As I posted last month, March was fraud prevention month. That of course wasn’t meant to imply that now that March has passed we can forget about fraud prevention. And to underscore that, Amazon put out an email warning today about fraud when buying from them in which they included some eye-opening 2022 statistics that should make you sit up and take notice:
- They initiated the takedown of more than 20,000 phishing websites.
- They initiated the takedown of more than 10,000 phone numbers that were used for impersonating scams.
- They referred hundreds of scammers across the globe to law enforcement.
To put those numbers in perspective, that’s about 55 websites and 27 phone numbers on average per day for every day of 2022.
If you or your shop do business with Amazon here’s what they want you to know:
- Be wary of false urgency. Amazon will not pressure you to act now. Scammers try to create a sense of urgency to persuade you to do what they’re asking.
- Never pay over the phone.
- Always verify orders directly with Amazon.
It’s unfortunate that we have to revisit the topic of security frequently but it’s the world we live in now. And, obviously, if Amazon alone has 20,000 phishing website taken down in a single year, scamming is big business at which the bad guys must be succeeding if they keep persisting.