Scam Alert

Scams Targeting Amazon Shoppers

With so many people spending more time at home, online shopping is attracting more scammers.

Criminals are taking advantage of all those clicks. And many are falling for these scams.

Amazon ships more than 1.6 million packages each day. That gives crooks an opportunity to find ways to steal personal information, including someone’s identity.

The latest scam comes in the form of a phone call from someone claiming to work at Amazon. They ask the unsuspecting victim to confirm a recent purchase by providing his or her name and additional information.

They’ll even give an 800-number to call back for someone who is concerned it’s not a real call.

The phenomenon is called social engineering, said Mark Flores, a retired FBI agent.

“It’s when the criminals will reach out to the victims portraying themselves as someone they are not and try to solicit personal information or information about accounts, user names and passwords so they can go in and steal from those accounts,” Flores said.

Here are a few pointers to protect yourself:

• Don’t give personal or financial information.

• Amazon has no call center background noise.

• Look up the number the caller contacted you from yourself.

•Ask them to tell you your account number.

• Amazon will rarely call people on the phone

• If Amazon needs to contact a customer, it will almost always use email.

Additional information about emails, text messages and webpages:

• Don’t open any attachments or click any links from suspicious emails or text messages.

• Suspicious or fraudulent emails, text messages or webpages not from Amazon.com may contain links to websites that look like Amazon.com, but aren’t.

If you receive an email about an order, Amazon recommends checking with “Go to Your Orders” on its site to see if there is an order that matches the details in the correspondence. If it doesn’t match an order in “Your Account” at Amazon.com or in another Amazon international website, the message isn’t from Amazon.

Watch out for requests to update payment information that are not linked to an Amazon order or an Amazon service you subscribed to.

To double check this, visit “Go to Your Orders.” If you aren’t prompted to update your payment method on that screen, the message isn’t from Amazon.

Amazon will never ask you to disclose or verify sensitive personal information or offer you a refund you do not expect.

Amazon recommends that people report any suspicious or fraudulent correspondence. To learn about how to avoid payment scams, visit “Avoiding Payment Scams” at www.amazon.com.