
Amazon seller’s account suspended after changing profile name on Kindle Fire - ikeboy
https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/5gvgdl/using_a_amazon_kindle_fire_destroyed_my/
======
unknownsavage
Something similar happened to my wife as an Amazon affiliate. It took quite a
while to piece together, but after about 4 or 5 back and forths, we figured
out what happened.

Someone had clicked on her affiliate link, then copy and pasted it onto reddit
to share the Amazon product with some people (without knowing it had the
affiliate link as ?tag=....). Because reddit is a site you are not allowed to
share affiliate links, Amazon suspended the account.

The person who had shared the link was obviously even a legitimate reddit
user, and the post was pretty minor only getting a few upvotes (we only found
it via a search). But because of this, Amazon suspended over $500 of earnings,
and killed a site that took many months to build and establish. And now my
wife is now on a "refuse to respond" to list for trying to contact them
multiple times to get someone who can apply a little bit of reason to the
situation.

I think in hindsight we made the mistake of not trying to publicize the issue
and Amazon could just ignore it. So here's an upvote for the OP

~~~
ominous
So... sharing affiliate links on reddit will ruin the sellers account?

~~~
majewsky
Devil's advocate says that this is the most effective way to target this bad
policy. Use it to ruin the accounts of a few very big sellers, and have them
do the publicity work for you.

~~~
colinbartlett
I would like to see what happen when someone like The Wirecutter, owned by The
New York Times, has one of its affiliate links shared on Reddit and then has
its affiliate account shut down. They are certainly responsible for millions
of dollars of Amazon revenue.

~~~
esrauch
The really big affiliates almost definitely in a separate bucket that requires
a higher bar or human review to disable the account.

~~~
Harkins
Bless your heart.

------
ideonexus
I have run into this kind of automated bureaucracy several times in the last
decade. It is both infuriating and frightening.

My mortgage was sold to a new company that had a weird computer-directed
policy that rejected my home owner's insurance. They then flagged me as not
having insurance and charged me over $1,000 for providing insurance. I spent
hours on the phone speaking with people in India who absolutely would not send
my proof of insurance up the chain of command. It wasn't until I was able to
find the CEO of the mortgage company and contact her directly to explain my
situation that it was finally resolved... for six months when the automated
system rejected my home owners insurance again. I eventually had to refinance
the home to get out from under this soulless company's grip.

Institutions like the Better Business Bureau used to protect consumers from
this kind of abuse, but the complaints I have registered with them have
achieved nothing. If I was poor, this situation would have financially ruined
me. I would have missed mortgage payments, my home would have been foreclosed
on, and my credit would have been ruined for years.

I highly recommend the science fiction film "Brazil" to anyone who wants to
see the dystopia this kind of automated rules-enforcement could create.
"Brazil" is the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" but the totalitarian government
rules with a system of overwhelming bureaucracy. The problem here is that it
is the Capitalists who are the oppressors.

~~~
codegeek
Sorry to hear that. I want to add a side note on this for people considering a
mortgage. We never think about the fact that your mortgage could be sold to
another company when going for a mortgage. So unless you get the mortgage from
one of the big guns like wells fargo etc, there is a good chance that the
"smaller" mortgage firm that gave you a great rate will repackage your
mortgage and wash their hands off it. This can throw things off for you as you
are left to deal with a new company who can impose their shitty policies on
you and you didn't even choose them.

~~~
tw04
That's not necessarily accurate. The smaller mortgage BROKERS will likely sell
your loan to the highest bidder. If you go with a small town bank, they're
often self-funding the loans and won't ever sell them off (which is exactly
why I went with a small-town bank). Every small bank I've ever dealt with was
extremely easy to work with and up-front about whether or not they'll sell the
loan.

~~~
falcolas
I wouldn't count on this. My wife and I got a mortgage through our local bank
which has two branches, both in towns under 40,000 people, and the loan was
sold to Fanny Mae and their ilk before the ink had dried on the closing
papers.

They were up front about it, which I appreciated, but it goes to show that
using a small town bank does not guarantee your loan will stay local.

------
byuu
I feel really bad for the guy and I hope this gets enough media attention for
Amazon to actually care about helping him.

