According to foreign media reports, a new type of online fraud is targeting Amazon's Prime member buyers. Phishing scammers will impersonate Amazon's backend and send thank-you letters to Amazon buyers, thanking them for shopping during the July Prime Day promotion and inviting them to visit Amazon's official website to write reviews for the purchased products.
Potential victims are also told that they will receive a $50 Amazon credit after submitting their review. Once they clicked the link in the email, they were directed to a fraudulent Amazon.com website that looked exactly like the real thing! If they enter their email address and password, that information is passed to the scammers, who gain access to the user. What’s even more outrageous is that this fake website will also install malware on the victim’s computer or mobile device!
Foreign media specifically remind Amazon buyers: Before entering your password and username, check the website URL first. The fraudulent domain name may be a slight variation of www.amazon.com. If users receive emails from some well-known sellers, and the content of the email is about previous orders or requests for reviews, they should be extra careful and never click on any links in the email.
A victim who received a fraudulent email said that the email he received looked very realistic. In order to prevent users from not clicking on the first link, the scammers even attached manual operation instructions. The Amazon.com link navigation in the instructions was actually a fake site, so it was very dangerous to follow these instructions.
Therefore, if users receive any email asking them to take some action, the safest approach is to ignore any links in the email, log on directly to www.amazon.com if they need to review their past orders, and communicate with customer service department about related issues.
If buyers feel they have received suspicious emails, they can report phishing emails or payment fraud to Amazon customer service.
Amazon has 80 million Prime subscribers, and as of July 2016, Prime members account for at least half of Amazon's customer base. In recent years, as Amazon has continued to grow and develop, the platform's credibility has continued to increase. Scammers have taken advantage of people's high trust in the Amazon platform, and online fraud methods targeting Amazon users have emerged in an endless stream.
Last year, the United States hit a new record number of phishing attacks, with the total number of phishing attacks reaching 1,220,523, a 65% increase over the number of attacks in 2015.
“Phishing scams are an attack that relies primarily on fooling people and are not particularly sophisticated,” said Greg Aaron, APWG senior researcher and iThreat vice president. “As a result, phishing scams have always been a tried and tested scam method for cyber crooks. ”
