
Amazon Froze My Account and I Still Don’t Know Why - ilamont
https://bardsandsages.com/juliedawson/2018/05/06/amazon-froze-my-account-and-i-still-dont-know-why/
======
redleggedfrog
I think this is the future rise of the robots. It won't be Skynet, with
clearly malicious bots trying to destroy humanity. It will be capricious and
arbitrary bots, locking us out of our bank accounts and merchant accounts with
little or no recompense. We've already seen it with Google, now here with
Amazon. How soon until your phone gets turned off, and that's just the end?

~~~
dsnuh
I feel like the "rise of the machines" won't be some bloodbath with
terminators or AI killing people outright, it will just be that _everything_
will be a Kafka-esque maze of bureaucratic complexity with no human recourse
when you get caught in the system. It's like those Coke Freestyle machines,
where you get stuck in line behind someone trying to figure out the
touchscreen system when all you want to do is get a Coke. The future of
society is all of us frustratedly waving our hands in front of an automated
paper towel dispenser before we just give up and wipe our hands on our pants.

~~~
temp-dude-87844
This is already the case. Much of the adult condition consists of trying to
prove one's case to bureaucracies: why you shouldn't have incurred that
overdraft, why you shouldn't have been denied that insurance claim, why you
think there's a mistake on your bill -- and merely getting a human on the
phone isn't sufficient to resolve your issue. You should also come armed with
ample documentation (which you may not even have) to support your case, and be
prepared to set aside a chunk of time as you bounce from department to
department. This is part of why money-poor and time-constrained people have
such terrible outcomes: each mistake hurts more in proportion, they lack the
funds to hire an expert (e.g. tax professional, lawyer), and they're
constrained on time to deal with offices that are only open for less than a
quarter of the week.

There's a march towards more automation, more externally-opaque algorithms,
and less humans to escalate to, but the core of the problem is quite old.
Instead of a polite-if-flustered customer service representative telling you
they don't know, you need to speak to someone else, you'll have to scrape the
secret number from a 3-year-old reddit post or publicly shame them on Twitter
to get answers, but the outcome's the same: the better-equipped and loudest
voices win, while there's a bunch of others who get shafted with no recourse.
Eventually, you quietly learn to keep thorough records, emergency savings, and
eat the loss, because unless you can fight these sorts of issues in a higher
forum where damages are an option, fighting them more than two roundtrips deep
isn't worth your time.

~~~
anitil
I've spent a lot of time trying to come up with a business case for this
problem. Something like : 'For $x I will call your bank/real estate
agent/local council/supplier and sort out $problem. If I don't solve it, you
don't pay'. Somewhere between a lawyer and a PA.

But I couldn't get around the privacy implications - I'd need all your
passwords, birth dates etc and would need to either certify myself as your
agent, or pretend to be you.

Edit: dizzystar and other below actually do just this thing for dealing with
Amazon

------
black_puppydog
As many I'm afraid of a future (and present) where big platforms like amazon,
google, facebook are essentially without alternative, and laws governing
competition and thelike become a farce in the face of "rule by terms and
conditions".

In Germany though, we recently had a nice case about a nation-wide football
(soccer...) arena ban, in which the constitutional court ruled that this
constituted a significant obstacle to taking part in regular social life. They
pretty explicitely stated that this is _not_ limited to football arenas, but
can in principle apply to facebook and thelike. According to this ruling,
they'd have to come up with a good reason for banning a user and there would
be potential recourse. Very encouraging, really, since the ruling just admits
what many already claim: the big platforms are an essential part of
private/professional life, really they're more infrastructure than a choice
made by the user.

------
j-c-hewitt
Having had to work with Amazon support in a variety of capacities for many
different businesses this is a common response to Amazon's support.

Contrary to what a lot of people think these are generally not robots. They're
just people with a very short training period governed by an extremely
didactic decision tree. If you do not give the support person what they expect
using Amazon's unique definitions for terms which are often orthogonal to the
dictionary definitions (e.g. you are supposed to get IP owners to 'retract'
complaints even if you are really supposed to 'resolve' those complaints and
there is a giant distinction between 'counterfeit' and 'inauthentic' products
in Amazon-land) .

This often causes a lot of frustration as people shake their fists at the
injustice of a highly bureaucratic system. Fist-shaking doesn't really do much
and it just sorta amps up the frustration level. Sending lots of messages in
also tends to befuddle the support people and/or cause giant problems if the
wrong thing is said.

In practice what it means is that people who try to sell on the marketplace
without knowledge of the opaque rules that govern it will tend to get weeded
out. People tend to expect that the systems that they rely on are governed by
moral rules about who is right and who is wrong. But it is really more easily
navigable by people who are savvy.

What's fair doesn't really enter into the picture and the way that Amazon's
systems in particular work tend to run against the average American's
expectations for justice (expecting to be innocent until proven guilty, that
laws and procedures be readily comprehensible, that judgment be even-handed
and based on precedent, and so on).

However unlike some other big tech cos like Google/FB you at least have
avenues of appeal beyond suing them. If you have a business problem with
Google you will probably have to do something insane to get their attention.