But this is the world we are headed toward with people continuing to stake
their entire livelihoods on services with almost non-existent customer
service. Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it.

If they won't give you a phone number that rings through to an actual human
being promptly, you shouldn't allow yourself to become dependent upon said
service continuing to work. Let alone base your entire income and the incomes
of employees under you on it. That's just incredibly irresponsible.

~~~
SwellJoe
Why is a phone the gold standard for support? If I have to talk to someone on
the phone, it means I have exhausted every other possible method to resolve my
problem, and I am furious with the company for making me talk to an idiot in
real time.

What I want is an issue tracker that has responsive, accountable, people on
the other end. That's my ideal support experience. Phones are the worst case
scenario.

~~~
benbristow
Because you're pretty much guaranteed an instant answer for every question you
ask. It's live 1 to 1 and instant. They can't patch you or put you in some
backlog.

~~~
SwellJoe
I don't want instant answers. I want right answers, in a timely manner. That's
entirely doable in a ticket system. Not so much with phone support...at least,
not in my experience. Phone support generally has a script. When your problem
diverges from the script, the person on the phone is of negative value. I want
my problem triaged to someone who can solve it, not hear how very sorry they
are and how much they appreciate my patience.

If I sound bitter...well, I really hate phones. My favorite support
experiences have never been on the phone. Chat maybe, email maybe, phone
never.

~~~
FussyZeus
> I don't want instant answers. I want right answers, in a timely manner.

THIS. TIMES. A. MILLION.

Call centers put pressure on employees, especially good ones to wrap up calls
quickly to keep their numbers high (because shitty policies result in a ton of
people calling) meaning that even if you get a rep who legitimately _wants to
help you_ , they are punished in their job if they try too hard to do that (or
take too long.)

Sidebar; Maybe this is a generational thing, I hate the phone. I hate being on
the phone, I hate using the phone. If I have to talk to sales reps I'd much
rather do it over email/in person, but not over the phone.

~~~
allengeorge
Email support makes it too easy to cut-n-paste replies. I've had too many
interactions where I spell out a problem - along with resolutions I've tried -
and then receive an obvious generic response (Evernote support - looking at
you). It can take multiple rounds to resolve the issue, and it's infuriating.

~~~
FussyZeus
That's very true, but email comes with a written record of everything that's
happened so far which makes dealing with that sort of issue a lot simpler. I
mean the phone alternative is where you get transferred from dept. to dept.,
having to re-explain the issue over and over again. I'll take a copy-paste
reply over that any day of the week.

------
setq
I recently had a bout or two with Amazon over a relatively trivial issue.
Simply that sold me a USB stick (Corsair Survivor) that fell to bits. Asked
for a replacement to be sent out. They wanted me to send the old one back. I
refused unless I can destroy the ICs on the board first for obvious reasons.
Took 45 minutes of explaining to someone who didn't really care. Eventually
they agreed to replace it and told me to dispose of the original.

Then about two weeks later I got an email saying that I was going to be
charged £31 for the replacement. Contacted Amazon again and was told that it
was policy to take a payment for it and they wouldn't budge. They also had no
record of agreement before either.

I lost my shit. Another 45 minutes later, eventually I have a resolution, I
think. I'll only know when they take or do not take the money.

Three lessons from the above and the original post:

1\. Get everything in writing. Use Amazon's chat facility when you contact
them and make sure you get a transcript emailed to you.

2\. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. I wouldn't trust them to solely run
my infrastructure or my business fulfillment. You don't really matter in the
scale of things so they can afford to do a shitty job sometimes.

3\. Cheap isn't necessarily a good deal. I'd genuinely rather pay more these
days for something and get it from Argos here in the UK. Or bytemark etc.

~~~
witty_username
Is the obvious reason securely erasing data from a flash drive?

I did not know that that is not possible.

~~~
raverbashing
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdx bs=1024 count=(size of drive in K)

Do it for as many times as you want.

~~~
michaelt
As flash drives do automatic wear levelling and remapping of bad sectors, some
people worry that their data might remain on the flash, in sectors they can't
read or write because of those features.

