Caution of fraudulent PSC e-mails

In recent weeks, unknown persons have illegitimately posed as representatives of the German port State control (PSC) in e-mails and subsequently used the received data to send bills to shipping companies. Here are some tips regarding how to protect yourself against these imposters.

In several cases, unknown culprits have posed as representatives of the German port State control in e-mails written in English and requested shipmasters or shipping companies to disclose information regarding the ship and the shipping company. Subsequently, this illegitimately acquired data was used by the perpetrators to e-mail bills over services that were never rendered using the name of the respective shipping company of the ship – together with the request to transfer the invoice amount. The perpetrators used copied or fake names.

Our tips to protect against fraud attempts:

1. Do not react to e-mails from the following e-mail addresses:

ops@psc-gov.org
port@pscgov.org

2. If you repeatedly receive e-mails from the above-mentioned e-mail addresses, mark and block these e-mail addresses as spam.

3. Check if the e-mail contains a postal address at the end:

If not, do not react to the e-mail.
If so, verify that the address matches the correct postal address: Brandstwiete 1, 20457 Hamburg.
In the fraud cases we have encountered so far, the unknown persons used the postal address of the respective port authority – however, in Germany port authorities are not responsible for port state control.

4. If you find an e-mail to be suspicious, contact us to be on the safe side. Our correct e-mail address for the German port State control is psc-germany@bg-verkehr.de. All port State control officers (PSCO) have an e-mail address following this format: firstname.lastname@bg-verkehr.de. You can find the names and contact details of our employees on our website.

Sadly, fraud attempts keep reoccurring. In 2019 for example, the US Coastguard warned of a similar fraud attempt. Back then, unknown persons used the fake e-mail address port@pscgov.org to gain access to ships' computers (see the US Coastguard bulletin of the time).