Greg's Corner

Amazon congratulates non-expectant women for their baby registries

The other day we wondered if Amazon is becoming rife with scams as much as craigslist is. A story that broke yesterday made us wonder that again, as many Amazon customers started receiving emails congratulating them on someone having purchased them a gift off their Amazon baby registry. The problem was that the majority of the people who received these emails did not have a baby registry with Amazon and were not expecting a child.

When this story was initially reported, a number of people wondered if these emails were some form of phishing scam. That is a legitimate concern since fake Amazon emails are a large source of many phishing attacks where scammers try to get your Amazon log in information in order to try to purchase Amazon products with the financial information you may have stored in your Amazon account. However, Amazon has since commented on the situation saying that the emails did come from Amazon and were a technical glitch. No products were actually purchased or sent to the individuals who received the emails.

While this thankfully turned out not to be a scam, one has to wonder what’s going on inside the offices of Amazon. Is there focus on expansion stretching their attention so thin that they’re allowing mistakes like these and the toothbrush kerfuffle to define them as a company, or are they just having a string of bad luck and bad timing?