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Comment by kangnkodos | Hacker News Reader

Wait. I'm missing something important here.

Are you saying that after Amazon verifies your credit card once, a scammer can keep making purchases on your card after you report it stolen to your credit card company?

This is news to me.

How long can Amazon do that? The end of the day? The end of the month? What eventually stops Amazon from accepting a card which has been reported stolen, and how long does the process take?

But blocking one specific company such as Amazon works faster? Why is that?

I guess at the end of the month, you can dispute the purchases.

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It's a feature on credit cards. Merchants in good standing can get updates on your new credit card. This should keep failed transactions to a minimum; for example, your electricity bill won't bounce if you got a new credit card and forgot to update your billing info.

What Amazon should be doing is letting you cancel an Amazon account if you know what credit card information it's using, like the author of this blog tried to do. The flaw is if your credit card info is leaked and someone cancels your Amazon account. But I see that as vastly superior to just having a random unauthorized Amazon account somewhere out there with your leaked credit card info in it making unauthorized purchases.

> What Amazon should be doing is letting you cancel an Amazon account if you know what credit card information it's using, like the author of this blog tried to do.

As you note, this has a flaw:

> The flaw is if your credit card info is leaked and someone cancels your Amazon account. But I see that as vastly superior to just having a random unauthorized Amazon account somewhere out there with your leaked credit card info in it making unauthorized purchases.

I don't see why it needs to be all or nothing. Just remove that credit card from the account, and block it from being added back. That lets you stop someone who has your card on their account, without opening you up to having your Amazon account canceled if someone gets your leaked info and wants to be a jerk.

That solution is still better than what Amazon is currently doing, and I do like it. My reasoning is that an account being accused of fraud shouldn't be left open. But I suppose a fraudster isn't inconvenienced by having to create a new Amazon account and continuing their fraud there.

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