You’re a small retailer doing business on Amazon.com, and a customer submits a receipt for a refund. The receipt looks genuine, and the customer says the purchased item didn’t arrive. But it’s a scam.
An Amazon “receipt generator” is being distributed online, and it allows a user to enter information — like order placed, order number, item name, your name and address, and so on — and create a fake receipt that looks virtually identical to the one Amazon provides for you to print. The fake receipt can be printed, or captured in a screen shot for e-mailing.
‘Easy Enough to Check’
The receipt generator was brought to light on GFI Software’s blog, which said the AmazonReceiptGenerator.exe file has been circulating for “about a month or two.” The blog said the fake receipt is “identical” to the real thing, including “total before tax,” “sales tax,” and other such details.
The generator also has other, relatively sophisticated, assets to make it as convincing as possible. For instance, a 17-digit order number is randomly generated and shown in orange at the top. GFI said it sent the generator file to Amazon.
Wouldn’t a small business be able to tell if someone actually made a purchase by checking its records? The scam appears to rely on businesses big enough to have a steady stream of Amazon orders, but small enough that it doesn’t have time to check whether an order was actually placed.
While the scammer might seek to get a cash or credit-card refund, a more likely payoff is getting the seller to reship the product, which the “receipt” says has already been paid for.
Michael Gartenberg, research director for Gartner, said he didn’t think many businesses would fall for this. “It’s easy enough to check the submitted receipt against their records,” he said,…