RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) – As the largest e-commerce retailer in the world, Amazon is the target of all kinds of scams and recently several variations of those scams have hit the Triangle.
The first involves an email supposedly from Amazon claiming your payment couldn’t be processed and a need to verify personal and payment information.
“The more these hackers know, the more damage they can do in terms of hijacking your identity,’’ Maya Levine of Checkpoint Software Technologies said.
One of the biggest scams currently hitting the Triangle involves an “Amazon payment failed” email. It is actually a phishing scam.
There are two tipoffs CBS 17 obtained.
The name in the email URL is spelled wrong. Amazon is spelled AMZON, missing the second “A”.
When you hover a cursor over the URL one can also see the real sender is not Amazon.com, but a hijacked email address.
One never knows who is on the other end of that screen and scammers count on that as a trick.
“The hackers are looking at low-hanging fruit, looking at what’s easy,” cybersecurity expert Craig Petronella said.
What’s easy for the bad actors is to send out thousands of fake texts at random, telling the recipient their Amazon account has been locked and needing to give up some private information to get it back.
“No online retailer is going to need to know your birthday or…
