Your account has been frozen temporarily pretending to come from Amazon <[email protected]> is one of the latest phish attempts to steal your Amazon Account and your Bank, credit card and personal details.

This one only wants your personal details, Amazon log in details and your credit card and bank details. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your email, facebook and other social network log in details as well.

Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware.

The original email looks like this It will NEVER be a genuine email from Amazon or any other company so don’t ever click the link in the email. If you do it will lead you to a website that looks at first glance like the genuine Amazon website but you can clearly see in the address bar, that it is fake. Some versions of this phish will ask you fill in the html ( webpage) form that comes attached to the email.

Amazon phishing emailIf you open the attached html file you see a webpage looking like:

When you fill in your user name and password you get a page looking like this, where the phishers try to validate your details to make sure that you are entering “genuine ” information. They make sure that the bank account numbers have the correct number of digits and that the credit card numbers have the correct number of digits and format. After submitting the information you get bounced on to the genuine Amazon.co.uk website

Amazon account verificationAll of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day. Or whether it is a straight forward attempt, like this one, to steal your personal, bank, credit card or email and social networking log in details.

Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says .EXE then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.