~~~
zaroth
If someone is that concerned perhaps they should have been using an encrypted
volume on the flash drive in the first place.

~~~
setq
This is true. However you have to trade off the risk of an entire volume
failing due to a partial cell failure which would mean only the loss of a
single file if it wasn't encrypted.

This device was stored securely in a fire safe at home, not used as a portable
device.

------
freddyc
Wow, poor guy.

As a side note, it's frustrating how email ceo@company.com is fast becoming
the only way to get real customer service. I'm a T-Mobile customer and
recently had a billing issue that required me to interact with their customer
support who were thoroughly unhelpful and just added to the frustration. I had
heard about the tactic of emailing John Legere so I did, and sure enough the
issue was sorted out promptly by a US-based exec response rep. I was happy to
get everything sorted, but the fact that customer service reps apparently
didn't have the power to fix a relatively straight-forward issue still
frustrates me.

------
ikeboy
My own story time: I found an item selling on amazon.co.uk and amazon.de for
much less than the going rate on amazon.com. I ordered a bunch from co.uk.
Then I was testing out the amazon.de site, I added a gift credit of 10 Euro.
Somehow this flagged the .de account for verification, and that account got
locked out. Then, that lockout spilled over to the uk account, and eventually
to the US account, where I had dozens of pending orders.

I sent an email to jeff@amazon.com with a summary of the issue. It took a day
or two for my US account to be fixed, and about a week for the other accounts
to start working. I don't know whether the email helped or whether it would
have been verified eventually anyway.

The process is definitely broken, though. Even one day lockout could be
catastrophic for a larger seller.

------
ransom1538
These larger tech firms are consolidating and often have market monopoly. They
often don't care when your account is suspended due to their own erroneous
fraud detection systems. They would rather have 2 innocent people lose their
livelihood than check on 500 fraud cases.

I imagine these destroy a livelihood around the globe every 60 seconds:

"I lost my Adsense account because someone in India clicked on my ad?"

"I lost my Amazon merchant account because of my 'suspicious' credit card?"

"Uber suspended me after someone threw up in my car?"

"Why am I suspended? I sent the package?"

------
robotmay
I've had terrible experiences with Amazon this year (though nowhere near as
bad as this poor guy) and it took me an entire day of repeatedly phoning their
support lines and forcing my way through to a manager until I found someone
who would actually use a bit of initiative.

In my case, I had something like a 50% failure rate of Prime delivery orders.
It was at the point that every time I'd buy something with a delivery date of
tomorrow, I'd get it 3 days later after it was dispatched from Germany
instead. The drivers who did turn up have now been banned from delivering to
our apartment block, as they would ditch all the parcels outside or with
security instead of delivering them. Standard customer support wouldn't refund
my Prime subscription because I had apparently used it 66 times in 3 months,
which must mean that they must count MP3 plays as uses, as I only ordered 12
parcels in that time. Thankfully I did eventually get hold of someone who took
the time to check and see that I've been buying from Amazon since they
launched in the UK, and had been a Prime member since that launched too, and
she promptly refunded me the membership. It took far, far too many managers to
get to that point, however.

The general customer service seems to have deteriorated in the past year.
Prior to that I always had great customer service from Amazon. I've now
largely switched away to ordering from elsewhere. eBuyer gets me my parcels
within a day on free shipping, and they're pretty competitive on price. I
always ordered from Amazon because the CS was good, but they've lost me as a
customer for now.

~~~
forgottenpass
_The general customer service seems to have deteriorated in the past year._

Must be a cost-saving initiative in their support org. I've never seen a
retailer that could even properly bucket losses into "our fuckup", "possibly
our fuckup" and "satiating customer." And forget about always fixing things
when they are recognized as a fuckup. There is too much incentive to not to do
anything for the customer. Even when its the "right thing to do." Metrics
often prioritize short term savings over burning a large-but-not-VIP customer.

I once worked with a retailer where even their Point of Sale voids were
bucketed wrong. If a CSR were to accidentally scan the same $X item twice,
they would void one on the POS. The stock control logic would keep the product
in inventory counts, but the end-of-day financial tallies would look the same
as if they manually applied a $X discount on an order.

I don't mean to imply Amazon is _that_ bad. But just because they're a big
software employer, and AWS is a decent product, it doesn't mean that the
support staff, internal software, etc... aren't shite.

