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Amazon customer service representatives this weekend have been handling a wave of inquiries from customers who received suspicious and confusing email confirmations about gift card purchases they had not made.
Customers on social media said they were sent three consecutive emails, some Saturday night and others Sunday morning, thanking them for their purchases of Google Play, Mastercard and Hotels.com gift cards, despite never having bought them.
“An error in our system resulted in an order confirmation email being sent to customers who did not purchase a gift card. We are emailing these customers to inform them of the error and apologize for the inconvenience,” an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC.
Customers who received the false emails do not have to take any further action.
The faulty Amazon emails also contained a paragraph warning users against gift card scams: “There are a variety of scams in which fraudsters try to trick others into paying with gift cards from well-known brands.”
Part of one of the emails that was sent to a number of Amazon customers over the weekend, falsely confirming gift card purchases that had not been made.
Photo courtesy of Dan Mangan.
The messages left customers puzzled and alarmed that a hacker may have obtained access to their financial information and bought those gift cards.
“Thanks for the early AM heart attack Amazon. Who needs caffeine?” one user wrote in a Facebook post after receiving the faulty emails.
One Amazon customer service representative on Sunday morning said the company received three calls in a row about the email issue. The automated customer service bot said that there were “longer than normal wait times” in the phone queue.
“I’m really sorry to all those customers who received this kind of email and that this caused them alarm. But rest assured that every account here is safe and in the meantime, we can just inform them to just disregard the message,” said another customer service representative Sunday morning.
One Reddit user said that an Amazon representative explained the mishap as “poorly worded emails intended to warn customers about potential scams.”
A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed reporting.
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