It's amazing that amazon would let him run that massive instance for months without any successful payment. I would imagine other vendor would suspend the account after a few days of late payment. For example, DO was notorious on suspending and deleting data after just a few days of late payment and it caught many people off guard while on vacation (I think their policy related to late payment is much more relaxed now after it was blowing up a while ago).

The description sounds like that person is at fault. They have emails coming in for three months about thousands of dollars in charges and don't read them :(