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Something very similar happened to me with Amazon. I used a new debit card from an online bank to purchase an expensive item and deliver it to a foreign address

• rodneyg_ 5y ago
  Wow. This reminds me of my experience with Coinbase. I find it interesting that they don't see how troublesome all this is. There's a human on the other end of the technology, and shutting them out without a solid reason, or the ability to reasonable appeal is crazy.
  • jsemrau 5y ago
    When our bank replacements are run like tech companies everybody loses. I suffered through similar with Binance.
    • adrr 5y ago
      Traditional banks will cut you off as well. Move lots of money through your account, bounce it between a few accounts and back into your account. They'll cut you off.
      • jsemrau 5y ago
        That is correct. Yet it doesn't make it good. Customer focused communication even though some indicator tell you to terminate the account should avoid a "The process" situation. This is 2021, we have many amazing communication tools available.
        • YawningAngel 5y ago
          At least in the UK, there are "tipping off" offences that make it very legally risky to tell people why they're suspended. Banks just tell their employees not to do it to avoid risk
      • jimnotgym 5y ago
        In the UK I can raise this with my bank and if they don't resolve it I can raise it with the regulator, who has real teeth. Getting back on topic, who regulates Apple?
        • adrr 5y ago
          There are bank regulators in the US, it is heavily regulated. Businesses are still free to choose who they want to do business with. Banks will get smacked down by regulators if they helped laundered money so they error on the side of caution. The fact that is heavily regulated is the root cause.
    • ValentineC 5y ago
      > I suffered through similar with Binance. What did Binance do to you?
      • jsemrau 5y ago
        They had to stop business in Singapore.
  • WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    Set your age to below 13 in Coinbase for a fun surprise. As soon as you click "update", you are insta-locked out of your account.
    • bpodgursky 5y ago
      The US legal code doesn't give them a ton of flexibility here. Coinbase has to push the boundaries of US legal code interpretation in plenty of other places... picking "letting pre-teens manage accounts" would be a dumb hill to die on.
      • eropple 5y ago
        Coinbase already has verified you by your legal ID, though.
        • throwanem 5y ago
          Going into your profile on a trading app and saying "i am 12 and what is this", no matter the reason, seems like a reasonable signal that maybe you're not a customer I'm hugely concerned about retaining.
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      You’d think that’d be prevented when they identity proof you with government identity credentials considering the immutability of your birth date.
      • dotancohen 5y ago
        > the immutability of your birth date. Another falsehood programmers believe about dates. )) When immigrants move across borders, often if there is no record of date of birth the date used is the first of January on a best-guess year, and sometimes even the year is wrong. Later this information could be updated. I know of a case of a man whose birthday (immigrant from China) went from January 1st, 1900 to some date in the late 1890s upon documentation being found, just slightly before his 100th (living) birthday. There are, of course, also reasons for deliberately falsifying a birth date. Accessing an online service is one, false claim of benefits (e.g. pension) may be another, avoiding or enlisting in armed forces, purchasing age-restricted material, renting a hotel or vehicle, the list goes on. A robust system must account for these possibilities.
  • Andrex 5y ago
    When there's 1,000 happy customers and 1 unhappy one, what's the incentive to fix anything? Not being facetious, just pointing out the depressing nature of our reality. :/
    • ovao 5y ago
      To answer the question in the plainest way: the possible revenue potential from the unhappy customer if turned to a satisfied recurring customer. This is really just a question of the opportunity cost, which can vary.
      • tux1968 5y ago
        The depressing bit is that they can make a rational decision to weigh that cost against the amount of money it takes to keep people happy (vs doing nothing). Not that I support it, but they might be following the financially superior option. There's a lot of incentive to get that answer "correct", so I suspect it's currently working out in their favour, even though it sucks for those of us caught on the shitty side of that equation.
        • ovao 5y ago
          While true that economies in their various forms can form unsympathetic relationships between producers and consumers, it seems that, broadly speaking, producers who align more strongly with consumer satisfaction tend to ‘win’ and those who broadly speaking don’t tend to ‘lose’ on a long-term basis. To their credit, Apple seems to get this mostly right.
