With this year’s Amazon Prime Day sales now well underway, security experts have warned bargain-hunting shoppers to take care and make sure they don’t fall prey to scammers.
Check Point has revealed alarming new statistics about the scale of Prime Day-related scams, urging Amazon account holders to be cautious when it comes to clicking on links.
According to the firm, Amazon Prime-related phishing scams grew 16-fold in June 2023 compared with May as companies started to gear up toward promoting heavily discounted products on the ecommerce platform.
Watch out for these Prime Day scams
As many as 1,500 new domains had been discovered during this period, with more than nine in 10 confirmed to be suspicious or malicious.
With the US alone accounting for up to 60,000 orders per minute on the platform during its 2022 event, Amazon is hoping to measure equal or greater success this year.
Being that the event is somewhat of a time-limited occasion (though buyers do have two days to check for deals), cybercriminals look to capitalize on the pressure by tricking victims into supposedly urgent calls to action that ultimately reveal personal information, including payment details.
The level of creativity during the popular event is clear, leaving buyers with more than one type of scam to look out for. Some popular examples include fake payment failure emails which redirect to a malicious site that harvests credit card details and fake profile update links.
Checking the email sender’s domain is vital, but even if it appears valid, consumers are being warned to access their account by typing amazon.com into their address bar, and not following potentially suspicious links which could steal information or spread malware.
Other telltale signs include misspellings and other questionable language, a sense of urgency, and bargains that are simply too good to be true. On the other hand, legitimate sites will display a ‘lock’ icon which indicates SSL encryption (also denoted by the ‘S’ in ‘HTTPS’). Check Point says: “No lock is a major red flag.”
Finally, consumers are being advised to stick to credit cards wherever possible, which offer additional layers of financial security over debit cards.