A new scam related to the famous e-commerce Amazon is circulating via SMS, here's how to recognize the threat and how to defend our money from hackers
Have we received in recent days a suspicious SMS on our smartphone notifying us of an expected pickup of our Amazon package? Let's be very careful, because this is a new computer scam devised by a group of cyber criminals.
It is to all intents and purposes a classic phishing attempt. Basically, the hackers send us a message to our smartphone that says, "Package waiting for (our first and last name), please check details and confirm." Attached there is the usual malicious link that redirects us to a website, quite similar to the Amazon one but not the original one, where we are asked for all our account details that we have registered on the famous e-commerce. Once we enter this information we will be stolen by cyber criminals who will use it to access our Amazon profile and empty the money from the credit card we have registered on the site.
How to defend yourself against the Amazon scam
To understand that this is a scam, you don't have to be an expert in computer security, but just remember one thing: Amazon does not require via SMS any operation related to updating the data on our account. No package will be rejected, not sent or blocked because of our non-response to that message. For each operation on account and delivery we must rely solely and exclusively to the private area in the page of our profile on the famous e-commerce. So it is a good rule never to click on suspicious links that arrive us not only via SMS but also in our electronic mail. It doesn't matter if the sender pretends to be Amazon or another famous company with which we have an online profile. It is very easy for hackers to steal the identity and logos of such popular brands. Secondly, if you accidentally click on links and get redirected to hacked websites, check the URLs which are often slightly different from the original ones.