If youâre sitting on a pile of credit card points, someone with nothing but your card number may be able to spend them on Amazon. You probably wonât get a heads-up.
Doctor of Credit flagged a fresh round of it on October 13. The trick is simple. A thief gets your card number, usually from some breach you never heard about. They add the card to their own Amazon account, switch on Shop with Points, and pay for their orders with your rewards.
They donât need your Amazon password. They donât need your bank login. Your card number is the key.
Hereâs what they donât tell you
Amazonâs own explanation is the tell. A spokesperson told PCMag in February that when someone links a rewards account through Shop with Points, âwe send a notification to the rewards partner for every enrollment attempt.â
The rewards partner. Thatâs your bank. Not you.
Amazon has no idea who the real cardholder is, so it tells the bank and leaves it there. Whether the bank tells you is its call. Doctor of Credit points out that alert emails should, in theory, go out when a card gets linked or points get spent. Yet it âseems to be affecting quite a few peopleâ anyway.
PCMag counted at least 20 rewards programs that plug into Shop with Points, including Chase, American Express and Capital One. The current wave Doctor of Credit describes is Chase points so far.
The thefts are built to slip past you. Aviation journalist Jason Rabinowitz had his Chase Ultimate Rewards balance drained in a series of small Amazon redemptions last December, six figures of points by Android Headlinesâ account. âI only discovered the fraud well after the fact when I spotted my points balance was missing a digit,â he told PCMag.
The good news, with a condition
Chase told PCMag that âin confirmed cases of fraud, customers are not held responsible for unauthorized redemptions and are reimbursed for any lost points.â Rabinowitz got his full balance back within a week of reporting it.
Notice the word confirmed. The refund starts when you report it, and you canât report what you never saw. A balance number is easy to skim past. A redemption log isnât.
Do this now
Log in to your cardâs rewards site today and open the redemption history. The balance alone wonât tell you much. Look for Amazon or Shop with Points lines you didnât make, especially a string of small ones.
Find one? Call the number on the back of the card, report the redemptions as fraud and ask for a new card number. The old number is how they got in, and as long as itâs live it can be linked again.
Then check your own Amazon accountâs Shop with Points settings and unenroll any card you donât redeem through. That wonât stop a thiefâs account, but it shuts off accidental redemptions on yours.
Put the redemption check on your calendar once a month, the same day your statement closes. It takes two minutes.
Verdict: this one is on you to catch, and itâs cheap to catch. Points sitting untouched for a year are exactly the ones nobodyâs watching. For cards with rewards worth guarding, see our credit cards hub and best credit card picks.
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