------
peeky
I recently tried to change my password on my Amazon account (something I do a
couple of times per year) and was presented with a multi-factor auth prompt
for a long-forgotten and inactive AWS account that I trialled years ago. It
turns out the phone number on the AWS account is out of date and the
authenticator app was on the same phone that I no longer have, so I can't
remove or reset the MFA. All my details on my Amazon account are up to date
but these can't be used for resetting the MFA, only the details I entered when
I signed up to AWS. I've hit an impasse with support, they'll only accept a
notarized identity verification form and affidavit to proceed, which isn't
that easy or cheap to do outside of the USA.

At this point I'm snookered - I feel like if my password is ever compromised
I'm screwed, but it's not like I can just start a new account because all my
digital purchases, my Kindle, my Echo, etc are tied to my old account.

Basically: do yourself a favour and sign up to distinct services with distinct
accounts and don't have one global account for everything.

~~~
Pyxl101
I don't think you should blame Amazon for enforcing the MFA that you set up.
Allowing you someone to trivially reset the password on an MFA-enabled account
would completely defeat the security purpose of MFA. If you've been reading HN
for long, I'm sure you've seen stories of how attackers have used famous
peoples' personal information to compromise their accounts at various services
by requesting password resets. Respecting MFA and requiring a higher bar for
password resets is necessary for defending against these attacks. And of
course, if you're using both Amazon.com and AWS under one Amazon account
(which it sounds like youare), then it would also defeat the security purpose
of MFA if you could reset your account password through Amazon.com after
setting up an MFA to protect your AWS usage.

I think your conclusion and advice is good. Separate your accounts for
different services.

> I've hit an impasse with support, they'll only accept a notarized identity
> verification form and affidavit to proceed, which isn't that easy or cheap
> to do outside of the USA.

This should in fact be very cheap most places in the world. Do they not have
notaries public in your country?

Generally you just need to sign a legally binding form asserting under penalty
of perjury that you are so-and-so, and this is your account. You do this in
front of the notary, and they inspect your government ID to confirm it's
really you. Then the notary stamps the document to indicate that they've
witnessed you signing it, and have inspected your id. Now you're done.

A number of online businesses require this in certain circumstances, and it's
something that you can do in about 10 minutes at a store. In the USA, stores
like the UPS Store, Kinko's Copies, etc. often have notary services. If you
work for a medium-sized company or larger, your company will typically have a
notary in its business center who may be willing to notarize personal
documents for free. It should be a pretty simple process to complete, if
inconvenient.

~~~
peeky
The problem is that it isn't really a shared account - the login email and
password are the same, but they won't accept any current mobile number/etc
entered anywhere but AWS.

I used AWS for a bit and then stopped, and then forgot about it. I've kept my
Amazon account up to date, but not my AWS details. For years I continued to
use my Amazon account without ever needing to use the MFA, so forgot I ever
activated it. This year they've suddenly decided to enforce the MFA globally.
I blame myself for not removing the MFA when I closed the account, but you can
hopefully see why it's a frustrating user experience also. And like I say, the
net result is a less secure Amazon account for everything but AWS until I can
remove the MFA requirement.

Re notarizing, my understanding is that I need to use a US notary service for
it to be valid for a US document (eg available via the US embassy).

------
captainmuon
I've been saying this a lot, and hopefully I don't get downvoted because this
is too "political", but...

Essentially, Amazon is no longer a business. It is infrastructure. Every
citizen should have the right to complain if something goes wrong. There could
be a little office in every bigger city where you pull a number and get to
talk to a real human. And if the dispute isn't settled, you should be able to
take your case to a real court.

Note I don't want to expropriate anybody. Congratulations Jeff, you won
capitalism! Give the man a billion and make him Secretary of Shipment or
something. But the whole structure he created has become so important, that it
should be subject to the same scrutiny that a wing of government would be
(should be)... parliamental control, transparence and accountability,
separation of powers, etc..

~~~
niij
I'm curious what your thoughts are on other page businesses? Walmart, FedEx,
Ebay?

~~~
captainmuon
Good question. It's indeed hard to tell where to draw the line.

