Banned From Amazon, Possibly Losing All of My Books

[DiapDealer]

For the record, I've been getting slammed recently with phishing texts pretending to be from Amazon.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

For the record, I've been getting slammed recently with phishing texts pretending to be from Amazon.

I've seen the same which was the main reason I suggested that the email @vxf responded to was a phishing email.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I've seen the same which was the main reason I suggested that the email @vxf responded to was a phishing email.

Very well could be. I always have to warn my octogenarian father not to click on any links in email or texts that claim to be account related, period.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I've seen the same which was the main reason I suggested that the email @vxf responded to was a phishing email.

I got a phone call "from Amazon" today which rapidly morphed into, not a password acquisition attempt, but a remote access trojan installation attempt ("do you have an iPhone or Samsung?" was a giveaway -- my answer "neither" is both truthful -- it's a Fairphone 4 -- and unhelpful to the scamming bastards).

[vxf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Are you certain that the email was from Amazon? To me, it sounds quite possible that you responded to a phishing email and the credentials you entered on that site were used to attempt to make purchases using the recorded payment information which can easily trigger an account freeze.

As for sending your billing address information, what does that have to do with your account being frozen? Amazon's customer service can be accessed via email, etc. without access to your account so sending them an email with the image of a snail mail bill in it's envelope showing your address through the window would likely work (assuming that you are still getting some bills from utilities, the tax man, whatever via snail mail).

I see why you would think about fraud - the whole thing did not make much sense to me either. But, indeed, they did confirm the authenticity of that email over the phone - and that was a number I got off the Amazon site, not from the email, so I am pretty sure I was talking to their people.

Why they absolutely had to have that uploaded rather than emailed/faxed is beyond me. The people I spoke to over the phone basically kept referring to this almost-mythical anti-fraud team that they themselves supposedly could not communicate with, but which was responsible for blocking my account. Honestly, I lost patience with them pretty quickly and just let the ban stand. The whole impression I got was that the Italian team was not quite in top shape, frankly. My experience with the US site was a lot more positive (although, over the years, I had some weird moments with Amazon US as well...).

I am sure that, with a bit more effort, I could have fixed the situation. Nevertheless, my whole point was that, indeed, you can get banned by Amazon for no reason.

[Kusuri]

Stuff like this, is the reason why i always DE-DRM my books i buy and backup them savely somewhere. it can happen anytime that you lose access to your account or the digital media you bought, so backup'ing them is the best way i found to prevent such a scenario.

but i really would pay attention to such emails who claim "you need to verify information by clicking this link in the email". i got recently a ton of mails by scammers who tried to gain my account details by telling me my payment details are wrong and similiar things. there are even indian scammers who call you. they will tell you you have a new order on your account (iphone or something like that), and if you did that yourself. they then want access to your computer to basically trojan horse it so they have access to it (they can see your screen, webcam, copy paste informations, have direct access to your files etc).. so they then will steal money from your online banking and often even steal data from you for other accounts. sometimes, they even try to dox you if you catch them and upload illegal porn on your harddrive and then tell you they contant the fbi and similiar stuff. and then call with spoofed telephonenumbers to act like the fbi and want money... you really have to pay attention to not fall for such traps.

@vxf
sometimes it helps to contact a amazon support team from another country.. as weird it may sound. i often had issues where the germany support team wouldn't help me.. so i contacted the english one and they helped without any issue. my feeling is that the support teams of some countries amazon operates in are just worse than others.

[monophoto]

I got a text (SMS) message yesterday pretending to be from Amazon and warning that my account was going to be closed in 24 hours if I didn't respond immediately. The 'reason' given was 'suspicious activity involving Firefox'.

Didn't waste a lot of time worrying about it - just forwarded it to my ISP's spam monitoring account.

It used to be phone calls and e-mails, but now its SMS messages. And another route for this stuff is messages forwarded within a voice mail system. One of the worst offenders for that approach is AT&T. I've lost track of the number of times I've called AT&T (my wireless provider) to complain about unwanted marketing messages from their Direct TV subsidiary - they promise to make the calls stop, but they keep coming

UPDATE: Got a similar text three days later. This time, I did a quick search and found that there is an Amazon address that you can reach out to about bogus phone calls and e-mails. They don't respond to individual cases, but claim to appreciate details of specific cases that they can use to pursue solutions.

