FYI - Amazon 0.5% rebate to the charity of your choice

[charisstoma]

I received from an interest group this email:

Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:46 PM
Subject: Re: Amazon charitable donations

On Mar 15, 2014, at 9:38 PM, name removed for privacy wrote:

> Amazon has started a program where they contribute 0.5% of your purchases to an organization of your choice. I chose the NRA Civil Defense Fund. If you buy from Amazon, make sure you’ve chosen a worthwhile charity.

Do you have a url or menu location for getting to this data?

A responding email gave that url and there's a nice little link to what looks like the Amazon site complete with being able to see what is stored in my wish lists and shopping cart. But I'm a suspicious person and I haunt Amazon for work as well as other reasons. So wading through the, for me not very clear, options to try to contact Amazon. I got this back within the 12 hours response time their site promised:


Amazon
Your Account Amazon.com
Message From Customer Service
Hello,

The e-mail you received wasn't from Amazon.com. For your protection, do not respond to it, and do not open any attachments or click any links it contains.

We recommend that you open a new e-mail and attach the e-mail you suspect is a fake, then send the e-mail to stop-spoofing@amazon.com.

If you responded to the e-mail or visited a linked website but didn't provide any personal information (such as your login or password), your Amazon.com account information should still be safe. However, if you did respond or if you visited a forged website and entered your Amazon.com login and password (or any other personal information), we recommend that you update your Amazon.com password immediately by going to Your Account (http://www.amazon.com/your-account) and selecting "Change Account Settings." If you provided financial information, you may want to contact your bank or credit card provider.

We also recommend running anti-virus or anti-malware software whenever you receive a suspicious e-mail, especially if you opened an attachment or visited a website that was linked in the e-mail.

To learn more about ways to protect yourself from phishing, go to our Help pages:

http://www.amazon.com/phish

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Best regards,
Sakthivel.R

I did go in and change my Amazon password even though I hadn't logged in. That being able to see my CORRECT Amazon wish list and shopping cart didn't inspire confidence in my other information there not being hacked too.


The group that had this posted is paranoid and when I posted back to them, I got this- "Why would they go out of their way to tell you how you can distribute some of their cash to others? Sure, they created the program, but like most marketing, companies would prefer that it gives them a PR benefit without actually costing anything." A friend signed me up onto this group's site and I find it amusing/scary/interesting so haven't taken myself off their list.

So then I Googled a little more. *sighs* And found:

http://fundraisingcoach.com/2013/10/30/amazons-smile-windfall-nonprofits-yearend-fundraising/

So THEN I went to the stop-spoofing@amazon.com site and asked about the fund raising link from above including that link for reference.
BECAUSE I am suspicious.
Am waiting for their reply.

Comments

[2metaldog.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't trust Amazon if they told me water was wet. They are rat bastards. View anything from them, even if you contacted them as suspicious/bearing close scrutiny automatically.

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

This didn't come from Amazon originally. It came from a pro-gun/anti-gun control group.

This is a new Amazon program. And *grins* if you open one of the links in the comment below, reddit.com, Amazon is probably thinking tax deductions from giving donations to charities, now that places like Texas want their sales tax from Amazon on-line purchases.

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

Well this didn't appear before. I Googled again and found:

http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=13786401

OR

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1pk649/amazon_just_launched_amazon_smile_its_the_same/

[writer-klmeri.livejournal.com]

Oh geez. Now I am paranoid.

paranoid us?

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

It really is a new program. I just wish that Amazon knew what the other hand was doing when I first contacted them. They could have just said, yes this is a new program we are putting in place but noooo-00-oo. I'll have a canned response for you in less than 12 hours.

Amazon remembers your ISP or something. In my case it remembers both my work and my home. But if I want to purchase something then I've got to enter my user and password. So they do have security but hmmm.
Interesting that I found the information on their site shortly after all my flailing at them but then it was from Redit that the link was.