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Amazon Prime Invoice Scam

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Posted: Wednesday, January 29, 2025 at 07:25 AM | Categories: Phishing

Received a scam/phishing email the other day that really surprised me. The message is so clearly a scam that I wonder why they even bothered to send it. Here's the email message:

Bogus Amazon Prime email

Definitely a Scam

There's a lot of reasons why this is a scam, do not call the phone number in the email.

There's a lot of reasons why this is a scam:

  1. That's not the Amazon logo at the top of the message. Everything about it is wrong.
  2. Amazon Prime doesn't cost $239 a year, it costs $139 a year.
  3. Amazon doesn't use the term Sales Order Number, only companies with phone or in-person sales teams do. Amazon would call it an Order Number.
  4. There's a bunch of underlined content in the email, but none of them are links. Amazon is smart enough to not use underline in their email messages because most Internet Savvy people will assume they're links.
  5. There's no links in the email message, not a single one. Any email from Amazon would have at least one pointing to the Amazon portal.
  6. There's no link to the recipient's Amazon account, or, at a minimum, the specific order referenced in the email.
  7. The phone number is underlined in blue, making you think it's a link when it's not.

Deliberate Mistakes

A while back, I read an analysis of scammer messages and why they deliberately put mistakes in them. The purported reason is to keep intelligent people from responding to them and wasting the scammer's time. Like in this instance, the email doesn't have any links you can click, you must call the phone number to yell at them for your unexpected Amazon Prime order. That takes up a human's time on the phone to talk you into giving them your Amazon account password.

Instead, they want people who don't know what the Amazon logo looks like to call them.

I can't remember in which book I read about this, but here's a random reference to the topic: Why Scammers Make Spelling and Grammar “Mistakes”.

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