~~~
daveFNbuck
> In practice what it means is that people who try to sell on the marketplace
> without knowledge of the opaque rules that govern it will tend to get weeded
> out. People tend to expect that the systems that they rely on are governed
> by moral rules about who is right and who is wrong. But it is really more
> easily navigable by people who are savvy.

How does one avoid getting weeded out and become savvy if the rules are
opaque?

~~~
dizzystar
The rules aren't opaque. There just isn't any ambiguity to them, which means
that everything is exactly written with no room for Interpretation.

I explain Amazon support like this: if you told someone to grab money from the
bank, you haven't specified the instructions, so they will claim they have no
idea how to do it.

If you tell them to drive to the bank, walk in, go to the teller, not the
ATM...

This very specific instructions will get the response you need.

With experience, you start to get a hang of the lingo. It does feel like you
are talking to bots, but you are really talking to humans who click the next
step in the Q&A. They probably could hold your hand, but they don't appear to
be trained to do so.

It's highly unlikely that you'll get shut down full stop right off the bat.
You have a lot of room for error, but if you get frustrated quickly, you can
get blocked at some step, but really that's on you.

The situation in the article would have taken me about 1 day to resolve, but
the key takeaway is the books were up for sale again because the author did
exactly as the instructions said.

~~~
j-c-hewitt
'Opaque' as in 'generally opaque from the outside.' You learn in the process
that you're describing.

Hilariously, it's to some extent like playing Zork or a similar text-based
adventure game but with real money on the line.

~~~
ryanlol
The easiest approach is to just ask the rep to install Teamviewer, it will
help make the process _much_ less opaque.

[https://imgur.com/a/yaI4B](https://imgur.com/a/yaI4B)

------
cwkoss
I wonder if there is a list of buzzwords you can send to the autoreply that
will get it in front of an actual human. Like:

"Hey, seems like your bot is broken and I need to talk to a human, so I've
copy pasted the following terms to attempt to elevate the issue and reach a
human:

emergency fraud lawsuit hacked liability jeff bezoz better business bureau
fuck shit escalate critical severe engineer SLA reliability false positive
PARSE ERROR..."

~~~
lainga
A corporate version of the old NSA salute. al-qaeda operation dirty bomb
infosec target juliett class prism activate!

------
muddi900
I have had the displeasure of being on the wrong end. Amazon seller and vendor
support is obtuse and designed to confuse. It is adversarial. It is about
three steps away from being on the same level as a dealing with a federal
criminal charge.

I had to write a plan, to avoid my 'misconduct', which was repeatedly rejected
by 'assigned team', a group of unnamed individuals that was only allowed to
communicate to me in automated templates.

I would only wish this experience on my worst enemies.

------
bhuga
There's some assumption here that there's a reason for the account blocking,
and if only a human could be reached, it could be explained in detail. But
that may not be true. ML systems usually don't explain themselves by default;
it's possible there's simply no further information available for a support
agent to give.

This is a fun talk about post-hoc explanations from ML systems. It's possible,
but it takes real work: [https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2017/just-so-stories-
for-ai-e...](https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2017/just-so-stories-for-ai-
explaining-black-box-predictions.html)

------
caro_douglos
Unfortunately it's all too common with Amazon to not give a great reason as to
why where and how you violated their terms/expectations (IMO 3rd party sellers
have to go down a support rabbit hole in the hopes of finding the one support
person that can "guess" what's causing the suspension). Can you imagine how
painful it would be to that third party Amazon seller whose whole income is
from their (recently) suspended account?

Am relieved to hear that Amazon was not the author's only source of
income...note the similarities to uber/lyft drivers being suspended.

