the arse
The real thing they should be looking into is bulk sellers abusing pricing in proportion… Some large scale sellers are sending items that are sized as Packets as Large Letters – Quite a profit in sending a £2.82 packet as a £0.87 – £1.82 large letter… Times say 100 a day? that’s someone’s minimum wage for the day…