15 ms·

Amazon seller’s account suspended after changing profile name on Kindle Fire

576 points by ikeboy 10y ago

DougN7 10y ago
Wow. Amazon has some seriously screwed up software running somewhere. Sure hope the right people see this guy's post.
- marktangotango 10y ago
  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.
ikeboy 10y ago
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.
Hondor 10y ago
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.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  You can talk to a human, but not the department who can do something about it. Generally the way to get a human who knows what's up is to email jeff@amazon.com. According to an AMA with a former employee https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/3naqe8/i_am_a_former_seller_support_associate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/3naqe8... >I did hear that a few years ago there was Seller Performance phone support and it was simply abusive and harassing for the people on the phones and wasn't really productive.
- rietta 10y ago
  That would be a decent option and reduce some of the noise they would have to deal with.
  - niij 10y ago
    That is a bribe. They initiated the issue, so why can't they provide a mechanism to explain your situation to a reasonable human being? Customer support should not be considered "noise".
    - rietta 10y ago
      I was also thinking of things like Gmail Support and other services that have no human support option.
- djhworld 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
rietta 10y ago
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.
byuu 10y ago
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.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Fwiw seller support has a phone number that gets a human within a minute or so.
  - byuu 10y ago
    Well, you know what I mean. You need someone that will actually help when there's a problem beyond selling you more services. For major companies, this stuff is easy to find out, thanks to people sharing their experiences as in that Reddit post. There's entire websites dedicated to countless horror stories of Paypal locking out small business funds arbitrarily with no recourse. Google is infamous in never responding to their customers. If you're going to base your entire income on it, then do a day or two of research. Try and find stories from people who have had serious account issues: stolen identities, suspended accounts, you name it. Call and talk to people at the company and ask them what their policies are. If you get Amazon on the phone and ask them, they'd tell you their phone support team won't help if your account is suspended. Make them go on record. If they lie, you have a solid legal case to bring forward. It's okay to take some risk if you have a backup plan. Okay, Google shuts down my business e-mail account. But I have all messages downloaded daily, and I can switch tomorrow to this VPS e-mail server I set up. That's fine. It's not okay to be so cavalier if an account suspension will cost you your home and require you to lay off two employees. Again, I'm not trying to rag on the poor guy this happened to. Hindsight is always 20/20. I'm trying to warn people against getting into the same situation he found himself in.
ransom1538 10y ago
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?"
setq 10y ago
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.
- discreditable 10y ago
  This kind of thing is standard for storage device returns. When your Western Digital drive fails under warranty they expect you to send it to them whether you are able to scrub the bits or not. Some of vendors allow you to pay a "media retention fee" to avoid sending the failed drive. I know that HPE does.
- amyboyd 10y ago
  +1 for Argos. I've started using them wherever I can, after Amazon failed to deliver 3 orders this year. The first 2 orders were refunded, the third wasn't, because the package was signed for (but by someone with a completely different name, and they didn't record the house number it was delivered to). Emailed them many times. They won't even reply to the emails or call me now.
- dkrich 10y ago
  3. Cheap isn't necessarily a good deal. Can't agree with this more and I learn that it's truer and truer the more interactions I have with Amazon. I recently purchased a pair of boots on Amazon that were marketed as authentic and selling for half the cost of the originals, and they were listed as "shipped from and sold by Amazon" so I figured they must be real. The thing is that I own the authentic pair, so was able to compare when they arrived and the Amazon pair was obviously fake. I no longer have any faith whatsoever in the authenticity or quality control of Amazon's products and wouldn't trust them for any major purchases, and never for clothing or anything that is relatively easy to imitate. I'm quite sure that they are getting away with straight up copyright and trademark infringement hundreds of thousands of times a day, just because nobody can afford to challenge them.
detaro 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
  - twothamendment 10y ago
    That is exactly why I refuse to buy digital content on any platform that won't let me download it. Netflix - I get it, I'm renting a stream and when a show goes away, no problem. But I'm not putting my money on books, movies, music, etc. that can be taken away when a company fails or decides that they don't like me. As much as I like e-books and hate paper, a good old paper copy is mine to use, lend or sell to someone else.
freddyc 10y ago
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.
coldcode 10y ago
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.
robotmay 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
captainmuon 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I'm curious what your thoughts are on other page businesses? Walmart, FedEx, Ebay?
  - webmaven 10y ago
    "page businesses"?
    - niij 10y ago
      *big businesses
  - llvihearsevil 10y ago
    Walmart actually has really good customer service.
  - captainmuon 10y ago
    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.
TorKlingberg 10y ago
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.
jonstokes 10y ago
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.
ideonexus 10y ago
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.
- ebbv 10y ago
  The BBB does nothing. It's just the Yelp of the past. They don't help mediate disputes they just extort business owners. If the owner pays enough money they can get rid of negative reviews. It's crap. The only thing that will do you any good against a company like that is hiring a lawyer and it sounds like you should have done that in the first month.
  - ideonexus 10y ago
    The cost of a lawyer was more than the amount of money under dispute. It may have felt good to take the company to court and win, but the cost of representation plus the leave time I would have had to burn to spend time in court and satisfy all the discovery paperwork requests would have cost much much more than what the company was charging me. How does it make sense to spend so much time and money over such a small claim? And what about people who can't afford lawyers? Why does any American citizen have to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money disputing something that should be resolvable with a phone call?
sharemywin 10y ago
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.
tmptmp 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    Thank you for the advice.
  - tmptmp 10y ago
    This is much better than my advice. Thanks much.
phereford 10y ago
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.
dkrich 10y ago
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.
unknownsavage 10y ago
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 10y ago
  So... sharing affiliate links on reddit will ruin the sellers account?
  - majewsky 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        The really big affiliates almost definitely in a separate bucket that requires a higher bar or human review to disable the account.
intrasight 10y ago
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
ptero 10y ago
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.
AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
So the way you get customer support these days is make your customer support story "go viral!"
peeky 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
pjc50 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I do this to keep my internet histories separated by hobbies/business/personal. I have seven different Chrome "Users" open right now.
cherryblakes 10y ago
Hello Everyone I am writing on behalf of an active hacker who recently got me all my lost files and also information about my ex wife cheating after giving Him all the details He needed, in less than 24hours He mailed me all the details I requested.You can contact Him via Bryanjohnsonhacks@outlook.com
registered99 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
tinus_hn 10y ago
If it's about such a large amount of money, I don't understand why this guy isn't lawyering up.
- suspended123 10y ago
  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
unethical_ban 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  I'm not sure. I noticed the title was updated (I submitted with the title in the link), so maybe there were some flags on the previous title which pushed it down but didn't kill it?
suspended123 10y ago
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 10y ago
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.
pasbesoin 10y ago
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_ 10y ago
  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".
stefantalpalaru 10y ago
All watched over by machines of loving grace...

