Staying Fit
Illustration: Matt Chase
Scams are epidemic these days as criminals use every conceivable avenue to separate consumers from their cash. It makes sense that they frequently pretend to be big companies or institutions affiliated with millions of people (potential victims, in their minds): the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, big banks such as Wells Fargo and Chase — or massive retailers such as Amazon.
Amazon, which raked in nearly $575 billion in net sales last year, is “the low hanging fruit” for scammers, because it’s one of those “entities that binds us all,” says Mark Fetterhoff, a senior adviser at AARP Fraud Watch Network.
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Impersonation scams in general — in which criminals pretend to represent a business or official agency, usually to steal money — cost Americans at least $1.1 billion last year, according to reports to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). “These figures reflect just a small fraction of the public harm … because the vast majority of frauds are not reported to the government,” the FTC says.
In response, an FTC rule went into effect April 1 that includes stronger prohibitions and greater penalties against business and government impersonation.
Older adults are more likely to lose more money to scams than younger ones: a median loss of $803 per person for people in their 70s, compared with $460 for victims in their 30s.
Amazon-impersonation scams grow more complex
The FTC said in an April report that it’s seeing an increase in cases of criminals impersonating more than one organization in a single scam — “for example, a fake Amazon employee might transfer you to a fake bank or even a fake FBI or FTC employee for fake help.”
Charlotte Cowles, the financial advice columnist for The Cut magazine, described in a story how she became a victim of a multilayered Amazon-impersonation scam — a reminder that nobody is immune to fraud. Cowles explained that she received a call from someone claiming to be from Amazon customer service, asking if she’d recently spent $8,000 on MacBooks and iPads. No, she hadn’t. Must have been identity theft, she and the caller concluded. In panic mode, Cowles interacted with people impersonating investigators from the FTC and the CIA, and by the end of the day, she had withdrawn $50,000 and given it to an Uber driver so it could be taken to a secure location. When she stopped to take a breath, she realized what had happened. “Someone waged psychological warfare on me,” she concluded, “and I lost.”
Some victims have been devastated by similar schemes. A retired Montana woman lost her life savings in a scam that began with a call from “Amazon” informing her of fraudulent activity on her account. That led to a supposed investigation by a man posing as a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, who took $240,000 from her through an elaborate scheme. (Hear her story on this episode of AARP’s The Perfect Scam podcast.)
“It is not a new problem, but it’s a growing problem,” says Abigail Bishop, Amazon’s head of external relations for scam prevention. “And it’s an ever evolving problem, which makes it incredibly difficult for those who are fighting it to keep up and to continue to find ways to sufficiently protect consumers because scammers are incredibly sophisticated.” Criminals replicate the ways that Amazon and other businesses communicate with their customers “in ways that are incredibly convincing,” she says.
Common Amazon-impersonation scams
Sometimes the criminals will use a mix of the scams described below.
The fake order or delivery. You’ll receive a message that there’s a problem with your shipment and you need to pay a fee to straighten it out. The message may include a link that — like so many delivery scams involving UPS or the U.S. Postal Service — if clicked, might download malware on to your computer or lead you to a request for personal information. Or you may be contacted by phone, and the criminal will request your password, your payment information or other sensitive data. They may suggest that there’s a technical problem and ask to take control of your computer to fix it (see “Tech support scam” below).
Suspicious purchase. This common scam accounted for two-thirds of the fraud reports Amazon received globally last year. The criminals call to confirm your purchase of what’s usually a big-ticket item — for instance, the $8,000 worth of tech devices that scammers said had been charged to Cowles’ account. “And you’re like, ‘I’m sorry. What?’ ” Bishop says. “You’re caught off guard, which they use to their advantage, creating that false urgency. ‘We really need to resolve this issue.’ ”
They may ask for your login info. It’s not a new scam, Bishop notes, but “continues to be prevalent, because, unfortunately, it’s effective.”
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