We receive an email about an order, a reminder about a Prime renewal, or one about a pending delivery and, all too often, we ask ourselves: is this message really from Amazon? The company wants to be able to answer this question for us quickly and reliably and, for that reason, as TechCrunch reports, it has added to Alexa for Shopping a way to check whether a message really came from Amazon. A particularly interesting tool against digital scams that are becoming ever more convincing and that’s as easy to use as asking a simple question.
Alexa can check where a message came from
Every year, some 360,000 customers contact Amazon to confirm the authenticity of different messages they’ve received. Now we’ll be able to ask Alexa that same question directly. The system analyzes the sender, the content, the arrival time and, of course, all the metadata to verify whether any message is authentic.
A simple question like “Did you send me an OTP from the number XXXXXX about 10 minutes ago?” is enough to make sure an apparently legitimate message is real.
While fraud attempts take the form of order confirmations, notices about Prime, account alerts or delivery messages and are becoming increasingly convincing thanks to AI, having an integrated verification system makes it very easy to put any doubts to rest.
Alexa for Shopping, available on the web and in the Amazon app, boils it down to a single question. A big improvement over forwarding suspicious messages to verify@amazon.com and one that will allow us to interact with Amazon with greater confidence.
