Let's talk about late fees

[NightskyeB4Dawn]

Tis the season.

Two days ago I had a charge on my account from Amazon. I only use Amazon about 4 or 5 times a year. So I was immediately on alert. I too went the online route at first, and too, was not satisfied with the results.

I made the pesky phone call and if took a few minutes, but the lady that answered the phone sounded American. It took a hot second to find out the problem, and they fixed it right away, though I never found out how that "Prime" charge got there in the first place.

Less than 24 hrs later I got a suspicious email from Amazon claiming that they needed to check my account and it had a box in the middle saying "Click Here".

Not on your life.

I called Amazon again. They asked me to forward the email to them. Which I did. They checked, and my account had not been compromised, but a phishing scheme was in play.  Of course they told me to never click on anything in those emails, and to notify them right away, a pure case of preaching to the choir.

People can grump about Amazon all they want but I've never had anything but great service from them and problems are rare. In fact their delivery (they have their own drivers here) is by far the most reliable of all- USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL cannot hold a candle to them!

E-mail scams are a growing problem. Never click on a link from any e-mail you receive- go directly to their website yourself and log in to check for problems. Scammers are counting on the fact that if the e-mail looks enough like an official one from an actual business people will click without thinking and unknowingly give away their log in information. I know too many older folks who have had to learn the hard way, very sad! 

I don't use Amazon that often, but I think my post was fair to them. I had a moderate wait for an operator, I reported the operator was not foreign, easy to understand, and handled the issue quickly.

I am not blaming them for the email that came afterwards that proved to be part of a phising scheme, in fact, I think the whole false charge thing was to make sure that I was in communication with Amazon, thinking it would give me a reason to believe the phising scheme was legit. After all. I initiated the interaction with Amazon.

The dead give away for me, was the email stated they needed additional information from me with a box to click. I had already been in communication with Amazon and with two departments. The issue was resolved and I received proof of that from both my bank and my credit card company. There would have bee no need for Amazon to need anything additional from me.

So that was a giant red flag for me. I never go to any of my accounts through an email. Even with my monthly statements and notifications. I always exist my email and even use a separate browser.

You posted good information. The police IT team have a great forensic team, and I just finished a class "Technology Abuse: For Non-Tech People" last week. It was good, but a bit overly techy, since it was supposed to be for non-tech people.

Talking about classes. I have to get ready to go into my class on "Intervening With Those With Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities That Are Victims Of Trauma". Takes me about 30 minutes to get ready so I better make like a banana and split.