Amazon stopped telling you what you bought, and scammers noticed

Open a recent Amazon order confirmation and there's a fair chance it doesn't say what you ordered. "Your Beauty item is confirmed." "Household item." "Decor." "Outdoors." No product name, no thumbnail. Emails sent in June still had both; the complaints started arriving in July.

Amazon's explanation is privacy. The company says it simplified the messages to cut down on "customer information shared outside" Amazon and to push people back to the Your Orders page in the app, and it points out that the emails still carry the familiar smile logo. The Verge offered a less charitable reading: an email listing what you bought is readable by any AI assistant plugged into your inbox, which means a rival shopping tool learns your habits for free.

Either way, something useful got taken away. The fastest way to dismiss a fake Amazon email was always the item itself - a $1,200 television you never ordered is obviously a scam, and you know it in a second without touching anything. "Your Electronics item has shipped" tells you nothing at all, so the only way to check is to click, which is precisely what a phishing email is hoping for. Arun Vishwanath of the Cyber Hygiene Academy told Bloomberg it is "definitely not in the best interest of customers. If anything, it increases risk." The security firm Abnormal AI says it hasn't measured a spike yet, but agrees the new format makes the attack easier. Amazon was the second-most impersonated company in the US in 2023, with roughly 34,000 reports.

One habit survives the change intact: don't follow links in order emails at all. Open the Amazon app, or type the address yourself, and look at Your Orders. If an email has already sent you somewhere and something got installed, Tendvane's Safety check lists what arrived on the PC and when.