As the holidays approach, scammers are on the hunt to hijack your online accounts.
Spring Valley mother and Kindergarten teacher Jennifer Dye can attest to that.
Last month Dye and her husband got a notification on her phone from Amazon, confirming the purchase of a new iPad using the gift cards she had saved in her cart.
The only problem: Neither she nor her husband ever ordered a new iPad.
“I had been saving up gift cards for Christmas and my daughter’s birthday and they took everything they could and left only $31 in the account.”
“Right away we canceled it,” Dye said. “We pushed the cancel button and we were like, uh, what’s going on?”
The couple called Amazon. That’s when they noticed that two-factor authorization was removed from their account.
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Amazon told them that their case was forwarded to the fraud department and a refund would be processed.
That same night, Dye got another message from Amazon stating the account had been accessed again and the password was changed.
Dye and her husband called Amazon the following day and changed their password as well as their email address.
“My husband does IT so we are very secure on things. We even factory reset our phones just in case it was something on our phones,” Dye told NBC 7 Responds.
But no matter how many times Dye and her husband called, the scammers continued to access their account and change the password.
Meanwhile, the iPad had shipped.
“It seems like they were able to call Amazon, bypass the two-factor authentication and change the password,” said Dye.
The mother of two started to worry about getting it figured out in time for the holidays.
“It was getting a little close to Christmas and I started getting a little worried about what I was going to do for the kids.”
After not getting the results she needed, Dye called NBC 7 Responds for help.
The next day she got the call she was waiting for.
“Within a day, they called us back after not returning our calls, saying that they have gotten everything fixed and our money was back in our account.”
