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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

This happened to me with Linkedin advertising, where my budget of a couple hundred dollars got re-charged to my card up to a couple thousand dollars without notifications. They handled all the complaints not in email, but their web based interface, and memory holed their commitment to refunding me the money after multiple back and forths.

This isn't a mistake, the design is their business model. While we don't have a specific formal definition and name for it in the category of dark patterns, I'd like to name it "scumbag billing," where we got scumbagged.

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Or, if you cancel your Amazon account it doesn’t immediately stop all AWS billing.

It is — kid you not — recommended to terminate your individual services to avoid additional billing.

Technical limitation of a trillion dollar company? I say scum bag billing

What? How is that even legal ?

Can you afford better lawyers than Amazon? If not there's your answer...

Speculating but I wager they sell smaller collections in bulk to debt collectors at discount to try and collect vs running in house

Login and click cancel account and read the language. I’m sure it’s because of some of their intertwined or niche services and not everything but is very real.

You can cancel your credit card, but I imagine big Amazon and Co shops/sells their collections to the best on paper deal debt collectors (aka, truly the scummiest and worst ones).

If you have ever been pursued for unpaid debt like this, despite consumer legal protections, it is years of Hell, legal threats/letters, calls, and other gray intimidation. All while wondering if your credit score will just be nuked over night.

Source: Victim of identity fraud

Eventual consistency.

I remember broadband ISPs used to do that in the end of 90s, early 2000s with high price per MB of traffic, had to write off overages left and right (viruses on windows were a number 1 issue), then competition kicked in and "scumbag billing" disappeared, first they just got rid of overage charges and started merely throttling speed after caps and eventually got rid of caps altogether. Similar things were happening in hosting industry, colocation and dedicated servers in particular, competition eliminated overage charges too. Somehow "clouds" think they are too different, as if they don't compete with traditional hosting offerings, but being scambags trying to keep their high margins certainly pushes people away. I used to be an early AWS and Rackspace customer (remember when they were two top choices?), but haven't really used "clouds" since then, they are simply not competitive for literally anything, at least for someone like me, who's been doing infrastructure for decades.

Always use a virtual card for this. This way you can tell in advance how much can be drawn max and the expiration date. And even if their database is compromised it won't work elsewhere.

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