The Catoosa County News

What do I do about an Amazon email about something I didn’t order?

- Dwight Watt does computer work for businesses, individual­s and organizati­ons and teaches about computers at a college in Northwest Georgia. His website is www.dwightwatt.com. His email address is dwight@ dwightwatt.com.

As we move into the Christmas holiday shopping season, the phishers have found new emails to send to try to get people to give up their PII (Personal Identifyin­g Informatio­n).

I received several emails in the last few days appearing to be from Amazon that either claimed to be confirming orders I had placed or saying orders I had placed were shipped. They were for items like computer ($1000 or more) or fancy sound systems. They showed ship to names and addresses that I did not know although the ones I got were for in Georgia.

First, I knew I had not placed any orders in last week or two with Amazon. Second, I looked at the address it showed they were from. I hovered over the addresses to see what they were, but they had made it appear to maybe be real as they had Amazon in the name but the domain showing was more like Amazonorde­r.com. Looking further on several of them I discovered that if they were real, Jeff Bezos had forgotten how to spell the name of his company he founded in the 1990s. Amazon was misspelled.

These are phishing emails trying to get your PII so they can place orders or empty your bank account.

Do NOT click on the links in them; and if you did, do not give any identifyin­g informatio­n.

I did not click on them but more than likely they will ask for your email address and Amazon password so then they can log on as you later. Then they will ask for credit card number to stop the or

der and give you a credit on the card. You can also go to amazon.com (or smile.amazon.com) and login and look at orders to see whether an order was really placed, and most likely no order shows.

If you did click on link and gave any of that informatio­n, then you need to immediatel­y go to Amazon. com and login and change your password. If you gave a credit card number, immediatel­y contact the credit card company, and report it. You can also report the email by forwarding it to stop-spoofing@ amazon.com

Be careful with your emails; and when in doubt, look at the email and see if anything is not really correct (yes, Jeff Bezos and his employees know how to spell Amazon) and hover over links and the email addresses in the email and see if really look legitimate.

Most companies have their domain name that all know as only thing after the @ symbol in the email address, so should be amazon.com in this case.

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Watt

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