576 points by ikeboy 10y ago

DougN7 10y ago

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

marktangotango 10y ago
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.

ikeboy 10y ago

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.

Hondor 10y ago

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.

ikeboy 10y ago
You can talk to a human, but not the department who can do something about it. Generally the way to get a human who knows what's up is to email jeff@amazon.com. According to an AMA with a former employee https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/3naqe8/i_am_a_former_seller_support_associate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/3naqe8... >I did hear that a few years ago there was Seller Performance phone support and it was simply abusive and harassing for the people on the phones and wasn't really productive.
rietta 10y ago
That would be a decent option and reduce some of the noise they would have to deal with.
- niij 10y ago
  That is a bribe. They initiated the issue, so why can't they provide a mechanism to explain your situation to a reasonable human being? Customer support should not be considered "noise".
  - rietta 10y ago
    I was also thinking of things like Gmail Support and other services that have no human support option.
djhworld 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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.

rietta 10y ago

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.

byuu 10y ago

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.

ikeboy 10y ago
Fwiw seller support has a phone number that gets a human within a minute or so.
- byuu 10y ago
  Well, you know what I mean. You need someone that will actually help when there's a problem beyond selling you more services. For major companies, this stuff is easy to find out, thanks to people sharing their experiences as in that Reddit post. There's entire websites dedicated to countless horror stories of Paypal locking out small business funds arbitrarily with no recourse. Google is infamous in never responding to their customers. If you're going to base your entire income on it, then do a day or two of research. Try and find stories from people who have had serious account issues: stolen identities, suspended accounts, you name it. Call and talk to people at the company and ask them what their policies are. If you get Amazon on the phone and ask them, they'd tell you their phone support team won't help if your account is suspended. Make them go on record. If they lie, you have a solid legal case to bring forward. It's okay to take some risk if you have a backup plan. Okay, Google shuts down my business e-mail account. But I have all messages downloaded daily, and I can switch tomorrow to this VPS e-mail server I set up. That's fine. It's not okay to be so cavalier if an account suspension will cost you your home and require you to lay off two employees. Again, I'm not trying to rag on the poor guy this happened to. Hindsight is always 20/20. I'm trying to warn people against getting into the same situation he found himself in.

