Top Amazon Prime Day scams, and how to avoid them

The biggest two shopping days of the summer are about to get underway, but these days it's important to watch for emails and text about them. Many are legitimate and will lead to real deals, but some are not, according to a warning from cybersecurity provider Check Point Software Technologies.

Beware fake sales and copycat websites

At pickup locations everywhere, shoppers are getting excited about Prime Day sales on July 16 and 17.

Prime member Trey Morgan, though, says he wants to make sure the markdowns are the real thing.

"You always wonder if the price went up and then came down for Prime Day, just like a lot of companies do," he said.

But that's not the biggest thing to be concerned about. While you may be ready for Prime Day, so are the criminals, according to Check Point.

In June alone, Check Point identified more than 1,200 new website domains associated with Amazon, and it says 85% of them were flagged as malicious, or suspected to be malicious. Jeremy Fuchs, lead researcher for email security at Check Point, says before you click an advertisement or link, look closely at the sender’s email address for misspellings or added characters and hover over links to see where they will take you.

"Anything can be spoofed and any email is potentially a threat," Fuchs said. "And the 10 seconds you spend doing those two simple checks are a whole heck of a lot less time than what you would have to spend dealing with the potential fallout."

Beware fake delivery text messages

Meantime, with extra deliveries to your home, Melanie McGovern with the Better Business Bureau says it's important to keep track of which delivery notifications you signed up for.

"That's where people get confused, they'll see a text message," McGovern said. "They know they have a product on the way. They'll just blindly click on that link, and then all of a sudden they don't know if they have malware in their phone or if they've given up personal information."

So while Prime Day is exciting for shoppers, you want to make sure scammers don't empty your bank account first, so you don't waste your money.

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