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Maybe FedEx sees better results and gets more payments from appearing scammy? Scammers seem to do alright. I know we tech people think this is type of messaging is ridiculous, but I’m constantly pulling less technical friends and family away from crap like this. Half a dozen have asked me about Elon Musk’s crypto trading breakthrough.
Banks do similar dumb things. I once vented to a a Wells Fargo security manager about a similar issue. They had no defense at all.
Even worse, is where attempts to query that security is actively punished.
This is typical now. Listen here (at 42:20) with an example regarding the UK NHS whose incompetence plays directly into the hands of cybercriminals.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=24 (time:42:20)
You can find that number in the sms on an official FedEx page somewhere or other - I ended up using that as enough evidence to trust and call.
I get the feeling this system as a whole doesn't see much use - from a FedEx perspective, the vast majority of people paying duty will be via some specialised importer, not b2c direct.
I know this comes down to institutional incompetency, but at some point there was a singular human person putting the template content the SMS message in question was generated from into some computer system somewhere and I genuinely wonder what was going on in their head that made them string the words together in this way. You'd have to give it a true, earnest shot to make it worse.
Could easily be one person writing the message. Another who demanded partial edits in a Jira ticket. But then the data types didn't match up with what the writer requested and then the dev didn't want to deal with it and just shipped it.
Or it could be that the message is made with a bunch of disjointed and constructed if statements and only the final output is piped to the customer. I have seen some very terrible log messages like that as nobody is looking at the entire message, just the little bit in the conditional they are editing at that point.
As an anecdote, I once worked on code that generated these very detailed error messages about why something went wrong. I discovered most never made it to the customer as someone later down the line reassigned a variable rather than +=. Piles of support tickets could have been avoided.
Maybe FedEx sees better results and gets more payments from appearing scammy? Scammers seem to do alright. I know we tech people think this is type of messaging is ridiculous, but I’m constantly pulling less technical friends and family away from crap like this. Half a dozen have asked me about Elon Musk’s crypto trading breakthrough.
I doubt FedEx’s customer engagement increased by sending a query string with no domain or protocol. Someone’s asleep at the wheel here.
You can't make this up.
Not that I’m endorsing the use of smart phones, but FedEx does have a mobile application. Why not just use that for notifications regarding deliveries?
Hah!
I know this comes down to institutional incompetency, but at some point there was a singular human person putting the template content the SMS message in question was generated from into some computer system somewhere and I genuinely wonder what was going on in their head that made them string the words together in this way. You'd have to give it a true, earnest shot to make it worse.