------
jiveturkey
This is as designed. All these companies ban or block users without
explanation because their hand is forced. If they reveal the detailed reasons,
or even make it possible to discover why, they become wide open to gaming.
It’s a losing battle to begin with and keeping every advantage (secrecy) is
critical.

Unfortunately.

It falls into the “this is why we can’t have nice things” category.

~~~
maxk42
This is the correct answer.

Most of those "automated" replies were copy-pasted from humans. This book
inadvertently brushes up against something they want prohibited on their
platform, but if they explain why it will give you a vital clue as to how to
game their system. They can't get into detail, but want to stop you. It looks
like the author is writing stories that could be mistaken for Steven Universe
fan-fiction, so it may be a lot more straightforward than this writeup lets
on: The writing may come off as being related to a franchise they're not a
part of.

------
Havoc
Why doesn't Amazon at least include a hint as to what's wrong.

Automating this doesn't seem problematic per se, but omitting a key piece of
info like that borderline malicious. It's a bit like an error message that
just says "Error" \- short of an absolutely green programmer I'd expect
better.

~~~
lotsofpulp
That would open them up to people who can try to figure out what the triggers
are detecting unwanted activity and getting around it, and possibly opening
them up to discrimination claims.

------
fhood
Say what you like about Amazon, but you must admit that they are a very shrewd
company. Provide fantastic customer service to the consumers, and almost none
at all to the sellers. Brilliant.

~~~
peteri
Although they do sometimes fall down for consumers, I have a 2nd gen kindle
bought from the US but running on the UK store which no longer talks to the
store (I can download content but not browse).

I ended up in a maze of the US folks saying it's a UK store problem and the UK
folks saying it's a US supplied kindle so talk to the US. After a few rounds
of "reset back to factory" support calls I gave up.

I suspect the problem is the clock which is out by an hour so SSL /
authentication isn't working. I held out until we left summer time back to GMT
but even then it was still broken (I also tried from the Caribbean in case it
was a European time zone issue). The GSM modem diagnostic page looked correct.

In the end I gave up and my partner got me a Kindle Oasis from Amazon UK for
Christmas.

~~~
mynameisvlad
I had the exact same problem with a Japan-bought Kindle Oasis used in the US.
My Oasis got stolen right before I left for the airport, wanted one while on
my trip so ordered one in Japan. I got the exact same run around trying to get
special offers removed: US support says to ask JP support because it was
bought there, then JP support says to ask US support because it's registered
there. There was an additional problem that 3G only works in Japan for those
Kindles.

I ended up sending an email to jeff@ asking for an exchange of the Kindle to a
US one. Ended up getting a one-time credit for the cost of a new Kindle with
3G.

------
Liquix
Great read, I loved the letter vs. spirit workaround she employed in the end.

Amazon is growing in a bunch of directions very quickly, so issues like this
are bound to crop up.

I think the solution to this one lies in a business strategy (scale support
staff at the same rate you are recruiting customers & sellers) or automation
rule (i.e. flag and send to support staff if more than X replies have been
sent && account remains locked).

It will be interesting to see if they can solve these issues in a timely and
cost-effective manner or if certain arenas (i.e. eBook publishing) will be
neglected in favor of more lucrative & automatable ones.

------
nfriedly
Amazon once froze my seller account for something stupid and it was impossible
to contact a human or get it resolved automatically.

They got humans involved and fixed it pretty quickly once I explained why I
was canceling my AWS account.

------
bitL
Welcome to Amazon! Look at what is going on with 3rd party sellers there;
reliable, highly-rated sellers get their accounts indefinitely suspended for
completely bogus reasons with no recourse. I guess they don't need them
anymore so they don't care about their shoddy ML and its false positives...

------
biggerfisch
On a related note to Amazon taking automation too far, I've noted that they
seem to have some serious problems with categorizing products. For weeks and
weeks now, in my recommendations are "Men's watches" [1] which are almost
always comprised mostly of SSDs and flash drives. The flash drive in
question's product page lists it as the "#1 best seller in Men's Watches" and
my guess is that SSDs are close enough to a flash drive to also get pulled
into the mix. It's frustrating to see large companies with offices full of
developers making such public mistakes and then pushing broken technology
further.

