If you, like many, have been using Amazon.com for some of your Christmas shopping, then your account may be vulnerable to a scam using your order number that is genius in its execution, and uncovers some of Amazon’s failings in inventory control. It all comes down to the individual order numbers assigned to your orders. Those order numbers are for sale, along with the corresponding email address (as in your email address), and scam artists are using that information to get duplicates of your orders sent to them.

Yesterday we featured an article on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) contest challenging anyone from the public to come up with a way to beat spam phone calls. The reason for expanding their efforts, says the FTC, is because complaints about spam phone calls, or, “robocalls,” more than doubled in April of 2012, from their last high in October 2010 . So what should we do to avoid these nuisance calls until our unknown hero steps forward with the answer?

A new crop of scam spam is going around, with subjects like “Copies of Policies” and “Changelog as Promised” and talking about things like the “Ocean, Warehouse or EPLI policy”. They are short – to the point – and spam scams. They contain links that go to malicious sites such as https://web.archive.org/web/20121118080105/http://abstract.nassassin.com:80/wp-content/plugins/counterize/mail.htm/, http://flexjobb.se/wp-content/plugins/mail.htm, and https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, and come from sender names including Brock Buchanan, Darien Forbes, A. Simmons, and A. Blanton.

A new eFax scam email that has just been sent out, telling you that you have a new eFax message, actually links to a malicious site being hosted at places such as http://kaskada.tym.cz and https://web.archive.org/web/20181227145952/http://isolearn.eu/. The full links, in our examples https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/ and https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, we believe cause a malicious virus, trojan, or other software to download to your computer (although we have not confirmed this, our own tests suggest this – regardless, it is spam, and a scam, and the links that supposedly go to eFax actually all go to places such as https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/ and https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/.

Scammers are targeting Internet users with a new Craigslist scam – well, really more of a Craiglist spoof – wherein they send email to you, mostly from ‘robot@craigslist.org’, telling you that “you have succesfully posted your Craigslist ad” (although the samples we have seen actually misspell several words, so it ends up looking like “You have successfuly posted your Craiglist.org ad”).

It’s one of those things that you never think will happen to you. You’re going along in life, hunky-dory, then boom! There are fraudulent charges on your credit card, or an unknown credit card shows up on your credit report, or you get a call from a collection agency demanding payment on an account that you never even knew existed. Unfortunately, credit fraud and identity theft protection are not one of those things that you think about until it is too late. And if the person who stole your identity is a family member, such as your mother, father, sibling or even your own child, you also have an additional set of special circumstances to deal with.

What do Kate Croston (croston.kate@gmail.com), Hannah Howard (hhward22@gmail.com), Kaja Vollmer (kavo.jamer@gmail.com), Melanie Slaugh (slaugh.melanie@gmail.com), and Lindsay Samuels (lindasay.samuels04@gmail.com) all have in common? They are all part of a new wave of SEO backlink panhandlers, contacting websites, flattering them with such praise as “It has been a sincere pleasure to read your great content”, and then begging a link back to an article that “we just posted on our own blog” or site. They seem sincere and innocent, until you start getting hit from all sides with nearly identical requests, and it becomes clear that they are somehow related, and part of some secret SEO backlink group.

VIPSafeToday.com is an outfit that claims to want to give you a loan – or even a payday loan – and they are letting people know by spamming their cell phones with a text message that reads “You qualify to get up to 1200 DOLLARS instantly at WWW.VIPSAFETODAY.COM – It takes only mins for approval. ‘NO’ to unsubscribe” This message is dastardly for several reasons – read on for the full information, and don’t text them “no” (or anything else) to ‘unsubscribe’!

If you get an email asking you to “certify” with SafetyAlliance.net or Craigsguard.org, don’t fall for it! This is a site that is trying to collect your cell phone number. Ok, first, a disclaimer: we are 98% sure that this is a scam, but it is so new that we haven’t been able to fully prove it yet. But read on and you’ll understand why you too should be wary of it.

“TWITTER: Someone has a crush on you!” the subject of the email says as it announces that someone has a Tweetcrush on you. “You have been sent a Twitter Crush,” it goes on to say. Bologna. It’s a phishing scam, pure and simple. But, it’s a pretty compelling one, given how ‘authentic’ the site, which is hosted at ktwitteri.com, looks, where they steal your Twitter username and password.

If you get an email telling you that “your Facebook account has been disabled by an administrator”, don’t fall for it! It’s a scam, and the link in the email goes not to Facebook, but to yet another Canadian pharmacy site selling male enhancement drugs.

A whole lot of people are getting the latest spam scam that supposedly is sent from the “AOL Administration Center” (there is no such thing, folks). Coming from the spoofed email address “AOLCenter@message.aol.com”, the email tells you that “you have 1 notification”, and includes a link to click to see the “notification”. In fact, this is a classic example of Canadian pharmacy spam.

Earlier this year we wrote and warned you about the ConsumerWarningsReport360.com scam, which is run, among other places, on Craigslist. This is a “make money fast” type scam, and they lure victims in with fake Craigslist ‘for sale’ postings, then tell you the item is already sold, and they feel so badly, they are going to share this great “make money” scheme with you. Since we exposed the scam, someone has caused people to post comments to the article extolling the virtues of ConsumerWarningsReport360.com – clearly these people are paid, and it is part of the scam.

Just this afternoon a rash of fake Paypal emails was let loose on the internet, coming “from” notice@ppal.com, and claiming that “You have changed your PayPal email address”, and going on to say that you have added some random email address (most seem to list andrew1987@btconnect.com as the supposedly-added address). The email advised you to send back the attached form, “Personal Profile Form – PayPal-.htm”, if you did not authorize the change.

A flood of bogus emails supposedly “from” Western Union hit this week, telling their intended victims first that a “Western Union transfer is available for withdrawl” (sic), and then that the transfer was rejected. The ‘from’ addresses are mostly manager@westernunion.com, transfers@westernunion.com, and funds@westernunion.com. Most odd is that some of them contain info about the Federal Reserve Board with a link to the federalreserve.gov site (remember that the recent Oracle and Crazy Eddie scam came “from” noreply@federalreserve.gov).