I believe that AWS account creation requires unique emails & card numbers, but I'm not sure. There is definitely a telephone call with voice PIN, so I highly do

I believe that AWS account creation requires unique emails & card numbers, but I'm not sure. There is definitely a telephone call with voice PIN, so I highly doubt that they used AWS accounts directly. I think the "Amazon" spin in the title is from many other services running atop of EC2 and effectively reselling EC2 instances or access to VMs that run on EC2. They could more easily create accounts with these services and technically still run "within Amazon's cloud".