ransom1538 10y ago

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?"

setq 10y ago

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.

discreditable 10y ago
This kind of thing is standard for storage device returns. When your Western Digital drive fails under warranty they expect you to send it to them whether you are able to scrub the bits or not. Some of vendors allow you to pay a "media retention fee" to avoid sending the failed drive. I know that HPE does.
amyboyd 10y ago
+1 for Argos. I've started using them wherever I can, after Amazon failed to deliver 3 orders this year. The first 2 orders were refunded, the third wasn't, because the package was signed for (but by someone with a completely different name, and they didn't record the house number it was delivered to). Emailed them many times. They won't even reply to the emails or call me now.
dkrich 10y ago
3. Cheap isn't necessarily a good deal. Can't agree with this more and I learn that it's truer and truer the more interactions I have with Amazon. I recently purchased a pair of boots on Amazon that were marketed as authentic and selling for half the cost of the originals, and they were listed as "shipped from and sold by Amazon" so I figured they must be real. The thing is that I own the authentic pair, so was able to compare when they arrived and the Amazon pair was obviously fake. I no longer have any faith whatsoever in the authenticity or quality control of Amazon's products and wouldn't trust them for any major purchases, and never for clothing or anything that is relatively easy to imitate. I'm quite sure that they are getting away with straight up copyright and trademark infringement hundreds of thousands of times a day, just because nobody can afford to challenge them.

detaro 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
- twothamendment 10y ago
  That is exactly why I refuse to buy digital content on any platform that won't let me download it. Netflix - I get it, I'm renting a stream and when a show goes away, no problem. But I'm not putting my money on books, movies, music, etc. that can be taken away when a company fails or decides that they don't like me. As much as I like e-books and hate paper, a good old paper copy is mine to use, lend or sell to someone else.

freddyc 10y ago

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.

coldcode 10y ago

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.

robotmay 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

captainmuon 10y ago

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 10y ago
I'm curious what your thoughts are on other page businesses? Walmart, FedEx, Ebay?
- webmaven 10y ago
  "page businesses"?
  - niij 10y ago
    *big businesses
- llvihearsevil 10y ago
  Walmart actually has really good customer service.
- captainmuon 10y ago
  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.

TorKlingberg 10y ago

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.

jonstokes 10y ago

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.

ideonexus 10y ago

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.

ebbv 10y ago
The BBB does nothing. It's just the Yelp of the past. They don't help mediate disputes they just extort business owners. If the owner pays enough money they can get rid of negative reviews. It's crap. The only thing that will do you any good against a company like that is hiring a lawyer and it sounds like you should have done that in the first month.
- ideonexus 10y ago
  The cost of a lawyer was more than the amount of money under dispute. It may have felt good to take the company to court and win, but the cost of representation plus the leave time I would have had to burn to spend time in court and satisfy all the discovery paperwork requests would have cost much much more than what the company was charging me. How does it make sense to spend so much time and money over such a small claim? And what about people who can't afford lawyers? Why does any American citizen have to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money disputing something that should be resolvable with a phone call?

sharemywin 10y ago

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.

tmptmp 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  Thank you for the advice.
- tmptmp 10y ago
  This is much better than my advice. Thanks much.

phereford 10y ago

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.

dkrich 10y ago

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.

unknownsavage 10y ago

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 10y ago
So... sharing affiliate links on reddit will ruin the sellers account?
- majewsky 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      The really big affiliates almost definitely in a separate bucket that requires a higher bar or human review to disable the account.

intrasight 10y ago

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

ptero 10y ago

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.

AWildDHHAppears 10y ago

So the way you get customer support these days is make your customer support story "go viral!"

peeky 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

pjc50 10y ago

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 10y ago
I do this to keep my internet histories separated by hobbies/business/personal. I have seven different Chrome "Users" open right now.

cherryblakes 10y ago

Hello Everyone I am writing on behalf of an active hacker who recently got me all my lost files and also information about my ex wife cheating after giving Him all the details He needed, in less than 24hours He mailed me all the details I requested.You can contact Him via Bryanjohnsonhacks@outlook.com

registered99 10y ago

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 10y ago
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

tinus_hn 10y ago

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

suspended123 10y ago
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

unethical_ban 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
ikeboy 10y ago
I'm not sure. I noticed the title was updated (I submitted with the title in the link), so maybe there were some flags on the previous title which pushed it down but didn't kill it?

suspended123 10y ago

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 10y ago

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.

pasbesoin 10y ago

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_ 10y ago
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".

stefantalpalaru 10y ago

All watched over by machines of loving grace...