Amazon Imposter Robocalls Reaching 150 Million Per Month

YouMail Robocall Scam Threat Advisory - May 2021

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May 13, 2021, 09:00 ET

IRVINE, Calif., May 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- YouMail issued a new robocall threat advisory today warning that Americans are consistently receiving between 100 million and 150 million robocalls per month from fraudsters claiming to be with Amazon. These scammers trick consumers into believing that suspicious activities have been identified on their Amazon accounts.

Amazon Imposter Robocalls Reaching 150 Million Per Month

These Voice Phishing ("Vishing") robocalls normally urge recipients to "Press One" to engage with a service representative and take off the phony charges, often in the amounts of $729 or $1,499. However, these calls are not coming from Amazon representatives. They are made by imposters who are really identity thieves seeking to take over the bank accounts of victims and steal their cash.

These are not just harmless nuisance calls. For instance, Amazon imposters recently defrauded a senior citizen in Stockton, Calif., by claiming that $400 had been hacked from her account. The scammers lured the woman into giving away her banking credentials, before they withdrew $40,000 from her bank account and maxed out her five credit cards, according to a police report.

That stolen $40,000 could provide enough money to fund an entire robocall scam operation for 100 million more robocalls, ensuring that every ensuing scam that succeeds would return pure profits, according to Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail.

"We recommend that consumers do not answer or respond to any calls claiming to be Amazon because the odds are now overwhelming that it will be a scam," Quilici said. "In the current climate, consumers simply can't trust that any calls claiming to be from Amazon are actually from Amazon."

The volume of these calls has increased dramatically over the past 90 days, putting more and more Americans at risk of being scammed. Here are some examples of the types of grammatically incorrect Amazon scams identified by YouMail's threat investigators:

On your account which is billed on your card attached to your Amazon account. The amount charged is $1499. We noticed some suspicious activity on your account. So we have put on hold to this transaction. Please press one now and to report please press two. Thank you.
We strongly recommend please do not access your account on your device for security reasons until your account will not get fixed. For more support speak to our Amazon support team. Press one.
Your customer this is Molly from Amazon. We received one suspicious incoming charge of $729 and your Amazon account from Dayton Ohio for dispute on this charge press one to connect with our Amazon customer care representative. Thank you

Historically, whenever robocall volumes increase from under 10 million calls/month to as many as 150 million calls/month, it is because the scammers are having significant success and are scaling up their operations by adding more call center staff, or by reinvesting some of their earnings to grow their businesses. Finally, as the scams work, we find that more and more copycats set up shop with similar scams, or the scammers start attacking other brands.

At YouMail, we are raising this alarm because these calls are threatening millions and millions of unprotected consumers every month. Users of the YouMail robocall blocking app are protected because the app correctly identifies and blocks such calls automatically. However, these types of fraud calls can be very hard for other consumers to identify, especially when a trusted brand like Amazon is involved.

So long as these widespread scam attacks continue to succeed, they will keep getting worse. In turn, consumers will not only be scammed at an increasing rate, but they will ultimately come to distrust and ignore all communications from those trusted brands.

These call volume estimates come from extrapolating from the call behavior seen by the users of the YouMail call protection app, the same mechanism used for the monthly YouMail Robocall Index.

About YouMail, Inc.
YouMail protects consumers, enterprises, and carriers from harmful phone calls. YouMail protects consumers with app-based call protection services. YouMail protects consumer-facing enterprises by detecting and helping to shut down imposter traffic that can lead to financial or brand damage. We protect carriers with robocall mitigation services that detect when bad traffic is originating, traversing, or terminating on their networks. Our direct consumer solutions answer over a billion live calls per year across well over 10 million registered users, powering America's most robust telephone sensor network in identifying and providing zero-hour protection against illegal calling campaigns and cyberattacks. We also operate the YouMail Robocall Index™, the nation's definitive source on telephone network activity and attacks. YouMail, Inc. is privately funded and based in Irvine, California.

Contact:
Rohan Notaney for YouMail
Lumina Communications
[email protected]
650-814-9651

SOURCE YouMail Inc.