Amazon Phising email - BE AWARE

[Glynne]

I received an email this morning which to all intensive purposes appeared to come from Amazon advising me that my order had been despatched. There was nothing sinister in any way and given that I have a birthday in December and with Xmas coming, I thought my wife was doing some shopping so I didn't investigate any further.
My wife hadn't ordered anything and so I logged into my account and checked my orders - nothing since June. The order number on the email was of the right format. I looked at the email again and apart from an attachment with a "doc" extension, it seemed absolutely genuine in every way.
After trying to find out a contact number for Amazon (which I didn't manage) I did find a statement saying that if you get an email and don't recognise the order, simply delete the email and don't report it to Amazon.
Foolishly I had clicked on the attachment but I don't have MS Word so nothing opened and the file name didn't suggest that it might have been anything other than a word document. I have cleared down my Amazon payment details and apart from a £20 voucher, there is nothing left on.
I can't think that there is anything else I can do so please be careful with Xmas coming up, especially if you share an Amazon account with your other half.

 

[RogerS]

'anything other than a Word document'....good job you didn't open it as there are plenty of nasties tucked away inside Word documents.

 

[Cheshirechappie]

I had three of those last week. I was suspicious because A) I hadn't ordered anything from them, and B) the genuine Amazon notifications detail what you've ordered and the price, and sometimes have a picture of what you've ordered as well, and the 'dodgy' ones didn't. Also, the genuine notifications don't have attachments. The 'order numbers' on the real notifications obviously tally with the order number generated when you place the order, the 'dodgy' ones were all different and looked like a randomly generated string of letters and numbers.

If I'm in ANY doubt whatever, I treat ALL emails from interweb sellers as dodgy, especially ones with attachments. I always check by logging out of my email account, going into the web and accessing the seller's website, and checking account details there under secure access. So far - touch wood - no problems.

 

[JohnPW]

Don't click on links in emails or open attachments unless you know who sent them. Check the address of the email, it probably won't be [email protected].

 

[Eric The Viking]

I got this over the week-end, from Yahoo!, titled "S U S P E N D E D":

"Dear User,
"Our Record Indicates your account is not updated, which may lead to the close down of your account and its must be updated within 48 hours. Click on the link below UPDATE NOW and follow the instructions. You'll also need to agree to some new terms and conditions. to avoid the close down and keep enjoying our service.
"Yahoo! 2014"

There must be a rich seam of gullibility to be mined: these emails never dry up, although few these days get through the filters.

My "Microsoft Technical Support" record was one day last week - three calls in a single day. They're actually getting more frequent, which is quite surprising given the same script (pretty much) has been in use for almost ten years now. It must yield something. otherwise they wouldn't do it, but it still surprises me.

Be very suspicious out there!

 

[whiskywill]

I've had four of these messages so far today and had eight on one day last week. They go straight to my junk folder.

 

[WoodMangler]

I got one of those amazon ones last week too. You can usually tell if you look at the message-headers, but those ones were particularly well-forged.
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