Have you ever received a bogus message from Amazon indicating suspicious activity on your account? Well, I have, so many times in fact, I’ve come to ignore them.
Ninety-nine times out of 100 these are phishing scams hoping you will click on a link you shouldn’t or give personal or financial information over the phone. So, yeah, I didn’t think much of the messages from Amazon a little over a week ago when it said suspicious activity had occurred. To be sure, I checked my account, didn’t see anything suspicious, changed my password, and moved on.
Mistake No. 1, ignoring the barrage of emails from Amazon. Mistake No. 2, not checking my inbox during a vacation. In a 10-day period, a scammer was able to fraudulently return lawfully purchased items from my account to a gift card, which he then used to purchase another digital gift card on my account. When I didn’t notice this activity buried in some emails from Amazon, because I was on vacation willfully not checking emails, he then proceeded with the full-blown scam to order worthless items racking up thousands of dollars in charges.
The issue has been referred to Amazon’s fraud department, whom I have yet to hear from. But from what I can tell, thousands of dollars in bogus orders masquerading as legitimate packages have been sent out to recipients in my address list associated with my account. The packages, which are cloth dust masks, are being sent to everyone in my online delivery profiles including my mother and brother-in-law. The masks, which are worthless COVID masks marked at $99 each, are appearing as orders ranging in price from $360-$430. There have been over 30 purchases of these “masks” against my account.
The scam is tricky and nefarious and undoubtedly there’s hackers who know the inside of Amazon. The orders don’t appear in my orders list but buried under “archived orders” and only visible when I click on customer service — another indication of the inside origin of this scam. Packages are delivered to make it seem like legitimate deliveries, yet the value of the order verses how much the account don’t add up.
I’ve reported this scam to local law enforcement, closed my accounts, spent hours on the phone with Amazon, and notified my bank. For sure there’s a shell company involved located in Kent, Washington, but who knows where the fraud started … China, Russia, Nigeria or Seattle? Maybe they will find out. Maybe not. I will probably never know.
So much for easing back into the school year
