Forged delivery notices impersonating Korea Post have been found in some areas, with the phone numbers and QR codes altered to lead recipients to phishing sites. Korea Post, the postal service under the Ministry of Science and ICT, urged the public to check the paper color and how the notice is attached to tell genuine slips from fakes.
The agency said on the 29th that altered notices had been found on the entrance doors of homes in some areas. The notice is the slip postal workers attach to a door to inform residents that a registered item could not be delivered because no one was home. In the forged versions, the postal worker's contact number has been replaced with a number used for phishing, or only the QR code has been tampered with, making the slips hard to spot by eye.
Genuine notices issued by the postal service are printed on heat-sensitive thermal paper, the type used for receipts, on which characters appear when heat is applied. The adhesive is the same as that used on Post-it notes, so no residue is left when the slip is peeled off. Forged notices, by contrast, are printed on ordinary paper and taped on with clear tape, or peel off like a regular sticker, leaving an unclean adhesive surface. The paper color also differs.
Anyone who suspects a forgery should avoid the phone number or QR code printed on the notice and instead contact the postal customer center or a nearby post office directly to confirm whether a delivery was actually attempted. The postal service also asked the public to report suspected forgeries to a post office or the police. Post offices do not collect resident registration numbers or bank account numbers over the internet or by phone, so requests to enter such information should be refused.
Impersonating public institutions accounts for a large share of phishing crimes. According to the office of Rep. Kwon Young-jin of the People Power Party, a member of the National Assembly's Public Administration and Security Committee, which analyzed National Police Agency data, losses from voice phishing totaled 1.2578 trillion won in 2025, the highest in five years.
There were 23,360 cases, putting the average loss per case at 53.84 million won by simple calculation. Schemes in which callers posed as prosecutors or the Financial Supervisory Service accounted for 78.6% of the losses. According to the National Office of Investigation at the National Police Agency, 52% of victims of institution-impersonation schemes between January and August 2025 were in their 20s and 30s.
In January 2024, emails impersonating the postal service circulated claiming recipients had won a prize and asking for their personal customs clearance numbers, prompting the agency to issue a warning. The postal service said at the time that it does not send prize notification emails and urged recipients to delete them immediately.
Park In-hwan, head of Korea Post, said the methods used to impersonate post offices have grown more varied and more frequent in recent months, and that contacting a post office directly to verify a suspicious notice is the practical way to prevent losses. The agency said it will continue public information and prevention efforts.
