I'm a pretty frequent PrimeNow customer in London, and tonight I had an odd request from Amazon in the name of security.

They (presumably they...) called me from a number with a different country code than the country I live in and asked if I was expecting a delivery.

I asked who it was, and they repeated the question.

Because I suspected it was Amazon and that odds were small it was some phishing attempt, I said yes. They then proceeded to ask me my full name and address; each time I asked them why they were asking this, and I got the response that it was for security.

I responded that it seemed more like information they should be giving me to confirm they were really amazon, but that was clearly off-script.

It turned out they also had the delivery guy on the phone, who had apparently been waiting outside for about 5-10 minutes for Amazon to perform their 'security' checks before he was allowed to turn over my packages.

It's likely I'm inferring more into this process than meets the eye, but as someone who works tangentially in the security field, this seems like an absolute backward way of making deliveries more secure and indeed seems like it conditions people to be even more open to phishing attacks than they already are in order to make some people inside Amazon PrimeNow feel a bit safe. Am I taking crazy pills, or is this absolutely backward?