File photo shows the fake Amazon page created by fraudster. (Photo:CRIENGLISH.com)
It's reported that Amazon customers in China are being scammed out of thousand of yuan, by fraudsters who have access to their log in details and order histories.
Ynet.com, reports the case of Li Ping, who says she was manipulated into a situation where she received a call from what she thought was Amazon 'customer services' saying that she needed to receive a refund for her current orders which she was told had been canceled on August 20.
After checking online that the orders she had made a day earlier were "gone", she followed instructions to open a link which led to an authentic-looking website but which was actually a bogus payment site. There she entered her details and 15,000 yuan (2,250 USD) were immediately taken from her account.
Li is not the only person to experience such a scam. According to ynet.cn, over a hundred Amazon users from across the country who were deceived in the same way formed a QQ group. All were swindled between March and August this year. The total amount of money taken within the group is more than 3 million yuan (nearly 450,000 USD), with the highest single amount reaching 210,000 yuan (31,489 USD) in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong province.
One victim told ynet.com that because the fraudster knew details of their Amazon accounts and items ordered, their doubts were allayed. As far as they were concerned the request had come from Amazon, a brand which they trusted.
The official Amazon customer service department issued a statement saying they were aware of the complaints and said it was likely that a third party had stolen customers' account details and passwords. They then managed to hide customers order history and created a fake website, through which customers could log in using their actual security details.
Ynet.com reports the domain names of the fake site pointed to IP address in a variety of locations in Hong Kong, Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang province, and also in the United States.
Local police in various parts of China have started investigating the case.
