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What does an Amazon phishing email look like?
In This Article
Phishing emails are designed to elicit emotion, either to make you panic or jump at a time-limited opportunity. When it comes to Amazon, the panic-including ones are more common, like there extremely expensive purported Amazon Prime subscription notification I’m going to break down below.
Quick Safety tips
This is a particularly simple spam email, lacking any Amazon logos or graphical content, but those aren’t the critical tells that show us this is a fake: phishing emails can and do come emblazoned with all kinds of corporate logos.
Nonetheless, it’s superficially convincing, listing Amazon.co.uk as the sender, from what looks, at first glance, to be an Amazon email address… or is it?
Read the From field closely, and you’ll see that it’s actually from auto-confirm@amaz0no10.co.uk – that alone is enough to show that this is a fake, but some phishing emails use more deceptive address spoofing, so let’s look for other clues.
Hover your mouse pointer over that Manage/Cancel Subscriptions link at the bottom, which the message’s authorvery muchwants us to click on. In the bottom bar of your email client or in a floating box near your cursor, you’ll see a shortened URL from the bit.do service. The service itself is entirely neutral, albeit currently popular with phishing attacks, but the very presence of a shortened URL is a red flag in an email of this kind.
If you’d like to check the contents of a shortened URL, a number of online services will expand it to show you the real URL it leads to.CheckShortURLdoes an effective job of this.
It even tries to take a screenshot of the site you’re being sent to, although it hasn’t succeeded in this case. The shortened URL links directly to an IP address, which is home to a faked-up Amazon login page that, if you’re panicking about a large and unexpected bill, is just convincing enough to trick you into entering your username and password, to be used or sold by the thief.
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For further information on common phishing tactics, see Amazon’sown guide, which includes contact details for Amazon’sspoof email reporting serviceand additional information about phishing phone calls and text messages.
K.G. Orphanides is a writer and developer whose areas of expertise include internet security, VPNs, Linux for the desktop, small-scale game development, software preservation and computer audio techno…
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Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
