Amazon Phishing Scam

Just a head's up. If you get an e-mail from "Amazon" within the next few days referring to an order you have cancelled but can't recall placing the order in the first place, just delete it without opening it as it's quite likely a phishing scam.

I got one of these today and wondered if someone else in the family might have placed an order then cancelled after they noticed it was the wrong account but nobody had. What makes this even more insidious is that it got past my spam filter by mimicking an actual Amazon e-mail.

The Better Business Bureau has issued a warning about a new email phishing scam that looks like an order cancellation notice from Amazon.com.

This scam email comes from an Amazon.com email address, such as "order-update@amazon.com", and contains the subject line "Your Cancellation" and an order number. The email body tells the recipient that "your order has been successfully canceled" and provides a summary of the order.

Amazon.com cautions email recipients to delete any cancellation notice with an eight-digit order number. However, just because your email has a longer order ID number doesn't mean that's real.

To double check your email, be sure to hover over the links to verify their destination. Amazon emails only link to sites that begin with "http://"something".amazon.com." (Note the period before "amazon.com.") Sites such as "payments-amazon.com" are not actually Amazon. Amazon also never uses an IP address (a string of numbers seperated by periods) followed by a directory name, such as http://"123.456.789.123"/amazon.com/.

If you want to confirm a cancellation: Go to Amazon.com by typing www.amazon.com into your web browser. Don't click a link in the email itself. Click "Your Account" in the upper-right corner. Visit "Your Orders" and see if an order matches the details for the one in the e-mail.

More information about scams can be found at BBB.org's complete scam directory.​

 

I've been getting these quite frequently the past few days, very annoying.