Amazon Prime Warns 220 Million Users Of Attacks

If you have an Amazon Prime account, you may want to check to see if it has been compromised.

Amazon has warned its 220 million users of ongoing attacks against customers.

In the last month, scammers impersonating Prime employees have targeted Amazon Prime users.

Forbes had more details to report on the hack:

I know better than most that Amazon Prime subscribers are under attack: I have been on the sharp end of multiple phone calls and email-based threats in the last four weeks alone. I have the advantage of being a cybersecurity insider, and so you would expect me to be aware of such threats and deal with them accordingly. Not everyone is so well informed, however, which is why Amazon has warned all 220 million Prime customers as attackers strike. Here’s what you need to know and do.

Pieter Arntz, a malware intelligence researcher at Malwarebytes, has issued a timely July 16 reminder that “scammers are impersonating Amazon in a Prime membership scam.”

I say timely, quite besides regular reminders of such attack threats being most welcome, because I have experienced not one, but two of these this week. Both were telephone calls, which I only answered as I was expecting to hear from the hospital and was in bed, ill at the time. The cause of Arntz’s reminder, and the underlying Amazon warning to all 220 million Prime customers, however, was a spike in email attacks claiming that subscription rates are about to rise, along with a cancel subscription button that would lead to Prime account credential theft. The phone calls I took, by the way, were similar in outcome but differed in that they wanted me to believe someone had purchased an iPhone 13, of all things, using my account.

The warning emails from Amazon, which I received on July 4 and wrote about at Forbes on the very same day, started with a stark alert that Amazon has become aware of “an increase in customers reporting fake emails about Amazon Prime membership subscription.” These emails are particularly dangerous because, as Amazon said, they “might include personal information in the emails, obtained from other sources, in an attempt to appear legitimate.”

This came on top of earlier warnings from security researchers that more than 120,000 fake Amazon domains and web pages had been set up in the weeks and months before Prime Day, one assumes to be used to help in such attacks.

Amazon Warns 220 Million Customers Of Prime Account Attacks https://t.co/TYK2yKvymL

— Forbes (@Forbes) July 18, 2025

The scam comes as CEO Jeff Bezos has been dumping his stock positions.

Jeff Bezos just sold $665 million worth of Amazon stock. pic.twitter.com/ELV6otz5VE

— Pubity (@pubity) July 8, 2025

CNBC reported more on Bezos cashing in:

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.

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The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.

Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.

Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.

The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.

What’s your take?