In 2015, Amazon did more than $107 billion in sales and the company now has more than 304 million active customer accounts. Just consider that for a moment. Those are pretty shocking numbers, making it the perfect cover for phishing emails.
It’s no wonder why hackers consider Amazon one of the best brand names to lure victims into falling for phishing emails. Right now, another phishing scam has resurfaced, and it’s one that I’ve seen in my personal email.
The latest email to keep an eye out for claims to be from Amazon and says that you’ve accidentally been charged twice for your last purchase. In order to get refunded, you’ll need to update your account information.
But guess what? The email is a fake, designed to take you to the cleaners. Here’s what it looks like, as presented by blogger Kirk McElhearn, who is sounding the alarm that this scam is resurfacing:
The version of this email I received actually had an attachment. Luckily, I recognized the signs and knew not to click on it. Just last weekend I told you about the risks of ransomware hiding in your inbox. These attachments are how scammers try to trick you. Click here to see what makes your inbox so vulnerable.
Here’s what to do
If you see an email like this in your inbox:
- Be sure to exercise caution before you click on anything. Hover over any links and see where they direct before you click. If links are provided to go to a website, don’t click it. Navigate to the company’s site yourself without the link.
- Take some time and try to spot the typos. In this particular example, there are a few errors, a capital A when it should be lowercase, an extra space in between “your” and “billing” and there’s also missing periods at the end of several sentences. If you’re not sure that you can spot the signs, click here to take our phishing IQ test to see how many stand out to you.
- Practice multi-level authentication, which means you have at least two forms of verification, such as a password and a security question before you log into any sensitive accounts.
- Another thing is to have an internet security system. We recommend our sponsor Kaspersky Lab. Software from Kaspersky Lab can recognize and block ransomware. Even if it’s a new version or unknown version of a ransomware, Kaspersky Lab can figure out that the program is doing something it shouldn’t. Kaspersky Lab will stop it from running and will roll back any files that were encrypted to a previous non-encrypted version. Of course, Kaspersky Lab software also helps filter out and warn you about phishing scams, so your odds of even downloading a ransomware virus are slim. Get this protection, and so much more, with Kaspersky Total Security. Buy it today and save 50 percent.
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