9 ms·

I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to. Amazon can keep trying to get blood from a stone...

by pattyj 5y ago

gruez 5y ago
They can still theoretically send your bills to collections and ruin your credit
- dTal 5y ago
  Why can't we bill them for wasted time and stolen money, send those bills to collection and ruin their credit? Something seems unfair about the power dynamic.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Well, you can document your attempts to close the account and report it to the police. It's just a lot of work and you will only gain a document you can use to press your credit card issuer into rejecting the payments. Also, if they do send your debit to collectors, you can go to a court and ask for the debit to be dropped and for them to pay damages. That is a lot more work, but if they are clearly on the wrong will get you something.
    - hellbannedguy 5y ago
      Cops will tell you this is a civil matter. At least in the USA. Amazon knows this, a relies on people just paying. They know how difficult it is to dispute. I imagine they make millions just of people giving up, and paying? (I haven't used their servers, if I did it would be with a prepaid CC.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Or take you to court. Theoretically. I don't know in what cases Amazon might do either of these things. If you're not in the US, that's certainly another layer of barrier. But yes, in the US anyway, whether you legally owe someone money or not and they can legally collect on it is not controlled by whether you've cancelled a credit card.
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    Another reason that I'm very hesitant to run anything on Amazon.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      There's nothing particular about Amazon here, any company or person you owe money to in the US (can't speak for other countries) can take you to court or turn your debt over to a collection agency. I haven't heard of Amazon specifically ever doing either of these things. Or am I missing what you're saying is particular to Amazon and relevant here?
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      I'm completely amazed that such a large group of developers have decided to put their personal credit card on Amazon. Foolish choices lead to bad outcomes. When does billing by the hour for storage/everything start to seem appealing?
    - dkersten 5y ago
      I wanted to use ECS/Fargate earlier this year and the deploy kept failing. It was an issue on my end, but the infuriating thing was that Cloudwatch didn't have any logs 80% of the time. Like, at random: I could click the redeploy button 5 times and 4 of those times wouldn't have logs while one would. Of course, they charged me per deploy. I ended up running up a bill of $100 before I said screw it and used DigitalOcean instead (where I had logs consistently and was able to debug my container deploy within about 10 minutes and only a few cents of a bill).
      - scrose 5y ago
        I had a similar issue when moving our stack to ECS Fargate. logs wouldn’t tell us anything other than ‘application was terminated’ within seconds of it booting. The most helpful thing was looking at the reason given for the container shutting down(which still was a difficult riddle for a Fargate noob). In our case, it was a message saying something like ‘container timed out’ originally making us think it was a network issue. We ended up tracing it back to our app sometimes taking 21-30 seconds to fully boot, instead of the 20 second limit Fargate had for health checks. So even though the container did end up booting, Fargate was already waiting for it to start so it could kill it.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Unless you provided a social security number to AWS at signup, going to be a pain for them to ruin your credit.
  - eli 5y ago
    It's not hard to get a SSN from a name + address
    - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
      Legally?
      - dylan604 5y ago
        Legally shmegally. Just download one of the many troves of hacked databases. I'm sure you'll find the data you need somewhere. Or hire a 3rd party that does stuff on your behalf. Now you have plausible deniability in that you're the one not doing it.
      - eli 5y ago
        Often yes. And perhaps more importantly: you don't need a SSN to send a debt to collections or report it to a credit bureau (though of course it helps).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- xfitm3 5y ago
  And you use the Fair Credit Reporting Act to force them to validate the debt or cease collection activity. For small amounts they will not go through legal hoops.
geertj 5y ago
PM at AWS, writing on my own personal behalf. Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. That's definitely not the culture that I'm experiencing every day or that we hold ourselves to. Our goal is to deliver a ton of value to customers. If we are not delivering value then it would not be in line with how we operate to want to charge you for that. Out of curiosity, did you try contacting AWS support? Almost all customers I speak to love our support and the fact they can speak to an actual human. Of course I can't speak to the actual case as I'm just providing my personal opinion here, but I would not be surprised if support could fix this for you quickly and zero out any small balances that you accrued because you weren't able to access/use your account.
- tomrod 5y ago
  With all due respect, it has nothing to do with culture and more to do with business processes having rough edges. At AWS' scale, any rough edge is more than a rare edge case, since rarity flies out the window. Spending more to provide better customer service (explicitly or implicitly through bugfixes) is not generally how this type of need is. Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.
  - belval 5y ago
    That's kind of his point though, OP did not need to post to HN, he can just contact AWS Support and get the bucket deleted at (probably) no charge. Support will routinely give forgive an account balance given a good enough reason.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      From the comment: > I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to. We don't know whether OP has reached out to AWS support, but one can assume so since AWS is charging an account the user cannot log in to. Further, it sounds like the user has found their own resolution, so the user isn't asking for _help_ on HN, more that they are registering poor experience in agreement with others. So, it is a rough UX edge.
richwater 5y ago
How does you forgetting your password absolve you from paying for resources within your account?

