I just got an email from the Customer Service Department of Amazon.com. It seems they’re concerned about account and need my financial information. I’m a big fan of Amazon and buy lots of books from them, but I must say they need to work on their spelling and grammar. Check out this excerpt from their email:

Please take the time to read this message – it contains important information about your Amazon.com account. At Amazon, we routinely perform reviews of orders and customer
accounts to protect our customers. After careful review of your account, [Wait, you didn’t finish the last sentence. You can’t end a sentence with a comma.]

Please update your account.

For your reference, the credit card in question is your Visa, Master, Amex which. [Huh? Visa I know. But Master. You mean, MasterCard? And what’s up with that dangling “which”?]

Please you are the rightful holder of the account, click on the link below to log into your account within the short period. [You mean “Please, if you are the rightful holder. . . .” And what short period are you talking about?]

Account update: Please Read Click here  [I don’t know how to “Read Click.” And where’s the period?]

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to temporaly suspend your account. [Darn. I hate it when my account is “temporaly” suspended.]

We ask that you allow at least 1 hours for the case to be investigated and we strongly recommend to verify your account in that time. [Usually we say “1 hour” in English.]

Boy, Amazon needs to hire some proofreaders, don’t you think?

[Okay, okay, before I get a hundred comments admonishing me, I know that the email I received was fake. It was what is called a “phishing” scheme. Somebody was trying to get my credit card information, somebody who doesn’t speak English very well, I might add. The link that supposedly helps me to update my info actually takes me to a Skate Co-op web page.

Seriously, you need to be on guard when you get emails like this one. I have friends who have not been careful. One lost $7,000 before his mistake was caught. Some of the phishing emails are much more polished and look genuine. Be very careful before giving out personal or financial information. Usually, if I thought this email was genuine, I would not use the link to check my account, but I would go through the Amazon.com website.

Also, when I get things like this, I often let the company know so they can follow up. I did notify Amazon of this particular phishing attempt.]