Americans are excited for the upcoming holiday season, but so too are scammers.

As Amazon gears up for its Black Friday sales and subsequent holiday spending, it has warned customers to be extra alert to prominent scams.

Increasing number of transactions offer fraudsters more opportunities to profit and ways in which they impersonate Amazon to extract valuable information.

The first scam is referred to as an email attachment scheme. According to Amazon, they have doubled in the second half of 2023 and are expected to ramp up ahead of Amazon’s annual pre-Black Friday promotion, which starts on Friday.

They involve emails from a scammer pretending to be an Amazon sales representative. Included in those emails are attachments claiming their accounts will be suspended if they don’t take action.

Scammers are emailing Prime members suggesting that they will need to forfeit details to rectify some issue with their account, Amazon has said

Amazon has suggested scammers will make the most of holiday shopping by calling, texting and emailing customers and asking for their personal information

The email will then direct customers to log into their Amazon accounts using a false website which the scammers can use to capture log in information.

‘The bad thing isn’t opening the attachment,’ Scott Knapp, Amazon’s director of worldwide buyer risk prevention, told CBS MoneyWatch.

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‘It’s clicking on the link in the attachment, which goes straight to their website, where they start collecting all kinds of information.’ 

Another scam Amazon has warned of involves more rudimentary phishing, and has quadrupled in frquency this year.

Scammers are also calling, texting and emailing Prime members suggesting that they will need to forfeit details to rectify some issue with their account, such as an incorrect order or an account fee.

An Amazon Prime delivery worker is seen sorting packages in an Amazon van in Queens, New York

‘Coming into the holiday with big deals, they send out notices that there’s problem and say contact us to straighten things out. Give us your credit card information or bank account info to verify it,’ said Knapp. 

He advised that customers should never follow those instructions.

‘That’s something we would never do. We’d never ask for that,’ he said. ‘People should be careful or wary when somebody is trying to make them pay for something only with a gift card. No legitimate transaction is going to require you to use gift cards. So be on the lookout for that.’

Earlier this year, an online marketplace selling millions of sets of stolen personal information for less than a dollar each was blown open as part of a sting led by FBI and Dutch investigators.