1: [https://i.imgur.com/Sp7Yd5s.png](https://i.imgur.com/Sp7Yd5s.png)

------
rurban
Similar to my experience with them: I had two accounts, one US and one German.
After I moved back to Germany I asked them to remove my US account, as I
didn't have a US debit card anymore. First they were able to do that, after
several complaints and waiting. But then they also deleted my other account,
probably by accident. A so-called double close, which is fatal on glibc, and
in my case. Thankfully I've changed my mind about their services and am quite
happy without any account.

------
keith_analog
I've been locked out of my Amazon account for a year now, for reasons I don't
know. Amazon reps told me I'd hear back, but there's been nothing for months
now. Fortunately, the credit card they have on file expired, and the ebooks I
can no longer read are not so important to me. So, good riddance, I say.

------
crankylinuxuser
Again, this is the trend I posted about
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014500)

What happens if Amazon decides to disable your account? Well, folks. This is
no longer a "what if", but a "now what?!"

Sure, you can sue. But as many people here are pro-capitalist, they will
assert a company's decision to fire users with absolutely no redress of the
data that was decided upon. Personhood rights, and all that.

(No, I don't believe that companies should get personhood rights. And yes, I
do believe that we people have the right to see what data they use to
determine how they work with us, or not. The GDPR in Europe is a good start.)

Where does it leave everyone? Well, for these people, certainly not using
Amazon AWS now. And I'm guessing that they can't even extract their data
either.

Aren't automated system "Great" ?

------
marta_moreno
Hmm I wrote you an email. I am a dev only though. Let's see what we can do ;).

------
gustavmarwin
Twitter froze my account today and I have no idea why either. Hate blockchain
all you want, but I'm in pure love of it. I/We sorely need transparency and
decentralization.

~~~
freeone3000
How would blockchain help?

"Twitter froze my account!" "Yep. I see here twitter froze your account at
this time, in this date, in this transaction chain. Proof of work is right
here."

~~~
gustavmarwin
That's how:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/87k9iz/presenting...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/87k9iz/presenting_peepeth_a_decentralized_alternative_to/)

~~~
ItsMe000001
How does that help? There are thousands of well-meant projects from
overenthusiastic but inexperienced developers. The "interesting project!"
graveyard is overflowing. Nobody knows this project or cares apart from some
enthusiasts, and that won't change. Never even mind the discussion about the
purpose of the blockchain here. Even if there was a purpose, I'd say tweets
are the _last_ thing that needs to be archived all over the place.

The unique service of Twitter is that it is famous, not that it is able to
distribute tiny snippets of text. Just like Medium. By using the brand name
service you get an increased chance to actually be noticed and read in
exchange.

~~~
gustavmarwin
So like Facebook. So let's not change anything then?

Alright let's do this: you don't change anything and stay on Facebook/Twitter
indefinitely.

You will change you mind.

------
benmmurphy
while i think her response was clever isn't it basically lying. like if you
knowingly phrase something in a way to give someone a different impression
from what you actually will later claim to mean its just a really clever lie.

~~~
daveFNbuck
Which part of her response gives an impression different from what she
actually meant? I assume she read the rules and plans to comply with them. She
checked that none of her books violate the rules, so she doesn't have to
delete any of them to live up to the statement.

~~~
benmmurphy
You are correct. I re-read her response and it looks completely reasonable to
me on second reading.

------
ceejayoz
Why not send the "I promise to follow the rules" email - since OP clearly
desires to do so - and then follow-up afterwards instead of repeatedly
ignoring the instructions given?

~~~
Someone1234
As they explained in the article, they cannot agree to stop violating the
terms if they have no understanding of how they're violating the terms.

They did review them, and could not locate the violation. So they contacted
Amazon for confirmation and wound up in this bot loop.

~~~
ceejayoz
The email doesn't ask them to agree to stop.

It asks them to confirm they've read and agree to the rules, which they do.

Reply to the bot, then escalate. If the bot required wording like "I'm very
sorry for violating the rules", that'd be a potentially different story.

~~~
waisbrot
Even without an explicit admission of guilt, you're putting yourself in a
compromising position. Amazon made an accusation and then asked for redress,
so if you give them that and were then involved in a lawsuit you'd have to
explain why your actions (giving Amazon what they demanded to forgive you for
rule-breaking) are inconsistent with your claims (you didn't break any rule).

~~~
ceejayoz
So, add "Having reviewed them, I do not appear to have violated any of these
terms and believe this to be a false-positive" to the wording they request,
and send a follow-up to customer service.

Present in court, if necessary.

~~~
jdormit
That is exactly what she did.

