Amazon has become a target of scammers over the past few months and we want our users to be aware of the issue as we expect scammers to continue to operate through the holiday season. We've introduced some filters in the past 24 hours that are removing some of the scams from our price records, but it's impossible to remove all of them with the limited amount of information that we obtain about merchants from Amazon.
The scam is pretty straight forward. A 3rd party retailer posts an item for sale on Amazon at an especially low price. However, they ask in the offer description to contact them via email to complete the sale. Never contact merchants directly. This is where they scam you. Always complete your transaction on Amazon's website. But in this instance you don't want to complete the transaction at all because it is very likely a scam. If you see a scam like this report it to Amazon so that they remove it quickly.
Also be wary of 3rd party offers from new merchants with few or zero ratings. Quality merchants usually have hundreds if not thousands of ratings. We've seen a few instances of scammers that appear to be posing as new merchants as well.
If you want to be absolutely confident that you're not getting scammed stick to items that are fulfilled by Amazon. Those are usually marked as Prime on Amazon and therefore Amazon will handle the invoicing and shipping of the item.
This issue is affecting a relatively small number of items and we're sure Amazon is working to further limit the impact, but it's always wise to proceed with caution when that deal seems a little too good to be true.
Thanks for using camelcamelcamel this holiday season!
