16 Feb 2025 - AJ
I’m fascinated by scams, but most of the time I don’t get hit by scam attempts so I don’t get to talk about my own experiences here.
Usually I see the fake tolls scam, the fake incomplete address scam, or attempts at starting a pig butchering scam*, but this one was a new one.
The call came in while I was at work. I don’t answer my phone if I don’t recognize the caller so I let this one go to voicemail. Imagine my surprise when I saw that supposedly I’d ordered a MacBook and was supposed to press 1 if I hadn’t. (I suspect if you’ve let this go to voicemail that calling the number given would have also connected you to the scammers, but the whole thing screamed fraud to me so I didn’t.) I checked my Amazon account and did not see a MacBook order, and likewise checked my archived orders to make sure it wasn’t hiding there. Needless to say, it was not. I also checked my bank account linked to my Amazon account, and likewise nothing there.
Of course I checked to see if this was a known scam and of course it was.
In one of the reddit threads, someone noted that if you are shipping something to an address you haven’t shipped to before, they will make you re-enter the entire 16-digit number - something I can confirm, having had the same thing happen when I shipped a gift card to a friend. This is Amazon’s defense mechanism, not contacting the customer.
*I haven’t covered this particularly nasty one yet, but I will someday. If you’re curious, search “pig butchering scam” in your favorite search engine or video sharing site and you’ll get a lot of useful content.