A Cautionary Tale of Amazon Hacking

The Husband was looking over our bank statement last week and noticed a bunch of small-ish Amazon purchases.  Each line item mentioned Movie as the purchase.

He first went to Man-Child; which is understandable because back when MC was in college he would occasionally rent a movie.  But he hasn't done this in AGES; mainly because he has his own account now.  The Husband then came to me and showed me the charges.

I certainly hadn't rented any movies.

I searched my previous orders and did not see any movie rentals; which I figured would be the case because whenever I order anything, whether a physical item to be delivered or a video, I always get a confirmation email.  I had no confirmation emails for any of the dates on the bank statement.

First step was to change my password.  The next step was to hit the bank to cancel my debit card and dispute the charges.

Then I sgot a random email from Amazon asking me to update my payment information for such and such subscription service.  I assumed it was spam and ignored it.

In the meantime, we received notification from the bank denying the dispute; saying they found no evidence of fraud.  Irritating?  Yes.  But luckily, it wasn't that much that we were forced to eat.

And then another email came in for a different subscription service; and then another; and then another, etc.

I went back to my account and started looking around and discovered that Amazon DOES offer these various subscription services for Cinemax and other movie streaming sites.  Well, color me shocked.  I had NO idea that these services existed from Amazon.  When I clicked over to see what subscription services were linked to my account, I found that *I* had subscribed to all these channels.  Friends, I can assure you, I did NOT subscribe to anything other than Prime.  I immediately canceled all the subscriptions; except Prime.

I surmised that was the reason I hadn't received any confirmation emails and why there was no history in my previous purchases and why the bank refused to fund any of the money; because it LOOKED like I had subscribed to these services.

So, I figure someone, somehow, got a hold of my email address, did some basic online research and was able to guess the old password to get into my account.

Luckily, whoever got into the account never actually bought anything...but I feel sure that would have been the next step had we not noticed those initial charges fairly quickly.

I have set calendar reminders to change that password (and others) more frequently and will be checking on the subscription page often also.

Since I had never heard of this particular scam (nor of any of those subscription services) before now; I figured I'd sound the alarm so that you, hopefully, won't fall victim to the latest scam.