I get still more spam

re: I get still more spam

Vlado Klimovský — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:36:33 GMT

If nothing else, I would consider the "Emailing us before that time will result in delays" sentence a most suspicious thing in that e-mail. How on earth could e-mailing earlier than 72 hours after the "confirmation" delay anything...?

re: I get still more spam

eddwo — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:52:43 GMT

Amazon payments is actually a consumer facing service, not just for affiliates, its the equivalent of Paypal, or Google Checkout, it allows smaller web sites to offload payment processing to Amazon's servers and means that as purchaser you don't have to trust the small site with your credit card details as you provide them only to Amazon (who hopefully know more about using/keeping them securely)

The Phisher probably doesn't know if you have an Amazon Payments account or not, but by targeting high profile sites like Ebay and Amazon they figure that enough recipients will have some connection to the site to pay more attention to the message.

re: I get still more spam

Derlin — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:19:05 GMT

Some years ago I got a message from Amazon about a purchase of a $500 gift certificate. The message was grammatically correct, but poorly designed, and gave me little indication of what was going on or who to contact if I had questions. I assumed it was a phishing attempt or some other spam. Fast forward three years when I try to use my Amazon account again, and I found out my account was frozen due to an investigation into this charge. They won't even let me close the account (since an investigation is "open"), but they'll happily let me open a new one. I haven't yet taken them up on that offer.

re: I get still more spam

John C. Kirk — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:57:34 GMT

Actually, the way that you sell stuff through Amazon is a bit weird: they give you money, but you also have to pay them a fee, and they deduct that from your bank account rather than just reducing the money that they give you. So, it seems vaguely plausible that someone could use your credit card to pay for their listings, then redirect the income to a different account.