Anyone know how to stop a package before it’s delivered? My mother fell victim to a phone scam yesterday and shipped cash, next day air early, from a UPS store. She filed police report where she lives. Tracking shows it left Louisville this afternoon, scheduled to be delivered by 8:30am tomorrow. She does not have a UPS account. We tried creating an account and signing up for UPS My Choice, but it doesn’t link the tracking number to her new account. We have the delivery address, for what that’s worth. I assume the fraudster has an account and will redirect it before it’s delivered. UPS customer service is closed until 6am ET tomorrow. Any suggestions for steps to take today are most welcome.

Edit: tracking shows it’s in Jacksonville now. Destination address is a residence in Kissimmee. Does anyone have a direct number to the hub in Jacksonville I can try tonight or early tomorrow?

Update: thank you all for the suggestions. In spite of trying everything possible, package was delivered. Even had a supervisor from customer service call me back to confirm the facility manager was going to pull the package so it wouldn’t go on the truck. 45 minutes later, tracking changed to “delivered”. Yes, made it abundantly clear to UPS and Osceola County sheriff dispatchers on multiple calls, they could stop this fraud. Sheriff folks said “try UPS”. Even said the same to LE where my mother lives in Kansas. I did learn from the UPS supervisor why we couldn’t intercept / redirect it. Shipped from UPS Store. Those stores have to upload their manifests before the shipping details are available to UPS. Until that’s done, the package isn’t available for intercept in UPS My Choice.

Now for the incredible news….deputy went to the destination address, I think today, maybe yesterday. Elderly woman who lives there had the package. Hadn’t opened it because it was addressed to someone else. Handed it over to the deputy. In a few weeks, the funds will be returned to my mother. Odds of this happening have to be extremely low! I assumed the scammer would have been there waiting for the delivery. And I do appreciate the Osceola County Sheriff’s Dept for following up on this!

I canceled an online order yesterday but they still shipped it out. How do I get UPS not to deliver it but to send it back? I am not home during their usual delivery time slot.

For an international shipment from China to Laredo, TX

I called UPS many times, some representatives says that you can if it’s still in the US and others say once it’s already marked as “returning to sender” there’s nothing that can be done.

They either let me file a report or tell me I should contact the sender so they can report and stop it since it’s their package.

So which is it?

EDIT:

Ok, so there’s a very very very thin chance you can stop the process of it being returned to sender. But it has to be done RIGHT as you get the updates on the tracking number saying “returning to sender”.

As soon as they showed, I called customer support (international in my case) and asked for the exact Delivery Hub the package was in (they provided me with a Release Code so I could give it to the hub). Then I asked for the phone number and proceeded to give the Delivery Hub call after call until I got a confirmation that they had located my package and that they properly updated the info from “package was refused” to “funds required, will attempt to deliver tomorrow” (which was the MAIN ISSUE TO BEGIN WITH!)

I don’t know why UPS would label my package as “refused, returning to sender” instead of “funds required, will attempt delivery tomorrow” but it became a big problem for me.