Top 6 Amazon SCAMS to Avoid

Good evening. And right before we dive into the main topic regarding these Amazon scams, I'll quickly mention that over on my other new YouTube show, Prime Time, we recently published an episode detailing how the state of Florida is combating school shooters by installing these tiny little drones in the school buildings that can be activated within seconds to quickly neutralize the shooter, which on the surface is a good idea. It's basically a modern solution to a modern problem. But is it just another step to us living in a dystopian nightmare where the government can neutralize anyone at any time? If you want to check out that episode, which actually has footage of what these little school drones look like in action, I'll throw the link to that episode. You can find it down in the description box below. And if you check out that episode, I hope you also subscribe to that channel because I hope to grow that channel prime time into a big channel. Right now, it's about 8,500 subscribers. I hope to get that to at least 10,000 subscribers by the weekend. So, if you watch it, please subscribe. I greatly appreciate it. Now, shifting gears into today's main topic, Amazon, the biggest, if not the biggest, one of the biggest companies in the world. I'm sure you use it. I'm sure someone you know use it. Someone in your household uses it. And they recently put out a statement. You can see it up on your screen. Warning their millions of customers about new scams that are aimed to steal your hard-earned money. Specifically, in their statement, here's what Amazon wrote. Quote, "Amazon will never ask you to provide payment information for products or services over the phone. We will never ask you to disclose your password or verify sensitive personal information over the phone or on any website other than Amazon.com. Scammers constantly devise new schemes, exploit new technologies, and change tactics to avoid detection." Now, what they wrote here about scammers constantly trying out new methods is absolutely accurate. In fact, according to the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, between July of 2020 and June of 2021, around 96,000 people were targeted by some form of an Amazon related scam, with those people losing a total of at least $27 million. Now, chief among these scams is one that pretends to inform you about some problems with your Amazon Prime account. quote, "Some include text messages, emails, and even phone calls saying that your Amazon account or Prime membership was deleted or suspended. It also includes a fraudulent link or tries to get members to provide information verbally to verify their account." However, as you could probably guess, these web pages that the emails and text messages are leading you to are not real Amazon pages. quote, "Customers who land on these pages or receive these phone calls are then lured to provide account information such as payment information or account login credentials. Legitimate Amazon pages contain Amazon.com or Amazon.com/support. Other links should be first verified before handing over information. And like any good scammer worth their salt, these Amazon scammers try to create a sense of urgency in order for you to act right now, leading the Amazon warning to say the following quote. Amazon also said that scammers will try to create a sense of urgency in a bid to get victims to click a fake link or provide them with information. Be wary anytime someone tries to convince you that you must act now. Now, just as you would imagine, the Federal Trade Commission, they said that these types of scams, they are particularly effective against older people, particularly those over the age of 60, since they generally did not grow up with computer culture. To that end, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, noted that, quote, "People aged 60 and older were particularly at risk of such scams, while younger people were not. Older people, meanwhile, were more likely to be scammed out of money than younger people. Although, I will mention that I have seen other reports say that young people, such as those in their late 20s and mid-30s, they are just as likely to get scammed by these online scammers." Now, in terms of the number of the scams that are out there, in the year 2023, there were at least 202 different Amazon Prime related scams and another 186 Amazon related scams that the FTC was able to detect. And while on this program, we of course cannot go through 200 different scams. Let me break down for you the six top scams to watch out for. And of course, I hope that if you appreciate content like this, you do smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this vital information can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. Now getting into the six top scams, let's start with scam number one. Amazon sellers who are asking you to make payments on a platform other than Amazon. Now this is a fairly typical type of scam wherein you have quote unquote Amazon sellers tricking people into making payments through other apps like Venmo or Zel or even through wire transfer services like Western Union. If you go ahead with it, you basically forfeit any type of buyer protection that you would have normally had if you had bought on Amazon. meaning that if you get scammed in this way, there's very little chance of getting your money back. And the way the scam works is simple. The scammer, they create an Amazon listing for what appears to be a genuine product. They might even add some fake reviews to build that product's credibility. Then when you try to buy that product, the scammer contacts you directly with a link to a payment platform that's different from Amazon. Again, something like Cash App, Venmo, or Western Union. And if you go along with it, your payment and potentially even your credit card information then goes straight to the scammer. And so the best way to avoid this is to not even entertain the idea of paying for Amazon products outside of the Amazon platform. That moving on to scam number two. These are phone calls requesting your personal information. This is when a scammer calls you pretending to be from Amazon and then request your personal information so that you can verify your identity. And the problem with this type of a scam is that if you have a scammer, let's say, calling a thousand people a day, well, maybe one or two of those people were actually legitimately waiting for a call from Amazon for some type of reason. I mean, Amazon Prime has over 200 million users. And so, calling a thousand people a day, you will inevitably reach someone who's having an actual problem with their account. And that's why this scam is so nefarious. And so the best and probably only way to avoid this type of a situation is to just have a personal policy of never giving out your personal information over the phone like that. Because among other reasons, neither Amazon nor any legitimate reputable company would call you and then ask you to confirm your identity by giving them your personal information. And as soon as they do, that's a red flag and you should perhaps just hang up the phone right away. Next is scam number three, the famous mystery boxes on Amazon. Now, if you've been scrolling on Amazon for any length of time, you've bound to have come across some of these mystery box listings. Basically, it's someone selling a box with unknown contents, but the so-called possibilities of what might be inside are just too good to be true. The box might cost like $100, but the seller claims that it might have several thousand worth of electronics inside of it. And so, they build a box as something similar to playing the lottery. And often times these sorts of listings have a plethora of fake reviews telling people how great the contents of the box are. But this is likely a scam with the bulk of these mystery boxes containing junk that no one would actually buy. Now, this is a scam that's very easy to avoid. Basically, it's just a fake lottery. And so, just don't even think about it. All right, just a pause here for a super quick snack break brought to you by today's sponsor, Masa Chips. Probably the healthiest chips on the market. 