If you are going for a "social market economy" kind of society - e.g. a free
market but elements of what would be called "socialist" in the US - then there
is a place for huge businesses that are run privately (i.e. not state
controlled). E.g. Wallmart, Ford, Microsoft...

I would say the government should step in, that is the public should gain
control, if the enterprise becomes utility-like. If you "need" their services
to participate in society at a reasonable level. Or if many people build their
businesses on them. This feature of "being essential" is not neccessarily the
same question as whether a company is a monopoly or not. The end 1990s
Microsoft was maybe a monopoly, but it was not a utility or infrastructure.

OTOH, I'm not sure you could classify Google or Amazon legally as Monopolies,
but they have created awesome (in both senses of the word) infrastructure. I
don't think this infrastructure should be entirely in the hands of a company
or a few people. We also don't let owners of toll roads make the rules of the
road.

So I wouldn't neccessarily nationalize Walmart, FedEx, Ebay. But I would
regulate large Telcos for example. The model here in Germany seems to work
quite OK. The market is deregulated, most of the infrastructure is still owned
by the former state companies (Deutsche Bahn, Telekom, ...), and these rent
the resources to other companies. But there are regulatory bodies that ensure
that e.g. the prices are fair. It's not perfect, but it seems the resulting
situation is preferable for customers (having lived in the US and Germany, I'd
say both public transport and telecommunication is on average cheaper and
better in Germany, and I think it is a result of this model.)

Twitter is a possible target. It doesn't seem profitable as a business anyway.
But if someone decided that we as a society needed "a twitter" (I don't know
if we do...), then maybe it could continue in this way.

~~~
pc86
> _If you "need" their services to participate in society at a reasonable
> level._

Except by your own reasoning you don't "need" Amazon.

> _Twitter is a possible target._

Please.

------
dkrich
I learned a while back a form of this lesson, which I would state as "never
rely on Amazon as a single source of revenue."

My experience was starting a website that showcased interesting/humorous
products in the vein of thisiswhyimbroke. After getting a great deal of
traffic and getting a fairly substantial number of purchases occurring through
my affiliate links, Amazon informed me that they could not approve my account
and that I would not be credited for the sales that I referred to them.

I asked for a clear explanation and was not given one, only told to reapply
for the program.

I was pissed off but learned a valuable lesson- that Amazon customer service
is shit and at any point they can cut the power off to your business if they
don't like any minute part of it.

So while I might use affiliate links as a source of revenue again, I'd never
rely on Amazon as more than a small percentage of that.

------
jonstokes
I never do anything business related with our personal Amazon account. I have
an LLC with its own bank account and Amazon account for anything business
related, and this kind of stuff is why.

------
coldcode
In the end all we are is an account number and money provider to Amazon. If
they piss off 1000 small vendors or customers it is 0.000001% of their
business and thus makes no sense to care. I work for a business where the
customer is treated well (not your usual technology company at all, but
everyone knows who we are) and it does cost a lot of money and effort to treat
each one as important. But we do charge a lot for this and have an enormous
count of employees and that makes it much easier to be customer centric.
Companies built pure on leveraging technology to make things happen and only
profit as a business by ignoring the human element can't or won't or don't
(care). We support this type of company because we save money or gain
convenience and even to us customers we are willing support them anyway, which
tells them what matters.

------
Hondor
It's amazing these companies don't have a "buy your way out of trouble"
service. I'm sure this guy would be willing to pay a few hundred $ to have a
human resolve it.

Perhaps that option would create a new set of complaint about people being
extorted out of support fees for problems that weren't their fault.

~~~
djhworld
> It's amazing these companies don't have a "buy your way out of trouble"
> service. I'm sure this guy would be willing to pay a few hundred $ to have a
> human resolve it.

A few hundred dollars to pay for what effectively is a bribe?

~~~
Strom
It's not a bribe, because it only gets you in contact with a human and doesn't
guarantee a solution. In addition, paying a few hundred $ is far less than
losing your business.

~~~
niij
That looks like a bribe to me. They initiated the problem and want cash to
make it go away.

"we're going to close your business down immediately"

"what? Who can I talk to to explain the situation?"

