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How to Distinguish Real Amazon E-mails From Amazon Spam

by Amar Toor on June 25, 2010 at 10:45 AM

fake amazon logoIf you're an avid reader or a compulsive video-on-demand customer, chances are that your inbox sees a pretty regular flow of e-mails from Amazon. Not all of them, though, are legit. A recent wave of malware has been sneaking its way into inboxes, under the guise of Amazon's trustworthy name. The e-mails appear to be order confirmations from the online store, but beneath that facade lies a nasty Trojan Horse just waiting to devastate your computer. As PCWorld's Dan Tynan reports, the fake Amazon e-mails, at first glance, look remarkably similar to the genuine variety. But, if you look closer, you'll soon notice a few tell-tale inconsistencies.

For one, true blue Amazon e-mails always refer to a recipient by his or her Amazonian user name, not a user's e-mail address, as the spam mail does. And, unlike real order confirmations, the text within the average spam message doesn't cite a user's billing address, since that's still a factoid most spammers wouldn't be able to dig up.

Perhaps the biggest red flag, though, is that every single link embedded within the malicious e-mail directs the recipient to Booksalon.kr. Whereas most phishing scams usually lead a targeted user through two or three links before arriving at the main page, the spammers behind this campaign clearly have no taste for the subtle. If those three indicators still manage to evade you, take a closer look at the numbers in the receipt. The scam artists not only made several math errors, but didn't even bother to use the same dollar amounts throughout the entire e-mail.

Tynan tried snooping around the site, but his Kaspersky security system threw up an ominous warning to deter him from going any further. It may be a false alarm, but you're still better off not testing your luck. [From: PCWorld]

Tags: amazon, amazon spam, amazon.com, AmazonSpam, email, emails, malware, scam, security, spam, top, trojan, TrojanHorse

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