Alexa for Shopping Can Now Help You Identify Spam Emails.
While many online scams are obvious enough to be easily avoided, they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Even experienced users can fall victim to cleverly crafted fake emails, text messages, or phone calls. For example, if you receive a message from Amazon, you may have difficulty quickly determining whether it’s genuine. This could lead you to fall into a trap or, if the message is genuine, miss an important announcement or notification from the company.
Of course, there are plenty of tactics and best practices for verifying such messages yourself: you can check the sender’s email address or phone number and determine for yourself whether they are official company contact information (depending on the email address, this may be obvious); you can examine the message body, looking for grammatical and spelling errors that could betray a hasty phishing scheme; and you can flag any financial requests or urgent demands, which will increase the likelihood that someone will perceive the message and its contents as genuine.
But none of these methods allow you to directly contact the company—in this case, Amazon—and verify the authenticity of such requests. The new Alexa tool does just that.
How Alexa for Shopping Helps Verify Amazon Messages’ Authenticity
On Wednesday, Amazon announced an interesting new initiative aimed at reducing—if not eliminating—the risk of falling victim to fraud. Starting today, Alexa for Shopping, Amazon’s shopping assistant, will help you verify whether an email, text message, or phone call from Amazon is genuine. The company says you can ask Alexa for Shopping questions like, “Did Amazon send me a text message yesterday about a delivery issue?”, “Is this email from Amazon about my Prime subscription real?”, or “Someone claiming to be from Amazon called me about a refund. Was that true?” You can also ask Alexa for Shopping for more information about the message or call, providing any details that seem relevant (such as the email address or phone number the message came from, when you received it, and what it said).
Artificial intelligence will use this data to determine whether the message was actually sent by Amazon. What’s unique about this new feature is that the bot can check your details against the company’s database, which contains information about “every conversation they’ve ever sent,” including sender details, message content, date sent, and precise formatting. Amazon claims the verification is completed “in seconds,” and you’ll receive one of the following responses: verified by Amazon, not from Amazon, or unable to verify. Amazon states that Alexa for Shopping will only confirm the authenticity of a message if it has complete confidence in it.
If the message is from Amazon, the company will confirm that the message type, source, date, and time match Amazon’s message records. You’ll also receive account security tips—whether you requested them or not. If the message isn’t from Amazon, you may receive a result like “This message doesn’t match any official Amazon communications based on the information provided.” Alexa for Shopping may then offer recommendations, such as reviewing your orders in the app, contacting Amazon directly, and warning you not to click links or reply to the message. If the message can’t be verified, Amazon may suggest you try another verification method.
This isn’t the first verification method Amazon has implemented. The company says it launched an email address earlier this year, ” [email protected] ,” to which users can forward messages. There’s also an Amazon support contact form that provides step-by-step instructions on how to submit a similar request. Alexa for Shopping will likely show you these instructions if it can’t verify your message for any reason.
As companies continue to integrate AI features into all their products, this development from Amazon seems potentially quite useful. The concept is so simple that I’m surprised more companies don’t offer a similar service. Why not check automatically sent messages from users against your message records to distinguish real messages from spam? Perhaps Amazon will be a pioneer here—assuming, of course, that this feature actually works and doesn’t generate false positives .