Amazon’s Weird Gift Card Fraud Awareness Emails

tl:dr — Amazon sent out “informational” emails to raise awareness on gift card fraud, but these emails might make someone think they’ve actually been a victim of gift card fraud.

I received three emails this morning from Amazon, each with a unique sources for gift card orders:

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Knowing I hadn’t purchased any of these, I immediately went into discovery mode.  They each were legitimately from Amazon — DKIM shows it was sent by Amazon.

The emails were brief and didn’t appear to show an actual order info, but they each had a button linking to the following URL:

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https://www.amazon.com/b?node=15435487011&ref_=pe_2242090_351455300

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There were no actual orders to be found for these either — not in Amazon and I couldn’t find them in the billing account associated with Amazon.

I called Amazon directly and at first, the rep thought it was the usual — spam, forged email, etc.  I outlined the emails do in fact appear to be from Amazon, as per their DKIM.  He then verified the times the emails were sent and found them.  He too thought they were for gift cards and asked if I had verified the order amounts in our card/bank account.  I let them know I cannot correlate any of these charges back to our accounts, so there are no orders nor charges.

After a minute, he came back with the info. — these were informational/educational emails sent by Amazon to help “raise awareness” to phishing scams, gift card fraud, etc.  😀

So if you received emails from Amazon regarding your “gift card order” (great ‘campaign’ idea, Amazon), hopefully this post can help someone not have a moment of anxiety.