New Amazon Gift Card Scam Targets Your Banking Information
Gift card are the most popular gift during the holiday season. And Amazon gift cards are usually the go to option when you’re out of ideas. It was ranked number one in popularity in WalletHub’s Best Gift Cards of 2020.
As more gift cards are purchases for the holidays, scammers and hackers are also hard at work to try and steal some of those funds, or even worse, your banking information. TechRadar reports that a new Amazon gift card scam has emerged that seeks to infect victims with a banking trojan. It cites a report from security firm Cybereason, which says that scammers are distributing a highly convincing phishing email that contains a document “weaponized with malicious macros”.
It looks like an official Amazon email with Amazon branding, and it claims to offer the recipient a free $100 voucher that they must download to activate. That should be a red flag right away, and should at least make you suspicious, if you are not expecting to receive a $100 gift card. Once the victim has downloaded the file, they are redirected to a legitimate Amazon webpage, which adds legitimacy to the scam.
The malware installed on the victim’s device is banking trojan known as Dridex, designed to steal e-banking credentials and other sensitive information. The trojan has been active in various different forms since 2012. This version uses three distinct delivery methods to infect users with the Dridex trojan: infected Word documents, self-extractive screensaver files and VBScript files.
You should be aware of such scams and pay attention to details in the email you receive ,especially if they offer things that are too good to be true. Also look for abnormalities such as spelling and grammar mistakes, unfamiliar URLs or URL’s that don’t match the text of the link, etc. If you’re not sure, go to the website in question directly, instead of clicking on the links in the email.
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