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Amazon customer support representatives this weekend had been handling a wave of inquiries from customers who got suspicious and confusing electronic mail confirmations about reward card purchases they’d no longer made.
Customers on social media stated they were sent three consecutive emails, some Saturday night and others Sunday morning, thanking them for his or her purchases of Google Play, Mastercard and Lodges.com reward playing cards, no matter never having purchased them.
“An error in our blueprint resulted in an show confirmation electronic mail being sent to customers who did no longer beget a reward card. We are emailing these customers to uncover them of the error and apologize for the grief,” an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an electronic mail to CNBC.
Customers who got the pretend emails enact no longer must always rob any extra motion.
The inappropriate Amazon emails additionally contained a paragraph warning customers against reward card scams: “There are a unfold of scams whereby fraudsters strive and trick others into paying with reward playing cards from smartly-identified producers.”
Portion of regarded as doubtless the most emails that modified into once sent to a replacement of Amazon customers over the weekend, falsely confirming reward card purchases that had no longer been made.
Photograph courtesy of Dan Mangan.
The messages left customers puzzled and frightened that a hacker could maybe well merely have purchased entry to their financial info and bought those reward playing cards.
“Thanks for the early AM coronary heart attack Amazon. Who wants caffeine?” one user wrote in a Fb post after receiving the inappropriate emails.
One Amazon customer support e-book on Sunday morning stated the corporate got three calls in a row relating to the e-mail field. The automatic customer support bot stated that there had been “longer than unusual wait times” within the cell phone queue.
“I’m essentially sorry to all those customers who got this vogue of electronic mail and that this precipitated them apprehension. But leisure assured that every tale here is true and within the interim, we are in a position to apt uncover them to apt brush aside the message,” stated another customer support e-book Sunday morning.
One Reddit user stated that an Amazon e-book defined the mishap as “poorly worded emails supposed to warn customers about attainable scams.”
A spokesperson for Amazon did no longer straight away respond to a search info from for comment.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed reporting.
