Amazon: The implosion is near

Well too click-baity a title for what you're describing as the last straw here.

Amazon takes a no-questions-asked approach to most customer service issues, which results in a fair amount of exposure to abuse.

I wrote up a piece about a scammer using social engineering to sniff my order history and request a re-order of a recent product, posing as me and claiming I never received it. They were able to do this without gaining access to my account.

See here: http://www.htmlist.com/rants/two-for-one-amazon-coms-sociall...

(They just needed my email, name, and billing address for the live chat reps to get them other details.)

I fought this so that I wouldn't be wrongfully at risk of an account closure, as I've had to return items or request refunds in the past and recognized this.

But understand that it's a complicated balancing act for them, and that what happened here almost certainly is that you ended up on the wrong end of their fraud analysis algorithm.

There isn't going to be anything but incremental improvements on their side, either: in order to maintain the insanely high level of "we'll take care of it" support they do, they have to defend against those bad actors willing to take advantage of the system as best as they can. Sometimes there are false positives. There should definitely be a process for redress or further discussion, and it should never move to straight banning of the account, except in extremely obvious examples, but there's still going to be an anti-fraud system in place, and it's still going to have false positives.

Much ado about nothing, except to say that they have a whole significantly sized team of people working on fine-tuning this process and trying to not cause these problems for legitimate customers while limiting their downside risk for such a generous CS policy.

Sounds like this system is in place to prevent people who abuse Amazon's lenient refund and return policy from costing them thousands of dollars. In this particular case, it seems that several subsequent order problems in a short time period triggered the alert. I'd hope that once someone looked at the account in detail, they'd quickly realize what happened and remove the flag on the account, but OP doesn't actually explain what happened after this.

I get that a lot of people are on the anti-Amazon karma train today, but I'm not seeing anything particularly objectionable here.

I want to share an experience that I had a few months ago, to see if anyone had something similar.

I have an AWS account that I use to upload stuff to Glacier and leave it there. My monthly fee comes to about $0.20/mo and that's been going since around 5 years (previously it was just on S3). The data I store there is not encrypted (not that they would be looking at it, right?), nor is anything sensitive/illegal at all. Aside from that, I ocasionally spin a cheap EC2 instance to test some new binary before installing it or things like that.

Anyway, around March I received three emails (they were spaced like 6 hours or so apart so I've read them all at once) and the subject was something like "Important Notice regarding your AWS Account, Urgent! Open Now!". The first thing I thought was sh*t, my account was hacked and now I owe a million dollars to AWS.

To my relief that wasn't the case, but they wanted me to send them many documents that I consider personal and for no reason at all. I replied something like "Is something wrong?" and they said it was standard procedure, which is weird because I've never knew of anything like that. Things eventually went to "send us a scan of your passport or we will terminate your account", passport because that's the only ID I told them I had. I eventually told them to piss off, I figured that $0.20/mo and the things I had there are not worth the worry of sending that data to someone hiding behind an email. They didn't reply anything and then... nothing happened. It's been half a year since and everything is business as usual.

It was weird, and I never could make sense of what they really wanted, but anyway, just thought of sharing that when I read this guy's experience.

Would termination of a shopping account also affect AWS as a "related account", even though there are no returns associated with AWS? Public info on the review/appeal process would be helpful.

I had a miserable near account cancelation experience with Amazon recently and wrote about it here:

https://gist.github.com/softwaredoug/6f74748822bf52728545

What makes the minor threat of account cancelation so scary is all the DRM they sucker you into. Movies, books, etc just deleted by canceling your account. And there's about 4-5 major companies now that sell e-books, movies, etc all with this model. Why should I trust any of them? Why can't there be a different model. Instead of the Internet destroying the old distribution models, its only created stronger more consolidated control over the distribution of media. Time to visit my local book store.

This piece is 99% hot air.

A bunch of backhanded attacks on Amazon before we hear the real problem, which is obviously that some automated system mis-classified the customer. Even the author acknowledges this.

I would assume a quick email or phone call with Amazon would have cleared this up.

It was a waste of time to write this and a waste of time to read it.

Non-disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Amazon except as a normal customer.

Terminating problem customers seems like reasonable and smart company policy. Maybe frustrating for the customer being terminated, but to me it doesn't signal 'implosion is near' for the company.