Amazon Prime Minister’s Day offers consumers deep discounts on appliances, electronics and other products, but also provides an opportunity for cybercriminals to take advantage of their affinity for a good deal.
Bad actors are known to prey on shoppers’ desire to shop online during the retail holiday season, which is one of the most anticipated shopping events of the year. Indeed, Amazon said scams tend to increase around the event, which will happen this year takes place on July 16 and 17.
Last year, approx Prime Minister’s Day, Amazon shoppers reported three times more fraud than usual for the company. Customer reports of bad actors trying to defraud them jumped from roughly 5,000 a week to more than 14,000 a week, Scott Knapp, Amazon’s director of worldwide buyer risk prevention, told CBS News.
Criminals target consumers by email, text message and even phone, according to Knapp. In particular, there has been a recent increase in cybercriminals successfully defrauding consumers over the phone.
Fake product reviews, phishing and “collision” attempt., where criminals send shoppers links used to steal their information, are not unique to Amazon or Prime Day. They typically increase around any major sales event, including Black Friday or the Christmas shopping season, according to the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
“More deals are great for consumers, and more people out shopping is great for businesses big and small. Just be careful and don’t get so caught up in the excitement that you fall for phishing scams, deceptive ads, and scam websites. similar.” warns the BBB.
Counterfeit products
In addition to criminals creating fake websites to try to obtain Prime members’ personal information, they also pose as legitimate third-party sellers on Amazon.com, but the goods are fake.
“The only thing certain about the market is that every major trade event is accompanied by an increase and influx of the availability of counterfeit products,” Saleem Alhabash, professor of digital advertising at Michigan State University. “There’s always market awareness from counterfeiters that these are high-volume days – and from a psychological perspective, consumers know there’s a time limit to get that good deal, and fraudsters use that to make their product available. falsified.”
An abnormally low price for an expensive product can be a telltale sign that a product is inauthentic. Of course, this is harder to find during Prime Day, when shoppers expect deeply discounted prices on popular goods.
“In terms of detecting malicious activity, we say that if you see an expensive brand offered at a much lower price that looks too good to be trusted, that’s a red flag,” Alhabash said. “But that can be tricky with a sales event like Prime Day, because the whole idea is to sell things at lower prices.”
Cybercriminals are using Amazon Prime Day as an opportunity to increase the types of scams they target consumers throughout the year. There is a wide range of fraudulent activities to watch out for this year.
The high volume of third-party sellers on Amazon.com also presents an opportunity for fraudsters to pose as legitimate businesses. Often, they claim to sell a hot product, like a high-end vacuum cleaner or blender, but once they get the consumers’ credit card information, they’ll send them a subpar smack, or nothing at all.
“They present themselves as sellers of branded products and pay a lot of money,” said Ram Bala, associate professor of AI and analytics at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. “As the number of sellers has increased, it is harder to keep track of who is fraudulent and who is not.”
Amazon’s Knapp said the company has “zero tolerance” for counterfeit products in its store and removes knockoffs from its site as soon as it identifies them. “Then we go after bad actors trying to sell counterfeits in the store,” Knapp said.
Additionally, to date, Amazon has taken action against more than 40,000 phishing websites and 10,000 fraudulent phone numbers.
AI Reviews
Fake reviews have also proliferated online, aided by AI-generating tools like ChatGPT that make it easy for cybercriminals to rapidly churn out product reviews.
“If a consumer is looking at a review right now, it could be created or added by AI,” Saoud Khalifah, the founder of Fakespot, told CBS MoneyWatch. “People are using tools like ChatGPT to help them with their jobs, but they’re also being used to write reviews.”
However, fake reviews are likely to be filled with grammatical errors and contain sentences that don’t make sense. They also tend to be vague and lack details about the product they’re associated with, according to Khalifa.
Sellers of fake products often generate dozens of fake reviews to draw attention to their sites. If an item has 100 five-star reviews generated in one day, this may be a hint that they are not authentic.
According to Fakespot, product categories that are relatively insulated from fake reviews include Apple products, video gaming chairs, computers and books. Bluetooth headsets, clothes, stick vacuums, and vacuum cleaners usually have the most fake reviews, as do the cheapest electronics in the $30-$50 range.
“That’s because it’s a very competitive category, with so many products and sellers competing with each other, and the list that wins is the one with the most reviews,” Khalifah said.
Phishing and phishing scams
Phishing scams and so-called smishing scams, in which criminals contact you via SMS or text messages, are numerous and can also be very sophisticated.
“Fraudsters are refining their techniques, and the most common type of scam is that they’re creating fake websites that look like Amazon in order to get you caught in a scamming loop,” Zulfikar told CBS MoneyWatch Ramzan, chief scientist at Aura.
Phishing emails can offer consumers fake deals and direct them to a website that appears to be Amazon but is actually a copycat. Signs of a fraudulent website can be found in its URL. It can contain Amazon somewhere in the address, but with a zero it can in place of the letter “o”, for example.
“The only noticeable difference might be in the address bar at the top,” Ramzan said. “Before making your purchase, triple check to make sure you’re not buying from a site other than Amazon.com. Fraudsters may have Amazon somewhere in the address, but it won’t be in the right place.”
Avoid accidentally visiting copycat sites altogether by accessing the store through the Amazon app, advises Ramzan. “Don’t click a link in an email and expect it to take you to a legitimate site.”
The BBB warns that “photos may be stolen from other websites, so don’t believe what you see. If logos or other images on websites look unclear, take this as a red flag for a scam.”
Amazon’s Knapp said criminals most often try to obtain Prime members’ credentials by claiming an order needs to be confirmed or that they need to reset Prime memberships.
An email or text from a cybercriminal may tell the recipient that there is a problem with an order and that they should click on a link to verify their address or credit card information. It is fake and criminals do it to collect personal information. Similarly, they prey on shoppers’ desire to get deals before they expire, telling victims there’s a problem with their Prime membership and they need to submit their credit card details to reinstate the membership so they can shop Prime Day deals.
“These messages are all variations of things we’ve seen classically,” Knapp said.