Avoid phishing scams from fake Amazon emails
By Sharon Fussell, April 7, 2016
If you ever receive an email that appears to come from Amazon, eBay, PayPal, or indeed other agencies such as banks, always go to your account to check it out, but never ever go to your account via the email sent.
Why?
There are many spam email senders out there trying to cheat you and to gain access to your accounts.
They nearly always seem to be genuine in content, and some can be quite worrying when they demand payment or inform you of issues in your accounts.
If you go to your account and log into your messages there – independently of the email (don’t click on any links in dodgy emails) – then all legitimate messages will also be there waiting for you within your account inbox.
If it the email in question is not there, consider it dodgy – it’s most likely a phishing scam, where they’re after your details.
For example, lately this email has been received by some sellers on Amazon:
For improving our seller support we kindly ask you to submit us your current working telephone number.
Best regards Matt Langer (Amazon-Support)
This message seems quite benign. However, should you receive this email, do not respond. They’re trying to gain personal info about you.
You can often spot a phishing scam email from the bad grammar, spelling mistakes, strange syntax and frequent typos.
Legitimate companies have copy editors who will make sure any messages sent out are worded correctly. Even in the above example, the words ‘for improving’ should correctly be ‘to improve’.
You can report emails you consider to be spam to your email provider and also to the company the phishing scam purports to be from.
Jessica from Amazon Seller Support writes this response on the Seller Support forum…
Hi all,
Thanks for your posts.
The buyer-seller messaging system is not used by Seller Support to contact you. Please do not reply to this message if you receive it in that section of your account.
On some seller accounts there is a little orange notification asking for your number but that would be the only request outside of cases with Seller Support, Seller Performance or the Verification Team.
I’m having this investigated as I have an example from the other thread mentioned by Karen. If anyone wants to send me the encrypted buyer e-mail address please feel free to do so through a private message.
Thanks, Jessica
Whatever you do, don’t go to your accounts via any email sent to your inbox. Some emails do look very genuine, but if the email is so, you will have notice of the issue or request in your Sellers Account inbox too.
What do you think?
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