“Hello from Amazon High Tech Trading”: the phone call, usually from a Italian mobile number displayed in clear text, it opens like this. Then he continues, proposing phantasmagorical investment plans for high-yield trading: anyone interested can be contacted by an operator. The company he calls however does not have nothing to do with Amazon: only takes advantage of the brand awareness and stock market successes of the e-commerce giant to defraud customers.
Telephone fraud attempts have been going on for almost two years, and are particularly insistent. Phone numbers they call appear as legitimate, thanks to a technique called caller-id spoofing (which we explained here): scammers, probably through a VoIP system, change the caller’s number to make it look like a generic mobile phone number. Anyone who has tried to recall some of them, however, will have noticed that they are all non-existent.
The robotic voice that answers suggests to press 9 to not be called againbut of course it’s useless (we tried): the phone calls still keep coming.
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The Amazon email (the real one)
As phone scam attempts intensify, Amazon has begun to notify customers by email about this fraud mode. “The scammers are contacting customers posing as Amazon Financial Services, urging them to provide their payment and billing information in order to invest in Amazon stock or business opportunities that promise high returns in a short time,” can be read in the text of the email. The company also warns against providing payment or banking information over the phone, a rule that applies not only to this scam but to any other telephone enquiry. Amazon never, under any circumstances, asks you to share sensitive data over the phone or by text message.
“The scammers trying to impersonate Amazon they put our customers and our brand at risk – the company explained to us – Although these scams take place outside our platform, we will continue to invest in protecting customers and informing the public about prevention. We encourage customers to report suspected scams to us so we can protect their accounts and refer offenders to law enforcement to protect consumers.
How to defend yourself
In the specific case of the Amazon High Tech Trading scam, the method to defend yourself it’s very simple: just throw it down. The scammers only have our phone number available (how they managed to get it is another story, but not a risk in itself) and no other data. By interrupting the communication, nothing will happen, and certainly you will not lose who knows what opportunity to earn. What unfortunately cannot be done is block further calls. The mobile phone numbers from which they come are always different: even by entering one on the blacklist on your mobile phone, you can still be contacted by others.
However, the company invites you to report the scam attempts via the notification page Suspicious Pages and Communications. With the appropriate form it is possible to report not only telephone fraud such as that of Amazon High Tech Trading but also phishing emails and SMS. More information on how to recognize this type of scams and how to protect yourself is also available in a post on the official company blog, released last year, but still very current. Furthermore, Amazon suggests users to also address the reports to the competent authorities and in particular to the Postal Police, with which the company itself collaborates to share user reports.
The guarantor for privacy is also moving
The problem of telephone scams and aggressive telemarketing is also at the center of the political agenda. In a meeting with the Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso, the guarantor for privacy, Pasquale Stanzionerenewed the need for “further and more effective interventions capable of contrasting the illegal use of telemarketing and the non-compliance by numerous operators of the Opposition Register, thus increasing the protections in favor of consumer privacy”.
Among the problems underlined by the Guarantor in an official communication there is also that of caller ID spoofing, used by Amazon trading scammers. The phenomenon makes it particularly difficult to identify the real author of the call and is linked to the problem of using telephone numbers and e-mail addresses that come from so-called list Do not agree, i.e. where personal data has been collected without the proper consent of the users. In this case, the problem does not concern only scammers, but also legitimate telemarketing companies which nonetheless operate on the borderline of legality, choosing not to respect the need for informed consent, much less the registration of a telephone number in the Register of Oppositions.
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Amazon High Tech Trading al capolinea
Fortunately, telephone trading scammers do not always go unpunished. At the end of July, the Prosecutor’s Office of Pordenonein collaboration with the Anticrime of Tirana, has defeated an Italian-Albanian gang dedicated to the scam of false online trading. The company called unsuspecting customers (in this case with numbers from the British area code) and offered investments in Amazon shares. The investigation, which led to 17 precautionary measures and the denunciation of 44 people, also highlighted the modus operandi of the scammers: the first step was an investment of 250 euros into shares. On the fake online platforms created ad hoc, users saw their investment triple in a few days, convincing themselves to invest even more, not only in stocks but also in cryptocurrencies. An upward game which, in the most striking case from which the investigation started, led one of the victims to invest and lose more than 600 thousand euros.
It is not clear whether the organization dismantled by the Pordenone Public Prosecutor’s Office was the same that makes the calls in the name of Amazon High Tech Trading or another that exploited the company’s name in the same way: we will perhaps understand this over the next few months, if we receive fewer calls from non-existent numbers that promise easy earnings with online trading.