"everyone is busy, but you can pay us $200 and we might be able to fix your
problem"

~~~
Strom
You've set up quite a straw man here to take down. Amazon isn't actually
offering this premium support.

~~~
niij
Never said they were. I was commenting on how it would be a poor idea to
implement such a support plan.

------
unethical_ban
Let the record show this has 481 points after 5 hours, and it's #36. Meanwhile
there are at least three stories on the front page that have far fewer points
that were posted further in the past.

I wonder why, I truly do. Admin manipulation? A messed up algorithm?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120872)
256 after 10h

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120794)
167 after 10h

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120301)
143 after 13h

~~~
whamlastxmas
Front page weight is also determined by commenting. Lots of comments tends to
weigh it down I believe. Those linked posts have similar comment counts but
they are probably over a longer period of time. I recommend hckrnews.com over
the frontpage fyi.

------
pasbesoin
Stop for a moment, and think what happens when our increasingly-advocated
"cashless society" ends up being owned by a few "too big to fail"
institutions.

Run afoul of some policy, or mistakenly triggered monitoring, and suddenly you
are penniless. Maybe your phone and Internet bills go unpaid, and you are
connectionless.

Right now, Google can kill your email (et al.) and Amazon can take away your
books. Paypal can freeze online payments and balance.

Who you gonna call, when they take away it all?

Given that this is alread de facto business practice and not about to go away,
it's sorely in need of regulation.

"Regulation?! Abomination!!"

Well, how do you think we got regulation in the first place? People getting
screwed over by circumstances too big to effectively fight, as individuals.

Yeah, some of it went bad. But baby, bathwater. And with changing technology,
we are back to individuals getting screwed by circumstances very difficult or
impossible to fight and remedy, as an individual.

The long-term effect of crap customer support.

~~~
janc_
Every company that handles monetary accounts should be subject to the same
regulations as a bank.

And: too many complaints about those monetary accounts not resolved in time? ⇒
suspend their license to operate a "bank".

------
registered99
This same thing happened to me -- a compliance review and e-mails about
closing my account. I hadn't even changed my name, but got requests for my
mother's information. Thankfully I wasn't a seller, but it took me over 3
months of constant calling before I could get it resolved. I was constantly
handed off in between customer and seller support before I decided to e-mail
jeff@amazon.com. In the end, I was able to suss out that this is some back
department of Amazon that does compliance reviews, has a limited grasp of
English, will not take direct phone or chat correspondence, and is only good
at constantly asking for government ID and offering no other help.

An executive support representative reached out after I e-mailed Jeff and was
able to figure out what was going on since all of the previous reps had no
idea and kept passing the buck. I was in fear that I was going to lose my
buyer's account, and hadn't sold more than $100 on my seller's account.

A tip for anyone else going through this: no one reachable through regular CS
channels knows anything about this issue and everyone will tell you
conflicting things. The only way to resolve it is to reach out through
executive support. I tried escalating multiple times and people would tell me
to not worry about it, then I would get e-mails asking for the info again or
saying that my account was closed (it was not).

~~~
suspended123
Thanks for the advice, I have reached out to all the executive teams that I
could think of but I have not yet received a response

------
TorKlingberg
It is worrying how more and more people are reliant on running a small
business tied to a tech giant. It could be selling on Amazon or eBay, driving
for Uber, selling apps through Apple or running a website with Google AdSense.
All these companies treat their sellers as entirely disposable, and if their
algorithms look at you the wrong way you're out.

------
phereford
Not trying to hijack this, but this entire ordeal reminds me of this Hacker
News comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360482)

If your livelihood is solely invested in a singular vendor, then you
absolutely need to find a contact on the inside :/.

I hope he gets it resolved.

------
ptero
I am afraid this is more common than it looks like: software glitches (or
faulty logic) locks out people who are small fry for amazons and paypals and
thus get no customer support -- it is almost certainly not profitable for
amazon to spend time to resolve this except to fix bad PR. If an affected
person cannot generate enough media attention they are SOL.

Maybe the problem is big enough so a new mechanism makes sense -- something
like a well curated (and thus respected) resource that can select and publish
"top 10/100" of the most egregious glitches which could shame companies into
better behavior.

That, and having a "Plan B" in place -- local backups of cloud content, pre-
selected secondary payment option, etc.

------
detaro
And on the other hand there was a recent thread were people banned by amazon
were labelled as "not trustworthy".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13045022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13045022)

