Amazon's Dormant Accounts Under Fire as E-Commerce Fraud Shifts Tactics

Fraudsters in India have moved past phishing emails and are now systematically targeting dormant accounts on Amazon and Flipkart, according to recent reporting from the Times of India. The shift reflects a broader evolution in e-commerce security risk: attackers are exploiting the fact that most users never deactivate old accounts, leaving credentials and stored payment methods vulnerable to takeover.

The issue arrives as Amazon faces scrutiny on multiple fronts in the region. The Ken reports that the company is running behind local rivals in India's booming quick-commerce segment, betting that rapid warehouse expansion and its existing Prime subscription base will compensate for a late entry. That strategy assumes customer trust and account integrity remain intact.

Meanwhile, the Advertising Standards Council of India released its annual complaints report showing that illegal ads and scams now outpace traditional misinformation violations. The council singled out offshore betting operations that churn high-speed content across influencer networks, affiliate channels, and messaging apps, making enforcement nearly impossible. The ad ecosystem's speed and reach have amplified harm faster than monitoring infrastructure can scale.

Elsewhere in platform news, Zalando has partnered with Vestiaire Collective to bring authenticated resale inventory into 14 European markets, a hedge against the margin pressure that has pushed traditional e-commerce players toward higher-ticket categories and closed-loop ecosystems. Both the fraud surge and the resale partnerships point to the same underlying tension: platforms built for growth now face the operational cost of policing the secondary behaviors their scale has enabled.