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Basically the way that this scam works is that you might receive an email claiming to be from an Amazon representative. They then tell you to get in touch with them right away because they say that there's been some kind of an unauthorized purchase on your account or sometimes in another version of the scam, they tell you that there's been a recent issue with your purchase. You call them back with a phone number that's listed in the email and then the fake Amazon rep, they tell you that you're actually owed a fat refund because of either fraud or because you've been overcharged on some purchase that you might have made. And then in order to fix the issue, you simply need to grant the Amazon rep on the phone remote access to your computer. And then of course if you grant them that access they will just hack your personal finance information or lead you back to some kind of a fake website where they'll make purchases and so on. And so the lesson here is that if someone claiming to be from Amazon reaches out to you, don't call whatever number is listed on that email. Instead, go to the back end of your actual Amazon account and then all of that information regarding your orders will be listed there as well as the official Amazon phone number. Then there's scam number five, which works similar to the other scams, but it's done through text message instead. Basically, you receive a text message from someone claiming to be from Amazon. They tell you that you've won a prize or that you need to resolve some issue with your recent purchase, and then if you call the phone number that's listed in that text message, the scammer will try to elicit your personal information in order to confirm that it's you. or alternatively, if you click on any of the links in the text message, they can actually download malware directly onto your phone, especially if you have an Android device. And so, the solution here is just to never respond to any text messages claiming to be from Amazon. If they text you and tell you that you're having a problem with your account, again, just go to your computer, log into your actual Amazon account, and see if that's really the case. And if you need to call Amazon, the phone number is listed on their official website, not on any random text message that you might get. Then there's scam number six, fake websites that look like official Amazon web pages. This is when some sort of an official looking email comes to you again claiming to be about your account. You click on that link in the email and they take you to some Amazon affiliated page. And once you get there, it actually does look like a real Amazon website, but the domain of the website, if you look, it might be something like Amazon-billing.com or it might be Amazon, but instead of the O in Amazon, it's it's actually the number zero. These are fake. The scammers build these landing pages to look like the real thing on a fake domain that also looks real. And as you likely guessed, if you put in any personal information on those pages, well, that information will get stolen by the scammers right away. And this particular scam, it's actually exploding in popularity. In fact, in just one year alone, a company called Checkpoint Software, which tracks these type of scams, they found that about 2,300 new domain names related to the word Amazon were registered with the vast majority of them very likely being registered with the intent to scam people. And so, the lesson here is that if you ever find yourself on some domain called Amazon-services-billing.com, just get out of there ASAP. And so, these are the top Amazon scams to watch out for. But there are many others like people sending you fake Amazon invoices and then having you call the phone number listed on the invoices. They then request information in order to verify that it's you. There are scam emails telling you that your Amazon account is going to be frozen unless you verify your identity within 12 hours. You have people posting fake Amazon job offers on career websites and then when you call them to actually discuss the job, they get your personal information that way and so on and so forth. There are so many of these different type of scams to watch out for. And frankly, I used to think that people were too ridiculous for falling for these types of obvious scams, but I don't think that way anymore because recently I almost fell for these scams twice myself. Basically, what happened was that I placed an Amazon order, two different orders at two different times. And within hours of placing those orders, I received a text message from Amazon claiming to be from Amazon saying that there was a problem with my order. Now, that message was a scam. And the scammer did not know that I placed orders just recently. But volume is the name of the game here. And so these scammers, they know that this is a numbers game. You message enough people, you message a million people in a month and you're bound to hit some people who are legitimately having an issue with their Amazon account. And so that's how these things work. And so in general, I would say be very wary about handing any information through the phone. Don't click on random links either in emails or in text messages that you weren't expecting. Don't grant anyone remote control of your computer. And just in general, a good rule of thumb is that if you did not reach out to them, but they reached out to you, it's probably a scam. If you'd like to read a more comprehensive list of all these Amazon scams, I'll throw several resources down into the description box below. They'll be there alongside the link to that other episode that I mentioned at the top, the prime time episode about these tiny little drones that are being installed in Florida schools in order to combat school shooters. Check out that episode. It actually includes footage of what those drones look like as they are neutralizing the school shooter within a matter of seconds. It's very interesting. Check it out. It'll be linked down in the description box below. And then until next time, I'm your host Roman from the Epic Times. Stay informed, stay safe from these scams, and then most importantly, stay free.