    • ctpide 5y ago
      Commonly the 1 unhappy customer might tell his story to ten of their friends or thousands+ of readers online. Fixing customer problems (especially drastic ones) carries large incentives, because those single stories will actually be observed, while the 1000 happy customers won‘t be mentioned.
      • 5y ago
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    I'm also locked out of my Coinbase account :( Don't know what to do, I'll just assume my investments are lost to time...
    • young_unixer 5y ago
      There's an old chinese proverb that goes: "Not your keys, not your coins"
      • smoldesu 5y ago
        I'm not mad, I've still got my keys from 2014-ish. I only made a Coinbase account after a finance teacher in high school heard that I dabbled in crypto, and bet that he could build a better-yielding portfolio than I could. I logged onto Coinbase, spun up an account with $20 in it, and invested in Chainlink and Ether. Nowadays it's worth ~350 dollarydoos, which isn't absolutely necessary to retrieve. Honestly, it was worth it just to watch his enthusiasm crumble when his 30% APR high-risk portfolio paled in comparison to some dumbass high-schooler's prediction.
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      File a complaint with your state’s Attorney General, FINRA, the SEC, and NYDFS. Should help Coinbase along in recovering your account. Should take no more than an hour or two to file with all regulators I mentioned.
      • sumedh 5y ago
        What about people who are not US citizens?
        • posguy 5y ago
          I'm surprised OP mentioned New York State Department of Financial Services (NYFDS), but this might be the local regulator if Coinbase's home state is New York. I would still file with them, they can still escalate on your behalf since they are the regulator, or refer you to the agency you should file a complaint with.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    It doesn't matter if they lose one customer by mistake if they screen out multiple fraudulent accounts this way. It's simply more profitable to do this in an automated way than to actually consider the human in the equation.
  • gzer0 5y ago
    I was banned from Coinbase 4 years ago, and I am still unable, to this day, to create an account without it being banned within 5 minutes of creation and no one is able to give a reason as to why.
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      From having been behind the scenes of a web hosting company a while back: They almost certainly have decided that you're a scammer, and that any account you ever try to open is just an attempt to get around being banned for being a scammer. The complete non-answers from support are almost certainly because they have that as a standard policy with people they've decided are scammers, because the genuine scammers out there are extremely good at manipulating literally any kind of even vaguely permissive support policy into enabling further fraud. The bigger issue here is that when a company is actually good at this stuff (like that web hosting company I once worked for), there's a department specialized in handling these cases with knowledge of how to properly verify legal identities and filter out the scammers... but quite a few companies today both big and small have decided (possibly correctly, given how they're treated) that it's easier and more profitable to just skip that entirely and instead leave false positives locked out of the system permanently.
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      You may share a name with someone on a US Treasury, FDIC, FINRA or other banned list.
      • TomSwirly 5y ago
        I went to school with someone named Jane Smith whose father was named John. In my life, I've known two Mike Wilsons, and when I knew one of them, there was also a cabinet minister called Mike Wilson (in Canada). Summary: if your company blocks someone based on their name only, your company is a bunch of incompetent losers.
        • nullc 5y ago
          or it's complying with a US law or executive branch administrative policy that was set by a bunch of incompetent losers.
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Go to Small Claims court. Then again we probally signed that option away when we agreed to the TOS?
• disillusioned 5y ago
  Email jeff@amazon.com. It'll hit the exec support team (even though he's no longer CEO.) It's aggressively monitored. Jeff himself used to forward prickly ones with a ? to relevant parties, but at the very least, better than front-line support.
  • chii 5y ago
    as soon as this becomes common parlance, there'd be too high a volume and become yet another noisy channel.
    • LeoPanthera 5y ago
      This has already happened with "Steve's" email address at Apple, which used to be monitored but is now mostly ignored, I suspect because of the sheer volume of traffic.
