I read my emails last night around 10:30 before going to bed. There was an email from a former colleague of my husband from the community college. She asked if I have an Amazon account. I wasn’t sure what she meant so I asked if she meant prime. At. 1:43 am, she sent a reply saying she had forgotten her niece’s birthday was today and she needed to send her a gift. The niece is a gamer (listed several games) and she wanted to know if I could send her a gift card. Our friend is supposedly locked down in a covid facility for 2 weeks and didn’t have her phone.
The more I type, the crazier this sounds. First of all, both H and friend retired over 15 years ago and have not talked more than a few times, so it is unlikely that she would contact me for help. If she could email me, she could also order what she wanted from Amazon, and knowing friend, it would more likely be a book. The writing was much too casual for this particular retired college professor.
I think I had better change my email password since I foolishly answered the first email. I almost answered a second time for clarification since her reply was so ambiguous. I can see how people (especially we senior citizens who want to be helpful) get scammed.
Yep, scam. I’m getting so tired of having to be vigilant all the time. I am happy my mom always emails me when she gets something she wonders about. I’m afraid she’s going to get to the point where she doesn’t, though.
Sounds like a scam. Not sure you need to change your email password though (unless you use the same password for Amazon). Just answering the email doesn’t expose you to any risk. Unless there was a link in the email to Amazon and you clicked on it and entered your Amazon password.
I am happy that my father never took to computers. He still answers the phone anytime someone calls so that is bad enough. Has been close to falling for phone scams (he was convinced my daughter called him from a police station in need of cash that day and didn’t want to call my wife or me because we would do something horrible to her – never would happen --ever – thankfully he called me though he was headed to his bank). Computers and confusion they bring to people not used to working with them every day combined with fraud scams would be dangerous combo.
Scam. My friend’s account got hacked and they sent out a similar email from her email. I answered it “yes” and then texted her as it’s a friend I talk to almost daily and I was wondering why she would email me a question like that rather than just calling/texting me. She realized it had gone out to all of her contacts. She was so embarrassed even though she hadn’t done anything. She changed all her passwords, I didn’t do anything to my account.
I got an email supposedly from the President of an organization that I serve as Treasurer for. The email said he needed to pay a vendor. It seemed legitimate until he mentioned weird ways of paying for the bill.
Then there was the time my husband got an email from a building code official, asking for payment in regards to an inquiry that DH had made. The email even included a chain of correspondence that they’d had. DH at first thought it was a BCO trying to make some money on the side, so he called the town, which said somebody had hacked into their email account and was sending out the scam messages! That case really drove home how careful you have to be, because it was so convincing.
I recently bought a bunch of gift cards and had to click a box confirming that I wasn’t being pressured by someone to purchase them. Probably anyone who was being scammed wouldn’t admit that they were being pressured, and the clerk didn’t quiz me about it, but maybe it would help someone more vulnerable.
I’m so over spam! My previous company’s IT dept would occasionally send out phishing emails internally, and if you clicked the link they’d send you a follow-up email politely letting you know what a moron you were for falling for a (simulated) scam. I still have PTSD from that, lol.
That is a common scam that is run. Find the name of the president and treasurer of a company (often the info is available online) and send emails to treasurer that appear to come from the president requesting wire transfer be made. Typically its from an email address that is close to being the domain name of the purported sender. Now most companies I see have warnings that are attached to email messages that come from outside the company which should alert you to that issue. Also emails are typically off in terms of wording, signature (using formal name which is often what is online when person uses nickname every day), etc.
^Yes, when I looked at the email closer I realized they used the President’s given name rather than his nickname that he always go by. There are always clues, but when you’re flying through 100 or emails a day, you can miss stuff if you’re not careful. Vigilance!!
My mom got that same scam a couple of months ago. Supposedly from her cousin who had been “locked out” of her Amazon account and needed to send a gift card to her grandson. Fortunately Mom isn’t too savvy with Amazon and had to keep asking questions and the replies got more and more demanding, even insulting, which made her realize she probably wasn’t corresponding with her cousin. When she told me about it she was still not sure she’d done the right thing.
SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM. If you’re on the web version of gmail, google will tell you if they’re unable to verify that the email was actually sent from the listed email address. Also, make sure to look at the email address/any links, there’ll usually be a mistake or a slightly different spelling to make it look real.
There was a time that I got an email at work from an outside sender saying that the company was requiring all employees to go through some online training and to click on the included link to an outside website. Now that certainly looked suspicious, and many of us did not click on it…
Turned out it was real (the outside sender and website were for the contracted training company). But it certainly muddies the lesson about watching for phishing when real messages look like phishing messages.