Amazon’s AI assistant can now spot fake emails from the company

Amazon is trying to combat impersonation scams with a new feature that allows you to use its AI assistant to determine whether an email, text message, or phone call actually came from the company. With the update, you can ask Alexa for Shopping about a message you received, and it will use AI to compare […]. Amazon’s AI assistant can now spot fake emails from the company.

With the update, you can ask Alexa for Shopping about a message you received, and it will use AI to compare it “against a record of every message Amazon has sent,” while also analyzing its contents, formatting, and the sender. As noted by Amazon, the assistant will only confirm that a message is real if it’s “completely certain.” An example shared by Amazon shows a customer asking, “Did Amazon just text me an OTP from 98626? The company launched a similar feature earlier this year that lets you forward suspicious messages to “verify@amazon.com” to check if they’re real.

This isn’t the only recent update Amazon launched for Alexa for Shopping, as it added an “Update Me When” feature that can now help you track new product releases as well. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Emma Roth AI Amazon Amazon Alexa News Tech Most Popular Most Popular Is this the future of America?

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Amazon is adding a scam-detection feature to Alexa for Shopping that can verify whether suspicious emails, texts, and other messages actually came from the retailer. PSA: Amazon’s shopping AI can now tell you if that message is a scam.

Amazon is turning to AI to help fight scammers, the company announced on Wednesday. The retailer said some 360,000 customers every year reach out to its customer service department wondering whether a message they received from Amazon is real or a scam.

Now, customers will be able to ask Amazon’s consumer AI service, Alexa for Shopping, to help answer that question instead. The company said its AI can “definitively” confirm whether a communication originated from its own systems by checking it against the billions of messages Amazon has sent globally.

The AI analyzes the sender information, content, timing, message metadata, and more, to determine authenticity. Amazon said the system will improve as customers report more suspicious messages, helping it to spot scams more effectively in the future.

The new AI capabilities follow on Amazon’s earlier attempts to address the growing scam problem, which includes fake order confirmations, Prime membership renewal alerts, account suspension warnings, package delivery notifications, and job scams. Earlier this year, Amazon launched an email address, verify@amazon.com, that allows anyone to forward suspicious messages to the company and receive a response that confirms whether the email was a real message or a scam.

It also offers an online form on its customer service site that provides the same assistance. The feature’s addition is another example of how Amazon has shifted its product strategy around Alexa to focus more on how it can assist with shopping-related questions and provide proactive help.

Today, the assistant can source personalized deals, create shopping guides, help customers reorder their everyday items, offer AI product overviews, transcribe handwritten shopping lists, and more. On Tuesday, the retailer also added an Alexa feature that lets customers set alerts when something new or relevant happens, like a favorite brand launching a new product, the release of a new book from a favorite author, or an artist dropping a new record.

Alexa for Shopping is available from both the Amazon website and mobile app. Topics AI, Amazon, Commerce, e-commerce When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission.

This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Sarah Perez Consumer News Editor Sarah has worked as a reporter for since August 2011.