Thursday, May 10, 2012

AMAZON CUSTOMERS BEWARE OF SCAM

Two or three times a week for the past month, I have been receiving cancellation notices purportedly from Amazon for orders that I never placed. I received another such notice today. If you have received similar email notices, be advised that this is a scam!

Here is an example of one notice that I received:

From: order-update@amazon.com
Subject: Amazon.com - Your Cancellation (186-6951-71231)

Dear Customer,

Your order has been successfully canceled. For your reference, here's a summary of your order:

You just canceled order 186-6951-71231 placed on May 5, 2012.

Status: CANCELED
_______________________________________

1 "Blackmer"; 2006, Second Edition
By: Hywel Williams

Sold by: Amazon.com LLC
_______________________________________

Thank you for visiting Amazon.com!
---------------------------------------
Amazon.com
Earth's Biggest Selection
http://www.amazon.com
---------------------------------------

I contacted Amazon because I was concerned my account may have been hacked. Here is Amazon’s response:

The order cancellation notice e-mail you received wasn't from Amazon.com. We take these reports very seriously and are investigating.

Your account is safe and secure with us.

We suggest you never respond to any e-mail message that asks you to provide personal or financial information, open an unsolicited attachment, or navigate to a website linked to in such e-mails. We also recommend running anti-virus or anti-malware software whenever you receive a suspicious e-mail, especially if you opened an attachment or visited a web site that was linked in the e-mail.

If you responded to the e-mail or visited a linked website but didn't provide any personal information (such as your login or password) your Amazon.com account information should still be safe. If you ever respond to a suspicious e-mail or visit a forged website and enter your Amazon.com login and password (or any other personal information), unauthorized individuals may have collected that information. In that case, we recommend that you update your Amazon.com password immediately by going to Amazon, clicking on "Your Account" and then "Change Account Settings." If you provided financial information, you may want to contact your bank or credit card provider.

Amazon.com does not send order confirmations or other unsolicited requests that require you to open attachments.

If you receive a suspicious e-mail that looks like it was sent from Amazon.com and contains an attachment or asks you to visit a non-Amazon web site to update your customer information, please forward the e-mail to stop-spoofing@amazon.com (as an attachment, if possible) without opening it. Delete the e-mail after you forward it.

Visit http://www.amazon.com/phish to read more about ways to protect yourself from phishing.

If you encounter any other uses of the Amazon.com name that you think may be fraudulent, please don't hesitate to report it here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/report-phishing.html

Once again thanks for letting us know about this.

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