I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to. Amazon can keep trying to get blood from a stone...

by pattyj 5y ago

I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to. Amazon can keep trying to get blood from a stone...

gruez 5y ago

They can still theoretically send your bills to collections and ruin your credit

dTal 5y ago
Why can't we bill them for wasted time and stolen money, send those bills to collection and ruin their credit? Something seems unfair about the power dynamic.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Well, you can document your attempts to close the account and report it to the police. It's just a lot of work and you will only gain a document you can use to press your credit card issuer into rejecting the payments. Also, if they do send your debit to collectors, you can go to a court and ask for the debit to be dropped and for them to pay damages. That is a lot more work, but if they are clearly on the wrong will get you something.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    Cops will tell you this is a civil matter. At least in the USA. Amazon knows this, a relies on people just paying. They know how difficult it is to dispute. I imagine they make millions just of people giving up, and paying? (I haven't used their servers, if I did it would be with a prepaid CC.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Or take you to court. Theoretically. I don't know in what cases Amazon might do either of these things. If you're not in the US, that's certainly another layer of barrier. But yes, in the US anyway, whether you legally owe someone money or not and they can legally collect on it is not controlled by whether you've cancelled a credit card.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  Another reason that I'm very hesitant to run anything on Amazon.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    There's nothing particular about Amazon here, any company or person you owe money to in the US (can't speak for other countries) can take you to court or turn your debt over to a collection agency. I haven't heard of Amazon specifically ever doing either of these things. Or am I missing what you're saying is particular to Amazon and relevant here?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I'm completely amazed that such a large group of developers have decided to put their personal credit card on Amazon. Foolish choices lead to bad outcomes. When does billing by the hour for storage/everything start to seem appealing?
  - dkersten 5y ago
    I wanted to use ECS/Fargate earlier this year and the deploy kept failing. It was an issue on my end, but the infuriating thing was that Cloudwatch didn't have any logs 80% of the time. Like, at random: I could click the redeploy button 5 times and 4 of those times wouldn't have logs while one would. Of course, they charged me per deploy. I ended up running up a bill of $100 before I said screw it and used DigitalOcean instead (where I had logs consistently and was able to debug my container deploy within about 10 minutes and only a few cents of a bill).
    - scrose 5y ago
      I had a similar issue when moving our stack to ECS Fargate. logs wouldn’t tell us anything other than ‘application was terminated’ within seconds of it booting. The most helpful thing was looking at the reason given for the container shutting down(which still was a difficult riddle for a Fargate noob). In our case, it was a message saying something like ‘container timed out’ originally making us think it was a network issue. We ended up tracing it back to our app sometimes taking 21-30 seconds to fully boot, instead of the 20 second limit Fargate had for health checks. So even though the container did end up booting, Fargate was already waiting for it to start so it could kill it.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Unless you provided a social security number to AWS at signup, going to be a pain for them to ruin your credit.
- eli 5y ago
  It's not hard to get a SSN from a name + address
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    Legally?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Legally shmegally. Just download one of the many troves of hacked databases. I'm sure you'll find the data you need somewhere. Or hire a 3rd party that does stuff on your behalf. Now you have plausible deniability in that you're the one not doing it.
    - eli 5y ago
      Often yes. And perhaps more importantly: you don't need a SSN to send a debt to collections or report it to a credit bureau (though of course it helps).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
xfitm3 5y ago
And you use the Fair Credit Reporting Act to force them to validate the debt or cease collection activity. For small amounts they will not go through legal hoops.

geertj 5y ago

PM at AWS, writing on my own personal behalf. Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. That's definitely not the culture that I'm experiencing every day or that we hold ourselves to. Our goal is to deliver a ton of value to customers. If we are not delivering value then it would not be in line with how we operate to want to charge you for that. Out of curiosity, did you try contacting AWS support? Almost all customers I speak to love our support and the fact they can speak to an actual human. Of course I can't speak to the actual case as I'm just providing my personal opinion here, but I would not be surprised if support could fix this for you quickly and zero out any small balances that you accrued because you weren't able to access/use your account.

tomrod 5y ago
With all due respect, it has nothing to do with culture and more to do with business processes having rough edges. At AWS' scale, any rough edge is more than a rare edge case, since rarity flies out the window. Spending more to provide better customer service (explicitly or implicitly through bugfixes) is not generally how this type of need is. Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.
- belval 5y ago
  That's kind of his point though, OP did not need to post to HN, he can just contact AWS Support and get the bucket deleted at (probably) no charge. Support will routinely give forgive an account balance given a good enough reason.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    From the comment: > I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to. We don't know whether OP has reached out to AWS support, but one can assume so since AWS is charging an account the user cannot log in to. Further, it sounds like the user has found their own resolution, so the user isn't asking for _help_ on HN, more that they are registering poor experience in agreement with others. So, it is a rough UX edge.

richwater 5y ago

How does you forgetting your password absolve you from paying for resources within your account?