      • gcheong 5y ago
        Probably because people email Tim now.
        • somedangedname 5y ago
          Sure, you'll get a response after emailing tcook@apple.com. But there's no guarantee that the customer service peep assigned to you will do anything to help. I tried this approach when a client was having issues enrolling in Apple Enterprise to distribute an app in-house. Didn't work, took four months until we could release our app. Completely killed any esteem I had for Apple.
          • ricardobayes 5y ago
            I secretly hope everyday that a competitor comes along who can produce hardware with a matching level of beauty. Not sure why any existing hardware maker can't do it. Everyone else is producing plastic boxes of crap. That said I'll never have a mac, that whole mindset is so foreign to me.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• malux85 5y ago
  The exact same thing happened to me, I added my own (new) card for billing and they immediatly locked my account and requested the docs, I got the same screen you described. I had just moved countries and none of my new accounts had statements yet, by the time I got them I just get stuck in this repeat loop of upload docs, wait a few days, says invalid. No way to get back in, all my purchases lost, no human to contact, I just don't use Amazon anymore. Very annoying
• emrah 5y ago
  > to explain that the card does not send me a billing statement and I cannot possibly produce one I'm sorry but this does seem extremely suspicious. I've never heard of a bank that does not provide any statements. Sure, a debit card does not have a billing statement like a credit card, but the bank account that the debit card is linked to should provide a monthly statement where you can see the transactions. At least a downloadable PDF even if they don't send a paper one in the mail.
  • omk 5y ago
    This is more common than one would imagine. Not all banks provide statements narrowed down to debit card usage. A bank statement does not always show the debit card number making it difficult to establish a link between the provided evidence.
  • andreapmd 5y ago
    It's a simple top-up card, not connected to a bank account. I wrote "online bank" to simplify. What they offer is an online dashboard, a screenshot of which Amazon refused. In any case, I didn't ask them to take me on my word, but to contact me and see if a different set of documents might be used instead.
    • Lhiw 5y ago
      Download a monthly statement, itl be a pdf with your address on it.
    • phendrenad2 5y ago
      Just because it isn't connected to a bank account as you understand bank accounts to be, doesn't mean it isn't connected to a bank account as banks understand them to be, and you're not entitled to request a statement.
      • andreapmd 5y ago
        Just because one is entitled to a bank statement as you understand this entitlement to exist, does not mean that the card issuer is obliged or interested in providing one within weeks or even months of the request, especially with the exact format that Amazon or another third party has decided to accept.
• KorematsuFredt 5y ago
  > card does not send me a billing statement and I cannot possibly produce one I don't blame Amazon here. This is suspicios. All debit cards are linked to your bank account which always have a statement. Also, I have found it very helpful to provide not just statement but the photos of the card, your ID and various other documentation in the PDF. It helps the support engineer realize that you are really you.
  • andreapmd 5y ago
    Not all debit cards are linked to a bank account, some are just top-up cards (like this one – I wrote "online bank" for brevity).
    • rendall 5y ago
      I'm not familiar with these top-up cards. Do you get no itemized list of purchases? Can you send that in lieu of a statement?
      • andreapmd 5y ago
        I have an online dashboard, and Amazon won't take anything other than a card statement with my card number (all but the four last digits to be hidden) and the billing address on it.
  • lavezzi 5y ago
    Amazon should totally be blamed. Their reinstatement process has taken a complete nosedive recently, with their review of documentation consistently inconsistent and devoid of any quality control. I've sent them the exact documentation they requested (actually well over and above what was required) - all of it rexboxed and annotated, and each time they send it back saying the documentation is illegible or lacking in the details they require.
  • matheusmoreira 5y ago
    So what if it's suspicious? People pay hard earned money for content via services such as Amazon's. That these companies think they're justified in locking people out of the content they paid for because of some random suspicion is just insulting. There'll come a day even the people who defend copyright won't be able to justify supporting this industry due to how badly it mistreats and abuses them. It's simply appalling how it's almost 2022 and paying consumers still get infeiror products and services compared to "pirates".