~~~
CrossWired
I had a former coworker who was banned due to large number of returns. He was
treating it like a try-and-buy service, returning anything he didn't like and
they eventually cut him off...of everything. Paid amazon movies, gone. Paid
kindle content, gone. His wife's account with the same billing address, gone.
They annihilated his families Amazon world with one action.

~~~
peterclary
It sounds like the coworker was abusing the system, but can anyone think of
any legitimate reason to cut somebody off from their digital purchases like
this? At the very most they should make the account "Read Only" so the
customer can access anything they've already paid for, but they're just not
allowed to buy anything else.

------
pjc50
This kind of thing is why I know someone who has five Google accounts for
different purposes. It's something they make deliberately inconvenient but is
the only way to avoid catastrophic spillover.

(Work 1 & G+, Work 2, personal email 1, email 2, Youtube)

~~~
lulzman206
I do this to keep my internet histories separated by
hobbies/business/personal. I have seven different Chrome "Users" open right
now.

------
rietta
Indeed. Think about situations like this and that article last night of 6 days
to change a line of code. Inflexible processes have consequences. They are
setup to prevent fraud, but some sort of appeal or review would make a lot of
sense.

------
DougN7
Wow. Amazon has some seriously screwed up software running somewhere. Sure
hope the right people see this guy's post.

~~~
marktangotango
The systems I've seen and worked on, I can easily believe see this happening.
My view is that this level of 'wtf' is pretty common for our profession,
sadly.

------
sharemywin
I had a problem with ebay once and they suspended my seller account because I
didn't get them documents on time and they said they weren't going to suspend
my account. So, I got so angry I canceled my entire account and wrote a huge
rant in there comment section of the cancel about know wonder they lose users
left and right and pretty soon they won't have any left. and explained how
there process was wrong. and it worked. they reinstated my seller account.

------
intrasight
Advice to live by:

1\. Don't login to non-primary devices

2\. If you are required to login, use a completely new/isolated account

------
suspended123
Hey everyone, I am the OP of the reddit thread, thank you all for your advice,
and I will be taking some of these steps

------
CodeWriter23
Oh gee. Just email jeff@amazon.com and his team will get this straightened
out.

Side note: I've also found it effective when working with the recalcitrant
Amazonian, to ask them if they want to receive a ? email from Jeff Bezos.

------
tinus_hn
If it's about such a large amount of money, I don't understand why this guy
isn't lawyering up.

~~~
suspended123
Lawyering up would be my last option, I am not trying to get into a legal
battle with Amazon , I just want my life back. Because there are other people
have to consider before burning all my bridges with them

------
tmptmp
I will send an email, as a humane customer, to their customer service email
asking a clarification about their policy in this regard. I urge all people on
HN also to bombard them with queries regarding such shitty practices they
follow.

A thing to learn: Never, ever base anything big on a big player, be it Amazon,
Google, or anyone else. They can screw you at any time with or without a valid
reason.

Another lesson: All (especially not very big) companies relying on cloud must
remember that AWS, GCE, Azure may sound very good, but they can screw your
businesses at any time with or without a valid reason. VPS or on-prem should
not be discarded without due deliberation.

Edit: removed a bit of a rant.

~~~
lilbobbytables
> Never, ever base anything big on a big player, be it Amazon, Google, or
> anyone else.

It's certainly great advice - but for many this isn't really a reality. Even
in this case, you could argue that OP could sell on other platforms (and maybe
they could), but that will depend on the product and whether they need
fulfillment and such.

I think more practical advice is:

a) If you rely on any given service for a substantial or majority of your
income, try your damndest to build contact(s) at that platform so you have a
human with a relationship to turn to when something goes sideways. At Amazon
this is much easier if you're their direct customer (AWS) than a seller,
though.

b) Have a contingency plan or put a focus on building savings (if it's a case
like this) to fall back on while determining next steps. That could mean money
for getting legal help, starting new business, etc.

~~~
suspended123
Thank you for the advice.

