Sometimes I really hate people. But take this post as a WARNING:
Last week I received an e-mail from (possibly) Amazon.com regarding my account. The e-mail said that they had been notified by my bank that my credit card may have been retrieved and used by thieves so that I should follow the links provided to update my information within 48 hours. I followed the link and it brought me to the (possibly) Amazon.com website where I carefully read and started to fill out a form. When it got to my social security number I stopped, cleared all the boxes and backed out. Though it looked totally official, I hesitated and instead, checked my credit card where I found no illegitimate charges and figured I’d check back with Amazon.
Today I got another e-mail from (possibly) Amazon.com regarding my account. They claim that they were "phished," that I may receive a bogus e-mail that leads suspiciously to what appears to be their site and that I need to go back because they changed my password to protect me.
Which is the true Amazon correspondence if any? Coming at a time when I know that I can’t even buy anything from Amazon right now–and knowing of all the books I need to read, it upsets me that there are people in this world who would still take advantage of me. So please, do watch out for one or the other of these scams.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
My daughter got the same email and called us in a panic. A few days later I got one from Paypal that looked so legitimate I called my husband to ask him what was he doing buying hundreds of dollars worth of baseball tickets. Of course it was all phoney. I forwarded it to their security dept.
I unfortunately fell for this when these kinds of e-mails first started. It was “sent” by eBay, and it caused my account to get hacked and used. It wasn’t fun to have to deal with because ut led to my credit card getting charged.. which led to my credit limit being broken (which led to fees and a mark on my credit rating that I culd never get the credit card to fix).
One easy way to tell if these kinds of e-mails are legit or not is the links that are in the e-mails. If you hover your pointer over the link, it will give away the link’s true destination. If the link goes directly to amazon.com, you’re okay. If the link looks anything like “http://65.876.538/mumbojumbo/services/amazon.html” or something, then it is bogus. Also, these e-mails tend to contain some sloppy grammatical and e-mail formatting that a first-class business like Amazon just wouldn’t have in its business correspondance.
I got the same email as the first one you mentioned–and I immediately changed my Amazon password, and forwarded the email to them,, positive it’s a scam designed to steal identities. I don’t recall mine asking for an SSN–but I didn’t get that far. The same thing has happened with PayPal, the scammers make their emails look like they come from there.
The rule of thumb I use is, never use the link from the email. In fact PayPal advises never doing that. Only access their website from the URL you know is legitimate.
I get several of these a week from groups pretending to be Paypal and Ebay. They are extremely clever in what they do and the messages change every few days.
I now routinely forward all of them to spoof@paypal.com or spoof@ebay.com and forget about them.
Do not click on any of the links or attempt to write to these people.
These people are despicable. They are the lice of the internet. After you have received more then 50 of these fake warnings, you get pretty good at spotting them and sending them off to spoof@…