COLORADO SPRINGS — Amazon is one of the most commonly used company names by fraudsters and with delivery drivers moving millions of packages a day in the lead up to Christmas, the crooks know there are many people nervous about those deliveries who can be tricked into sharing personal details and credit card information.
"(BEEP) Hello. This is Alexa from Amazon support and this is an automated voice confirmation,” the answering machine played as Bonnie, a News5 viewer listened.
”We do not personally subscribe to Alexa, so we knew there was something going on immediately and Amazon had never called us before,” Bonnie said.
The message played on.
”In case you miss this call… immediately call our billing and frauds protection department.”
Bonnie explained the scenario laid out to her in this automated voicemail.
”They said that this iPhone we had ordered was going to be delivered to some place in Georgia and if this wasn’t correct to give them a call and they gave an area code that was not local and wasn’t an 800 number,” Bonnie said.
After identifying these red flags, Bonnie reached out to News5 about the call.
”If you’re someone who has nobody to talk to about this you would feel mortified that this has happened to you and you weren’t smart enough to catch the problem,” Bonnie told News5.
Her first step in protecting herself was checking her latest bill for anything suspicious.
”I went immediately to my Amazon account to see if I indeed had some Christmas order on there that I didn’t order,” said Bonnie.
After confirming there weren’t actually any issues with her account, she noticed this legitimate email was just sent to her by Amazon warning customers about suspicious calls like the one she took.
”My first thought was I’ve got to contact KOAA and have them come out and tell everybody about this wily Christmas scam. That was my first thought when the message was over was other people,” said Bonnie.
Amazon says while some of its departments may call customers, the company will never ask users for personal information or ask for credit card information to help with some kind of unexpected refund.
Calls like this are happening so often right now that Amazon has specific webpages designed to help customers figure out if calls are legitimate.
Here are the links:
To report suspicious calls, texts and emails
Help identifying if a call is legitimate or not
Amazon Blog post with information they want customers to know
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