Security experts are warning shoppers that there may be a high spike of phishing activity to capitalize on the Amazon Prime Day promotions.
Amazon Prime Day is the biggest promotional event of the year for the e-commerce giant. It is larger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined in terms of money spent. This, however makes it a huge target for online scammers to mimic Amazon Prime pages to trick shoppers into inputting personal and financial data.
Large fraud prevention companies have analysed millions of web pages using deep learning, language processing, and computer vision technology to be able to spot phishing patterns.
Phishing scams may look like fake Amazon pages where they request card details like a legitimate page would. The difference being that when you enter your details, they do not go to Amazon but to a malicious actor. This information can be sold on the dark web or used by the attacker to purchase items for themselves.
What can you do to make sure you do not fall for these fake pages or emails?
The best tip is to check the email or web address. For example, official Amazon pages will always be “Amazon.co.uk”. For hackers to create fake pages they cannot use the same domain, so they will try to name it something very similar to catch you off guard, for example “Amazonshop.co.uk”. In conclusion, always know the official domain of the site you are buying from. If it is different in any way do not go ahead with it.
Other giveaways of fake emails or pages are things such as bad grammar, misspellings and blurry images or images that are not related to the context of the page or email. For emails especially, always be sure to use common sense when considering what the email is asking you for.