• TechnoTimeStop 5y ago
  because cheating is bad - your premise is extremely flawed, think about your intention.
• msh 5y ago
  How the hell can it be legal for the card provider not to produce any kind of transaction log?
  • tjoff 5y ago
    That is your takeaway? Mine is to avoid amazon at all cost.
    • msh 5y ago
      Not my only take away. But it seems more surprising to me than what Amazon did (not that it was good).
  • AnssiH 5y ago
    They probably do have a transaction log in the form of an online webpage or dashboard. But Amazon wants a statement with a billing address and the card number. That's one reason I only use my credit card on Amazon - it has such a statement available in case I ever need one, while most of my other cards do not.
• auggierose 5y ago
  That's why I don't have books with DRM in my digital library. It would be unacceptable to me that my books are no longer accessible to me by somebody blocking my Amazon account.
• Hokusai 5y ago
  > and all my purchased media is gone Stolen by Amazon. They have no incentive to get it back. Amazon hopes that you purchase it again. Call the consumer protection services. Big tech companies are not the law, they cannot steal things from you. Even if you committed fraud in one transaction, they cannot take away your property. (Amazon will call it 'service', but accessing your property is not a service)
  • Terry_Roll 5y ago
    > Stolen by Amazon. They have no incentive to get it back. Amazon hopes that you purchase it again. They are not the only company doing this in some ways. ISP's who provide a set top box for watching TV and downloading/streaming service to tv, do the same thing when you change you ISP. Its a form of lock in because whilst you can still get access to the purchased films, you have to jump through more hoops. Its all legal but I question the morality of it, when considering online piracy via torrent streams and then the "hacking" that companies have used to trace and prosecute the worst. But I've learnt enough to know that everyone has their questionable practices to maximise profits/income, the lucky ones are the one's who would also be the expert witnesses in court or have been able to fly entirely the right side of the law.
    • tzs 5y ago
      Which ISPs kill your purchased content when you leave? At Comcast/Xfinity when you cancel all services your account still remains, and you can stream your purchased content the web or through their mobile streaming app when signed in on your account.
      • Terry_Roll 5y ago
        UK, so you purchase with a set top box you buy from them to use their additional services and then when you leave, they force you to purchase another device to watch those films like a computer to watch it on. You can no longer use the set top box to watch the purchase films on.
    • chasil 5y ago
• baybal2 5y ago
  > To this day I have found no resolution, and the only next step is to contact them through a lawyer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23506276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23506276
• hbbio 5y ago
  Wow, same for me! A few years ago, I was vacationing abroad, and ordered a gift from Amazon to be delivered in another country. The payment from Amex bounced for whatever reason, and Amazon permanently banned my account instantly. Difference is it says my login/password are invalid (they're not), there's no other message, no field for contact. I lost more than 100 paid Android apps. Never took the time to recover that account, if this is even possible at all. The damage would have been much greater with an Apple or Google account.
• mjevans 5y ago
  For traditional banks and credit unions, a physical branch is a major component in their 'anti fraud' device and systems. Trained human experts will review documents and establish an identity. However those systems also have financial hurdles to access. Someone with a very thrifty banking service, or someone with very little money (paycheck to paycheck poor) would have trouble utilizing such a resource. This is unfair and systemically disenfranchising. I would really like to see a solution to this issue from another part of 'the system' which must already validate someone's identity. A nominal and small fee should be attached, but it should be paid for by the corporation that wishes to ensure anti-fraud activity. In such a circumstance the corporation would be compelled to also accept this validation, or optionally offer others that may be faster if a consumer agrees. An individual under such suspicion would visit a nearby police department. Depending on the level of validation asked for said department might also try to actively contact the individual in other ways to cross-validate. If someone happens to be on vacation at the time this check would necessarily involve two departments (the place the person is at and their home area). Such a system is costly in time for the consumer, and some money for the company. Ideally solutions that don't result in account suspension would be developed to prevent reaching this state; but a good standard for last resort default is necessary to ensure any other solution that survives is better.
