Like a dog spotting a squirrel, I can’t help but notice when a fresh text pops up on my iPhone. The little gray notification catches my eye and I’m instantly pulled away from the task at hand. Plus, this one looked important. It was, but only because it helped me identify a very dangerous and pernicious, Amazon shopping scam.
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, such scams are on the rise (opens in new tab) and most of us are doing at least some gift shopping through Amazon (the retailer reported more than $1B in sales (opens in new tab) during Black Friday).
It’s this yuletide blend of frenzied shopping, excitment, and a low-level fear that someone is going to scam you that, naturally, scammers leverage to worm their way into your privacy and personal technology, all with the sole intent of stealing your identity, data, credit cards, log-ins and more.
While I wasn’t successfully phished, I purposely played along with a scammer so I could show you exactly how to identify and avoid a similar attack.
Like other alerts I receive from legitimate sources, this one was brief. It said:
“Your card has charged with $649 for XGIMI Elfin Mini Projector
Order id #EMPY2219 on 05/DEC/2022
N0T ordered by you?
Contact us: +17204813408″
It’ll happen to you
I’m fairly certain all of you will receive a text like this before the holidays are over. Take a good look at this one. It has grammatical and typographical errors that include a zero instead of an “o” and a missing word. No…
