Last week, July 12 and 13 were — together — Prime Day. Two days later, someone used Amazon to try to defraud our account.
Presumably, the crook assumed Amazon was going to be showing up on so many financial accounts this week that Prime Day would provide some air cover for increased fraudulent activity. This makes sense because Amazon Prime members purchased 100,000 items per minute during the Prime Day event, spending over $3 billion and purchasing more than 300 million items overall.
In other words, Prime Day gave fraudsters a target-rich environment.
Steve Bradford, Senior Vice President EMEA at identity security firm SailPoint, reports, “Fraudsters have never been so ruthless with their tactics, and they’re increasingly using ones that are far more personal and harder to spot. In the latest cases, we’re seeing an increase in phishing and credential harvesting email attempts linked to Amazon Prime Day.”
It’s true. My wife and I were among those targeted. In our case, it wasn’t a phishing attack. The bad guys had already harvested some of our personal information.
Sitrep (situation report)
On Monday, July 18, during a routine review of our bank accounts, we noticed a $193.77 charge from Amazon. This was anomalous because we never used that account to make purchases from Amazon.
CHECKCARD AMAZON. COM AMZN.C SEATTLE WA ON 07/15 – $193.77
The charge was incurred on 7/15, just three days earlier. We immediately did a deep dive into…
