Online shoppers beware! The latest email phishing scam looks just like an order cancellation notice from Amazon.com, Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona wants. Be sure to double check suspicious emails you receive from the online retailer before clicking on any links.

About the scam:

This scam email comes from an Amazon.com email address, such as order-update@amazon.com, and contains the subject line “Your Cancellation” and an order number. The email body tells the recipient that “your order has been successfully canceled” and provides a summary of the order.

What to do:

Amazon.com cautions email recipients to delete any cancellation notice with an eight digit order number. However, just because your email has a longer order ID number doesn’t mean that’s real.

To double check your email, be sure to hover over the links to verify their destination. Amazon emails only link to sites that begin with “http://”something”.amazon.com.” (Note the period before “amazon.com.”) Sites such as “payments-amazon.com” are not actually Amazon. Amazon also never uses an IP address (a string of numbers seperated by periods) followed by a directory name, such as http://”123.456.789.123″/amazon.com/.

If you want to confirm a cancellation:

• Go to Amazon.com by typing www.amazon.com into your web browser. Don’t click a link in the e-mail itself.
• Click “Your Account” in the upper-right corner.
• Visit “Your Orders” and see if an order matches the details for the one in the e-mail.

More information

For more information about phishing scams using Amazon.com’s name, please see the information on their website.

For more information about breaking scams in your area, see BBB.org’s complete scam directory.

E-book sales are growing exponentially, according to the American Association of Publishers. For the first eight months of 2011, e-book sales increased 144.4 percent, to $649.2 million. In February sales of e-books eclipsed those of traditional paperbacks. And e-readers are expected to be a hot gift item for the holidays.

But Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona warns that as the popularity of e-readers and e-books grows, so does the likelihood of related scams, including the following:

• E-books filled with useless and often badly written information sold for a couple of dollars. Malware is sometimes attached in order to obtain your credit card information.
• A single book is given different editorial spins and then sold under different titles or authors’ names.
• Material that is plagiarized from websites and blogs then packaged into an e-book and sold.
• Writing competitions with the winner having his or her work published digitally. Although the contests include entry fees, the cost to publish digitally is minimal.
• E-readers spammed with ad-laden works and hotlinks to both commercial and malware sites that load viruses onto your machine. (more…)