It was late on a Saturday. I was watching baseball in the great room and doing some knitting. I finished the row I was working on and checked email from my phone.
And the whole wind down to bed was upended.
I had three emails from Amazon about being careful with my gift card purchases--one from Hotels.com, one from Mastercard, and a third from Google Play.
I didn't buy any gift cards. Cue panic mode.
The thing that was confusing is that Amazon emails me after each purchase and I had no purchase emails, only the email warning me that scammers requested gift cards and to be careful. I get an alert every time my credit card is charged and I had no alerts. I checked my Amazon purchase history and there were no gift cards listed.
I had to boot up the laptop again and address this problem where I had better visibility and more screen real estate. As soon as I got to Amazon, I logged myself out of all locations except the one I was on. I reset my password, and reported the problem through their prompt system. This suggested the emails were spoofed and suggested I send it to their security email address which I did.
But this didn't feel like enough so I got onto chat with a customer service representative who assured me there were no purchases on my account and that the emails were probably spoofed. She said not to click on any links. Which of course I didn't do, but I assured her I wouldn't.
Monday morning, Amazon sent an email. It seemed rather generic so I'm assuming it went out to a large number of people. It said you might have recently received an email about gift cards. It was sent in error.
On the one hand, mystery solved and credit cards/account safe. On the other hand, that was an hour of panic I dealt with on Saturday night. All's well that ends well, and it was much ado about nothing in the long run, but I could have done without the tempest.
