Amazon’s goal to be Earth’s most customer-centric company includes ensuring that scammers are not using our brand to take advantage of people who trust us. We employ over 15,000 people and invest significant resources to protect customers from fraud and abuse. We build innovative technologies that shield customer accounts and detect attempts to commit fraud. We also have an elite team working every day to hold these bad actors accountable.
“These crimes can have really traumatic effects on the people that fall prey to them,” said Tom Olsen, corporate counsel with Amazon’s Customer Protection and Enforcement (CPE) team. The CPE team is composed of skilled attorneys and expert investigators around the globe. “People lose their life savings, they lose personal information, they lose trust—and sometimes, what’s the most insidious is that they lose their sense of identity and how they interact with the world.”
Olsen, who lives in Northern California, worked for 10 years as a prosecutor on the U.S. Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps. As an attorney on the CPE team, he focuses on investigating and taking enforcement action against bad actors who commit fraud and misuse Amazon’s name to harm customers.
See something? Say something.
Impersonation scams are an age-old problem, in which scammers exploit the trust of customers by leveraging the name of well-known brands. Today, they use sophisticated techniques by implementing a combination of technology and social engineering to make unsolicited contact via email, phone calls, text, social media, and other communication tools in order to manipulate consumers.
Timely reports from scam victims are a crucial source of actionable information, and the more scams that are reported to us, the better our tools get at identifying bad actors so we can take action against them. Customers can report suspicious communications at Amazon.com/ReportAScam. The tool is available to customers in more than 20 languages. Suspicious messages received by those who are not an Amazon customer can still be reported by emailing reportascam@amazon.com.
“I think there’s a sense sometimes when people are victimized by scams, that there’s no need to report it because their report won’t make a difference. But nothing could be further from the truth,” said Olsen. “Reporting scams lets customers know that someone not only believes what they said, but takes what they said seriously and is willing to do something about it. What’s more, knowing someone is pursuing bad actors and holding them accountable helps give scam victims back a sense of self.”
A continuing commitment to stopping bad actors
Amazon has zero tolerance for criminals who pretend to be us, or any brand, to commit fraud. Through our continued commitment to protect consumers from impersonation scams, Amazon initiated takedowns of more than 40,000 phishing websites and 10,000 phone numbers being used for impersonation scams in 2023. Amazon also referred hundreds of bad actors across the globe to law enforcement authorities, which have resulted in arrests and raids on scam operations. We will continue to support law enforcement’s efforts in ensuring these scammers are held accountable.
We also seek out opportunities for industry collaboration to disrupt scam operations around the world. For example, in 2023, Amazon, Microsoft and the Central Bureau Investigation (CBI), the federal enforcement agency in India, announced that they conducted multiple criminal raids against illegal call centers in India that were set up to impersonate Microsoft and Amazon customer support. The illegal call centers impacted more than 2,000 Amazon and Microsoft customers primarily based in the U.S., but also in Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, and the UK. This operation was supported by a joint criminal referral made by Amazon and Microsoft through joint prosecution agreements in the U.S. and India, as the same cyber criminals were targeting both our customers.
“The one common thread that runs through everyone on our team is a passion about protecting customers”, said Olsen. “For me, one of the most motivating things about this job is knowing that the things we do on a day-to-day basis are really impacting people’s lives.”
Learn more about Amazon’s approach to scam prevention or read about the latest scam trends.