  • 3np 5y ago
    If we’re talking radical changes, I’d really like to move from authentication-by-flesh to authorization-by-cryptography. Basically as opposed to have party A present identifying and (supposedly) hard-to-know information and biometrics until party B is sufficiently confident that they map to the same physical person.. authorization by cryptographic keys. Like using metamask for authenticating. There will still need to an ecosystem of companies with the kind of services you’re talking about, but there would be a clear distinction between the “vouching” part (attest to a bank that you are who you say) vs “access” part (multi-party key custody and recovery services) So many hairy problems (online payments fraud for example) stop existing in the same way if we move payments from pull to push and access control to utilizing cryptographic signatures. I shouldn’t have to expose my entire identity in order for an online merchant to be sure I won’t bounce the payment. And the scenario OP is describing would never happen.
• rgj 5y ago
  Download logo’s, see how a statement would look, and create one yourself. Print it, fold it and make a photo. Always works for me when I am asked for a statement from a full digital service. My energy provider used to perform an immediate change of address which would be visible on your latest downloadable PDF invoice. This allowed even people without the most basic computer skills to validate _any_ address. Long story short, all those processes eventually depend on “proof” that is really easy to fabricate. Dutch banks invented the iDin standard, some kind of oAuth with your bank that provides third parties with validated personal information, but it is not widely used and I am not aware of an international standard or initiative for this.
  • neilv 5y ago
    As much as it might seem practically expedient, I'd advise not doing this. I'm imagining a lawyer for the injured person hearing they resorted to fabricating evidence, lawyer looking sad or irritated, and telling the person there's nothing the lawyer can do for them now. At least not on the original problem, though now the person might have an additional problem.
  • kwhitefoot 5y ago
    It's no wonder that ID fraud is so rampant in countries like the US and UK in comparison to countries like Norway that have a national ID service (BankID). There is no way that my Norwegian bank would accept a utility bill as any kind of support of ID. Instead they send a letter to my registered address (national population register) with instructions to take it and my driving license or passport to the post office who will act as a notary and report to the bank that I am the person that the letter is addressed to. From then on BankID (using a one time pad, SIM card, or code generator) can be used to log in to pretty much all banks and government services.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • k4rli 5y ago
      BankID with a digitally signed utility bill should be enough for AML/KYC. I was developing one fintech app recently and I never heard of this requirement.
• 3np 5y ago
  My country of nationality, residence, and issuing bank are all different. On top of that, my name is odd for my place of residence and contains characters outside of A-Z (which makes names not match 100% on cards) I get hit hard by anti-fraud systems. If I budget 1-2h for any given online purchase, I have <50% success rate with Paypal and ~75% with Stripe. If I contact the bank and merchant, the issue is always with the payment processor. Trying to resolve through the payment processor goes nowhere. The only thing that can work is try again with another of my 6 legit cards (mix of visa/Mac debit/credit) and if I’m lucky it goes through. Sometimes the next day; I guess some cool down is in place. This feels like discrimination or xenophobia with extra steps. If you’re international enough and have some bad luck, the systems will perceive you just like a scammer and will deny you service or require hours of intervention because of things like your name, location history, and nationality. (For those who haven’t noticed, sometimes PayPal will arbitrarily require you to create an account in order to complete a single payment. Nationality is required information in this step) If it’s not something I really want provided only by a single seller, I will nowadays abort at merchants only accepting PayPal, and at the first failure of Stripe. It’s not worth the headache.
  • johnisgood 5y ago
    This reminds me... what about those who do not have a surname? > Most Afghans have no surname; it is also common to have no surname in Bhutan, Indonesia, Myanmar, and the south of India. They cannot handle patronyms, and for many people every local document (except passport and tax card) uses initials, for example. The problem is that the bank account name has initials (in many places for many people) which does not match your name. My friend had an issue with Wise because they wanted the name to match that is on the passport, which was fine because it did. Then it started demanding that it matches his bank account name, which it cannot, because he has only initials there. They are dealing with international customers. They need to understand these differences, but they do not.
