A bunch of Amazon customers were told about a purchase on their non-existent baby registries

Something weird is going on over at Amazon. It seems the online retail giant is randomly telling some customers about purchases on their baby registry. The problem is these customers say they don’t have a baby registry — and some don’t even have a baby.

Retailers regularly keep tabs on our purchases so they can retarget us with ads and notifications based on that data in hopes we come back and buy again. You might remember the story about Target’s ability to predict a teenage girl was pregnant back in 2012 using her purchase data.

But, in this instance with Amazon, something clearly went wrong.

Others who had set up a baby registry were told someone purchased one of the items, only to go check it out and find the link to the purchased item Amazon sent in their email just sent them to a broken web page.

https://twitter.com/sarawgrr/status/910244761243721729

That’s not just a disappointing notification, it’s also concerning to customers that this might be some kind of a phishing scam.

Twitter has now exploded with comments from concerned customers asking Amazon what the hell is going on.

We’re not sure why this is happening, but we’ve reached out to Amazon for further comment.

Update: Amazon has confirmed the email came from the company and that it was sent out by mistake.

“We are notifying affected customers. A technical glitch caused us to inadvertently send a gift alert e-mail earlier today. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused,” an Amazon Spokesperson told TechCrunch.