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amaozn.com?

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, August 24, 2006
17 years ago3,996 views

Does anyone know if the site amaozn.com is legitimate? It's a misspelling of amazon.com, but it looks identical. The registrar showed up as Amazon Technologies, Inc. but Amazon.com, Inc. is the owner of the actual amazon.com so the site seems fake.

I sent an email to amazon about it, since it could be a phishing attempt, and at the very least it's copyright infringement if they are not the owners (the amazon.com logo appears, along with the same interface).

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I'm almost certain it's legit as it pings the same server:

Pinging www.amaozn.com [72.21.206.5] with 32 bytes of data:

Pinging www.amazon.com [72.21.206.5] with 32 bytes of data:

(It would be much better if Amazon redirected the domain though...)

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

What's especially weird is the different company name (though the email address is still hostmaster[put at-character here]amazon.com) and the fact that it's registered through GoDaddy.

Plus since it doesn't recognize cookies from amazon.com, you won't be logged in even if you have amazon remember you.

The redirect would make a million times more sense.

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Hmm the Search and all work. If it was a phishing attempt, the owner should've gone through a ton of work.

IE7 isn't detecting it as phishing, Firefox 2 isn't either.

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

It's clean with Netcraft too.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Sohil, I don't think it'd be that difficult to duplicate functionality like the search on another site. You can just hit amazon.com with the query, screen scrape it, and present the results. The user wouldn't know the difference. This could be done for all pages. Then, on pages with personal information, additional code could be injected into what was screen scraped to capture personal information like account password, credit card info, etc.

That said, I think I'm with Tony that this is a legit site that just looks highly suspicious. Still, I'd never use it or login on it.

Kirby Witmer [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

i'm suspicious its somebody's affiliate site.. notice when you click on an item it redirects you to amazon.com's website with an affiliate id on the end of the url.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I don't think that's an affliate ID – it's probably just a tracking code for Amazon. (Clicking the same product on Amazon.com results in exactly the same URL.) And how could it be an affliliate site hosted on Amazon's servers?

You get the same results with:

www.ajmazon.com
www.akazon.com
www.akmazon.com
www.amaaon.com

etc...

More here: http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/?hostname=amaozn.com

(Note: this doesn't mean Amazon actually own those domains though – just that they're pointing at their servers and serving the usual Amazon website.)

Kirby Witmer [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

i see... thanks 4 the explanation, tony!!

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I don't know who is the owner of the domain, but the domain points to the legitimate Amazon servers, so he can't do anything bad as long as he does not change DNS records. Right now the site is served and controlled by amazon.com severs.

ludwik[put at-character here]leon:~$ host www.amaozn.com
www.amaozn.com has address 72.21.206.5
www.amaozn.com has address 207.171.166.102
ludwik[put at-character here]leon:~$ host 72.21.206.5
5.206.21.72.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 206-5.amazon.com.
ludwik[put at-character here]leon:~$ host 207.171.166.102
102.166.171.207.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 166-102.amazon.com.

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