Email Says Renewing Your Membership?

Yes you must renew your membership says the email…

Did I remember to pay it?? I thought it is on auto-renew??

Anyway This is what it looked like on my phone:

So I clicked on the update information(gently so as not to double click on phone) and copied and pasted the link.

I then pasted the link into a note app. Interesting to note the link led to a docs.google.com location which is suspect of course. There is no way any company would send a renewal email to their customers by sending them a Google doc.

When I looked at this email on my desktop it looks like this:

This is the actual text in the email:

Hi emailuser@some--company.com,

Your Amazon Prime Membership is set to renew on Thu, March 07, 2024 10:29 PM. 
However, we've noticed that the payment method associated with your Prime 
membership is no longer valid.
To update the default payment method or choose a new one for your membership, 
please click on the button below and follow the on-screen instructions.

Update Information
<https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/some--digits--here/preview>


Sincerly,
Amazon Prime Team

© Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Amazon, Amazon.com, 
Prime, the Amazon.com logo and 1-Click are registered trademarks of Amazon.com, 
Inc. or its affiliates.


      Amazon.com, 410 Terry Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98109-5210.

Notice how some of the email does look legitimate.

I deliberately whited out the to: <name> and part of the link(above and in image), as it is not a good idea to go and grab this Google doc even if you want to type the long string in. This is just an example of what I do to try and help you understand phishing, just like in my book “Too Late You’re Hacked” the Guidebook.

I place this example of a phishing email attempt as part of my program of trying to give basic information to help people navigating these types of issues.

Of course it also helps when we are in the National Consumer Protection Week (March 3rd to March 9th) FTC.gov website link .