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by anotherangrydev 3954 days ago
I want to share an experience that I had a few months ago, to see if anyone had something similar.

I have an AWS account that I use to upload stuff to Glacier and leave it there. My monthly fee comes to about $0.20/mo and that's been going since around 5 years (previously it was just on S3). The data I store there is not encrypted (not that they would be looking at it, right?), nor is anything sensitive/illegal at all. Aside from that, I ocasionally spin a cheap EC2 instance to test some new binary before installing it or things like that.

Anyway, around March I received three emails (they were spaced like 6 hours or so apart so I've read them all at once) and the subject was something like "Important Notice regarding your AWS Account, Urgent! Open Now!". The first thing I thought was sh*t, my account was hacked and now I owe a million dollars to AWS.

To my relief that wasn't the case, but they wanted me to send them many documents that I consider personal and for no reason at all. I replied something like "Is something wrong?" and they said it was standard procedure, which is weird because I've never knew of anything like that. Things eventually went to "send us a scan of your passport or we will terminate your account", passport because that's the only ID I told them I had. I eventually told them to piss off, I figured that $0.20/mo and the things I had there are not worth the worry of sending that data to someone hiding behind an email. They didn't reply anything and then... nothing happened. It's been half a year since and everything is business as usual.

It was weird, and I never could make sense of what they really wanted, but anyway, just thought of sharing that when I read this guy's experience.

2 comments

And you're certain those emails were legitimate because...?
Awww, come on...

Edit: Just checked them, I have them right here, most of them are from payments-verification@amazon.com, they wanted ID to verify the card details or something like that. Which I found it really weird because the account has been running for years and card's haven't expired or been changed.

Okay then. It just is exactly what I would expect from someone phishing, too, so figured it'd be worth checking.
do you still have the emails? might be worth examining the headers to see if it was some kind of phishing attempt.
Ok, to clarify, yes they were authentic amazon emails.

Not only that, they had a ticket open, this was somehow a 'case' and I had a support ID and everything.