A new warning has just been issued for millions of Amazon users, as a new wave of attacks on accounts has suddenly surged 5000%. This will come at you by text message, which is nothing new. Between undelivered packages, unpaid tolls and motoring fines, the scale of text attacks sweeping the U.S. and Europe is “out of control.”
The team at Guardio tells me that these new “Amazon refund scam texts” have surged “more than 50 times in the past two weeks.” Even in the world of text message attacks, that’s some increase. “These texts began appearing shortly after Prime Day, which started two weeks ago on July 8,” and spawned plenty of other attacks as well.
The texts are nothing to do with Amazon, and the attackers do not even know you have an account. They’re just playing a numbers game and most of you do. “The link in the message leads to a fake Amazon site designed to steal your account details and hack it.”
Amazon warns that “scammers may send text messages claiming to be Amazon,” and that account holders should be “mindful” if they “receive a text message for orders or deliveries that you are not expecting.” It’s the same for refunds.
But again this is a numbers game. The attackers assume you will have made a recent purchase on Amazon and who doesn’t want an unexpected refund? The link is a short-code to beat Amazon’s other warning to watch for misspelled URLs.
If you receive this text, and many millions of you will. delete it immediately per the advice from the FBI and state and local police forces. If you have any doubts, log into your Amazon account using your app or usual methods and check there.
These text attacks are now an industry with billions of messages sent. Campaigns are being driven by organized criminal gangs, largely out of China and beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. The telecoms networks filter out plenty of texts, but attackers use farms of normal phones and SIMs to bypass normal checks.
The hope is that there will be a technical solution at some point. Google’s AI-driven scam detection is one such hope, as are new solutions from elsewhere.
Trend Micro warns that “30% of consumers have been scammed online, nearly 40% didn’t realize it until they’d already lost money and most didn’t use any tech to verify the scam — relying on instinct alone.” Its new ScamCheck tech is another potential bandaid.
