Amazon targeted by spamming snakes…
Right, here’s another nasty email scam to watch out for.
I have to say this is one of the cleverer ones I’ve uncovered on Insider’s Edge. It’s an email that appears to come from amazon.com (they’ve completely masked the ‘from’ address) and tells you that your recent order has been ‘cancelled’.
The exact wording is:
Your order has been successfully canceled. For you reference, here’s a summary of your order: You just canceled order 102-5121-954 placed on May 2, 2012
If, like me, you use Amazon regularily to buy items online it’ll make you double take.
Here’s a screenshot of the email:
It’s clever because even if you realise that you haven’t ordered the item listed, you feel compelled to click on one of the links so that you can log into Amazon and rectify the issue.
Don’t do it!
This is another phishing scam designed to steal your private data, try and sell you dodgy sex pills and generally make your life a misery.
In this case there’s a subtle clue that this is a scam…
When you hover over any of the links it shows you the destination website which is somewhere completely different from the Amazon website. The address is a series of numbers which ends with the word ‘obliterated’. Hmmm…
If you receive an email like this delete it – or better still ignore it. Believe it or not the simple act of opening an email can alert scammers that your address is a ‘live’ address.
4 responses to “Watch out for this Amazon email scam”
Tom Thanks for the info on the Amazon spoof email. One thing I have noticed with most of the spoof emails around is that they can’t speak English! It’s either written with the words in an order that we would not normally use or there are simple spelling mistakes. In the one you have shown the word ‘cancelled’ has only one ‘l’, not once but twice (that’s my proof reading brain at work again)! Still, if you are in a hurry you may not notice this so thanks again for making people aware.
Thanks Bernard. Yes, that’s an excellent point. Spelling mistakes are a key thing to watch out for. I think in this case it has come from a spammer targeting Americans (as they spell cancelled with one ‘l’) but it stills provides an excellent clue – because if Amazon UK were really trying to contact us they’d use the correct British spelling!
[…] Amazon email scam… These guys just can’t get enough. Only the other week I reported on their last email scam which involved a ‘cancelled order’ […]
Thanks for the information about Paypal and Amazon scams.
Regarding Paypal emails. Paypal ALWAYS address you by name and Never “Dear Customer” Thought this might help.
Peter Davey