    • 3np 5y ago
      Yeah, I can only imagine how bad it would be to have an Arab name and only one of them.
• nikanj 5y ago
  Congratulations, you have the top comment on the top story of HN. Your issue should be resolved promptly. This is the true support channel for all major corporations.
  • andreapmd 5y ago
    You would think so wouldn't you
    • pjbeam 5y ago
      See my comment above, I am standing by to try to help.
• ghoomketu 5y ago
  My experience has been just opposite with Amazon at least their Web services. One of my account was hacked and since I don't use AWS any longer the emails and alerts were going to an email I never check. Don't remember how I discovered it but upon opening my AWS account I was stunned to see a $50,000 something bill. Amazon even raised a GST invoice for the same IIRC. My heart sank and mind filled with questions and uncertainty.. What if AWS sues me, maybe they will settle it for half or 25%. But their customer support was more than kind to me. In every reply they assured me that I need not worry and they are working on my behalf to resolve this. I cooperated with them in every way possible and After 16 days I finally got a reply that it was all taken care of and I owed them nothing and they didn't even suspend my account. God knows how the things would have turned out with any other hosting. I did leave them a suggestion to hard-cap the billing instead of just email alerts.
  • newaccount74 5y ago
    > I did leave them a suggestion to hard-cap the billing instead of just email alerts Why would they do that? Enterprise customers are just going to pay the bill, and for small customers they get a lot of good will when they make a "special exception" and don't ask you to pay for charges that someone else fraudulently racked up. The actual cost of providing the service to the fraudsters is probably so low that they don't have a lot of incentive to prevent the fraud, as long as there is a non-zero chance that someone pays for the fraudulent charges.
  • OOPMan 5y ago
    Web services is a rather different kettle of fish from their consumer items side, so your comment is rather inane.
• fantasticcammel 5y ago
  > All my kindle/audible/etc media immediately became inaccessible. gen.lib.rus.ec Also lookup myannonymouse for audio books, have all the latest titles. Getting an account is pretty easy, they literally checks if you can read their account policy.
• pjbeam 5y ago
  Hey, I'm not sure if you'll see this but I work at Amazon and can at least try to get a human for you. I can't promise magical solutions but I can get you some real person attention. Email me at my HN handle at protonmail dot com and we'll move the discussion to my work address from there.
• tzs 5y ago
  > I went through every possible channel to explain that the card does not send me a billing statement and I cannot possibly produce one Offerers of online banking services take note: even if you don't mail statements to your customers, you should provide an option to generate such a statement that the customer can download as a PDF.
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    How likely is it that a bank doesn't? I would expect every bank in the US to have some sort of monthly statement available, for instance.
• jimmaswell 5y ago
  Did you try just uploading a bank statement from the debit card?
• dcow 5y ago
  Are you not allowed to send pdf of the e-statement?
• novok 5y ago
  The online bank doesn't let you download pdf equivalents of monthly bank statements with your address on it? Usually that works I've found.
• gullevek 5y ago
  That's why every book I bought at Amazon I have physically downloaded. So in case Amazon decides to kill my account I still have the media.
• zhengyue 5y ago
  Did you try to call their customer service? I ran into the exact same situation with Amazon once. I was trying to sign up a free trial on audible.com, and my years old account had been locked immediately. To make it worse, my AWS services is on the same account, and I was locked out from the AWS console to manage my servers. At the same time, ironically, I still got monthly bills from AWS which I can't even pay. I tried several times to provide as much information as I can on that stupid login page but with no reveal (my bank doesn't send billing statements too, it's all on their app). Finally, I found Amazon's customer service phone number on a purposely hard to find webpage, the woman on the phone was nice and said she will try to contact the relevant person for me. After hung up the phone, I made a final attempt by uploaded a photo of my credit card. The next day, my account was unlocked. I don't know which method finally worked, but it worth a try.