Home delivery is booming these days. More and more people are opting to have groceries and other necessities delivered due to shopping restrictions caused by COVID-19. As you’d expect, scammers are taking advantage of the situation.
In fact, a reader gave me a heads up about an authentic-looking phishing scam that ended up in his inbox.
Good morning Cyn, believe the following is a SCAM because it has my renewal dates wrong and it is asking for my SSN. Thought you ought to see it.
Wow! That looks totally legitimate. Good catch on the renewal dates. And, of course, Amazon would never need to know your Social Security Number.
A common technique of phishing scams is to tell you there’s a problem with your account that requires you to enter credit card or other private information.
Sometimes the links take you to a page that downloads malicious software onto your device. Or they might include an attachment containing a malicious payload.
Security experts Kaspersky shared this image of fake shipping company website that looks pretty darn convincing. Could you tell the difference?
If you think an alert might be the real thing, your best bet is not to click on any links in the email. Instead, open up a browser and go to the website for your account. Then you can look up your account and see if there are any issues.
I also have received a number of scam emails about my Amazon Prime account. I don’t have one.
Another handy, quick scam detection trick is to read the actual sending email address (not the “name” of the sender). This typically will be some kind of gibberish, not an address you would associate with the entity if the email were really from the named sender. In most browsers/clients, you will be able to locate a menu giving you the option to read the entire transmittal history on the subject email.