Watch out for texts and emails trying to scare you into revealing personal information that can be used to hijack any of your online accounts.
There are so many ways to get tricked into giving up your personal information that it's scary. The latest scam takes advantage of the 300 million active global accounts that Amazon has. If a scam artist could somehow trick a small percentage of Amazon customers into giving up some of their personal information, he could probably put himself in a position to steal plenty of money by making unauthorized purchases.Here's how this scam works.
What the scammer is hoping you'll do is click on a link in the text and fill in the requested information that will allow the bad actor to hijack your Amazon account. Usually, such texts have a number of grammatical and spelling errors. This one just has one which you might not notice . The fear of getting locked out of his/her Amazon account is used to motivate the target.
There are some red flags including an email address that is a long series of numbers and letters that looks suspicious. Amazon says that its legitimate websites will have a name followed by .Amazon.com, and it never includes links to an IP address consisting of a long string of numbers. Keep in mind that looking for spelling errors and grammatical errors is a good way to filter out scams from real texts. But it is not perfect. This writer once received a text from Verizon Wireless that contained several spelling errors and it was seeking personal information about my account. I called Verizon and it turned out to be a legitimate text.