[Kusuri]

Originally Posted by monophoto

It used to be phone calls and e-mails, but now its SMS messages. And another route for this stuff is messages forwarded within a voice mail system. One of the worst offenders for that approach is AT&T. I've lost track of the number of times I've called AT&T (my wireless provider) to complain about unwanted marketing messages from their Direct TV subsidiary - they promise to make the calls stop, but they keep coming

The problem with that is usually that there are companys who sell access to the telephone networks to other companys (who then often provide VOIP services & co). some companys have direct access to the network, and they sell this access then. with such an access, you can spoof your telephone number really easy. especially scam callcenters in turkey and india buy access to the telephone network from such companys and then automatic call telephone numbers in germany, america etc. with spoofed telephonenumbers. they use computers who automatically go through each number (0000000, 0000001, 0000002 etc.) till they reach someone. they do the same with sms messages.. often they send millions of messages to each number they can in the hope you call them back and they can scam you then.

so as long the telephone network providers sell access to their networks to such companys, this will not stop. the protocols of the telephone network have so many vulnerabilitys you can abuse as a scammer, that they would need to completly remodell the protocols to fix this issues. but they won't. they are aware about this issues for more than 10 years if not a lot longer.. and still didn't fix it.

[haertig]

At the very least, if you are bound and determined to respond to a probable phishing email (you shouldn't!), then when you go to login to your account, intentionally use an incorrect password. If that appears to log you in (it would be fake), then you've proven it was a scam. Or if other weird stuff happens - like going to a webpage you weren't expecting, or getting an error that a webpage could not be displayed. Those are all signs of fraud. If your intentionally incorrect password is rejected, as it would be on the legitimate website, then maybe you are on the legit website. But you still don't know that for sure.

But best - by far - is to ignore the phishing attempt. I cannot think of any company that would send you and email saying your account will be suspended if you don't respond to the email. If you have the technical knowledge, you can look at the incoming email source, including headers, and look at domains, trace IP addresses, etc., to help determine the legitimacy of the email. But I only do this checking for personal entertainment. I would never enter any sensitive information - passwords, etc. - after following a link sent in an email or text message. Any email. Legitimate companies never ask you to do that, unless they are stupid. And in that case, maybe you should consider doing business with a different, more intelligent, company instead.

BTW, I do sometimes follow links sent in emails ... for entertainment. But that is done from my play computer that has nothing on it. No writable media - no hard disks, no SSDs, no flash drives, nada. I boot it off of a DVD and load the entire OS into RAM. I connect it to a totally isolated VLAN network. So the phisher is not going to harm my computer, network, or personal data in any way. And I know not to enter any sensitive information. Well, I do enter that stuff, but it is totally fake made up info so I can probe and look around at what the scammer is attempting to do. And often times your email address is included in the link they want you to click on. They use your click to verify that the email address is a good one, ripe for selling for future spam. So you have to alter the link they want you to click on to hide this information if you're going on an entertainment adventure. Sometimes your email address is in plain text, sometimes it's encoded. So be sure to kludge up any random looking character strings in the link before actually going there.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by haertig

At the very least, if you are bound and determined to respond to a probable phishing email (you shouldn't!), then when you go to login to your account, intentionally use an incorrect password. If that appears to log you in (it would be fake), then you've proven it was a scam.

Good tip that.

[Kusuri]

Originally Posted by haertig

intentionally use an incorrect password[/i][/b].

that would helped you maybe 5-10 years ago to spot a phishing site, but not current ones. you would be amazed how hightech and deeply developed phishing pages got this days.

example:

- some phishing pages use leaked / hacked databases from websites and send such phishing emails to the emails from this database, and check if you input the password from this specific hack. if you input any other password, they tell you the password is wrong (but still log the password so they can try to login)

- a lot of phishing pages just give you a "wrong password" message or another kind of error so you believe something is wrong with your account.. doesn't matter what password you input

there are a lot of other tricks phishing pages use this days.. some of them even have call centers behind them who trick you into thinking you talk with the specific company. they sent you a email that tells you there is a issue with your account and to please log in.. and then tell you your password is wrong or similiar.. and you need to call them. the telephone number is then a scammer callcenter acting like they would be the support of the company.

so.. best you can do is just to go DIRECTLY and MANUALLY to the website of the account and login there. never follow any links in emails.. always go directly to the website and login there yourself. that way you are sure its not a phishing page & if there should be really something wrong with your account, you will see it anyway. and then you are safe that the support is real and not a scammer.

[BookCat]

I suggest going onto youtube, if you have the time, and spend a few hours watching scam baiting videos, especially the ones related to Amazon scams.

[JSWolf]

And check the email address the email came from. It's can never be what Amazon would use.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And check the email address the email came from. It's can never be what Amazon would use.

Of course it can. Email "From" and "Reply-to" addresses are easily spoofed, by design. It's a needed feature. Few people would be able to understand the detailed headers showing source SMTP, intervening MXs and final mailbox server (IMAP, POP3, Web) which would show it wasn't from Amazon if you knew what list of SMTP servers they use.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Of course it can. Email "From" and "Reply-to" addresses are easily spoofed, by design. It's a needed feature. Few people would be able to understand the detailed headers showing source SMTP, intervening MXs and final mailbox server (IMAP, POP3, Web) which would show it wasn't from Amazon if you knew what list of SMTP servers they use.

I have never seen any spam or phishing emails showing the same email address as would have been used by the company the email is about.