With just a couple of days to go before Christmas, the holiday shopping season is in full swing.  Unfortunately, it is also full swing for scam season as scammers continue to take advantage of people who may be too distracted by their shopping to follow proper scam avoidance.  A case in point involves an email which many people, including myself, recently received.  The email purports to be from Amazon and it relates to a recent order of mine.  The email itself does not provide much detail, but there is an attached invoice.  Unfortunately, if you download the attached invoice, you will not be downloading a legitimate Amazon invoice, but instead, you will be downloading a keystroke logging malware program that the identity thief who sent you the email will use to steal all of the information from your computer and make you a victim of identity theft.

TIPS

As legitimate as the email appears to be, what you do not see which is a tell-tale sign that this is a scam is that the email was not only addressed to me, but to thirteen other people whose email began with the same first name as mine.  If you click on “details” in the email heading you can see the other people to whom it was also sent.  Obviously this is a scam.  However, as I have often warned you, downloading attachments or clicking on links unless you are absolutely sure that they are legitimate is a dangerous practice because unwittingly you may be downloading keystroke logging malware.  If you did order something from Amazon or anyone else, you should confirm the invoice number with Amazon before considering downloading the invoice.