Merchant Service Horror: Amazon Pay and the Disappearing $2300 | Hacker News Reader

Merchant Service Horror: Amazon Pay and the Disappearing $2300

bigmessowires.com

145 pointsfoodstances44 comments

Small claims court all the way. The demand letter alone should get their attention. Takes a few hours of your time - no lawyers needed.

Also contact any attorney general office in your state. Amazon pay is licensed as a money transmitter. Threaten their license to perform their business and they’ll start paying attention.

There’s a phone number on this page: https://pay.amazon.com/help/82972 of 866-216-1075 along with their license number and appropriate licensing agency for each state. My experience with obscure state licensing agencies is that they are looking for something to do - you bring them a slam dunk case and they will be happy to help and go to bat for you.

Edit- Amazon pay actually links to each state’s agency website here: https://pay.amazon.com/help/201310940

If OP is out there I’ll be happy to help.

Just for good measure even if you're not in Washington state, file a claim there and possibly with the Washington State Attorney General's office. Bob Ferguson has no qualms about taking Washington companies to court to do the right thing.

Is this a slam dunk case?

It does seem like a winnable one where the best outcome is Amazon cuts the seller a physical check?

The evidence provided in the article seems pretty damning. State licensing boards don’t take too kindly to their constituents being taken advantage of.

Yes ultimately the OP will end up with a physical check, I’m not saying they’re getting some huge payout or something.

OPs support experience, with the seemingly automated responses to keywords with no human in the loop has been my experience with more than one large, household name company. It bewilders me that so many organizations get away with this, but I guess the downsides for having effectively non functional customer support aren't enough to cause them much trouble.

The two that I've dealt with were EA and Uber. EA was years ago so I don't really remember much, but it was to do with incorrect linked accounts - I just got canned responses.

The Uber one was more recent - the issue was with their navigation directions for their drivers being incorrect, leading Uber Eats deliveries to a road that had no entrance to my property instead of the one that had my driveway on it. Despite repeatedly explaining my issue to them they just told me to drag the pin to the right location before requesting a delivery (which doesn't help when they send incorrect navigation instructions for the correct location), and when I explained that that wasn't a fix I got the standard "try restarting your device, clearing cache etc" advice.

As of ~ a year later the navigation seems to have finally been fixed, but I generally order from other delivery services now because I don't want to deal with Uber any more.

Wow!

You are prohibited from making any statement about the service without Amazon's permission.

"You must not issue any press release or make any public statement related to the Service, or except as expressly provided in this Agreement, use our or any of our Affiliates' names or Trademarks in any way without our prior written permission...."

Disputes have to be settled in arbitration. Paragraph 11.3

No liability for any "delays" in performance (which this might end up being)

And lots more!

Between this and the Upwork story, this is a reason why so many young people especially are abandoning entrepreneurship and trying to get into FAANG companies instead. The pay is better and none of this BS. It's so hard these days to be self-employed, so many things that can and will go wrong.

This, unfortunately, resonates quite strongly with me and seems representative of my peers as well

Don't quit that easily! I remember reading about the minecraft dev here on HN ~10 years ago when paypal froze his account with 20M. It was the first time I heard about the game so I checked it out and thought it was complete crap and probably a scam if he really had 20 million from selling this junk of a game )))

Notch's story is bittersweet to me.

He ended up bowing out from the game and largely retreating from the tech space entirely. Lotta reasons for that; but mainly -- as a wildly successful entrepreneur he suddenly found himself to be a highly influential figure whose every casual statement caused news article to get written[0] and he DID NOT WANT THAT AT ALL.

True, he made a ridiculous amount of money, but I don't know if it was worth giving up his creativity.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/799/

If the casual statements were "I like cheese" or "tabs are better than spaces" that would not have been newsworthy. "Feminism is a disease" and "Q is legit" are rather more controversial statements.

I don't want to apologize for those statements -- its clear that they were wrong. However, I do think that originally they were genuinely a result of a mental breakdown.

As for the "Q is legit" statement, he quit Minecraft before Q was a twinkle in 4chan's eye. I don't follow Notch and haven't for years. I'm not surprised a lonely tech enthusiast was ensnared by the Q cult, though.

> True, he made a ridiculous amount of money, but I don't know if it was worth giving up his creativity.

Well, you could always just open a new GitHub account under a new name. Perhaps he's done that.

He retreated from the public eye and started throwing huge parties for twenty something music and movie starts in Hollywood in the mansion he outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for. The mansion comes complete with a Candy Room [0]

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/minecraft-creators-new-mansi...

Amazon support is probably metric driven. Each person is punting or a bot which believes that it has the right answer. If you were bigger client then you would have a rep to escalate.

Amazon is dysfunctional. I was first external person to successfully integrate with that api platform (amz hired my company as a 3rd party tester during the launch many beta years ago). Amazon is a horrible company to work with or for, highly dysfunctional. I moved to Australia and only shop on ebay and taobao - my point is, i can relate.

Good luck. You can probably claim they have nexus in your state, small claims court is your best answer. Demand an apology, reimbursement, court filing fees.

Fantasy authors have been routinely finding themselves banned from Amazon and their royalties confiscated. They tend to only get reinstated if they have enough social media clout that there is enough noise, eventually someone from Amazon notices, and just as mysteriously they are unbanned...and in many cases, they never get their payments back.

Never ceases to amaze me the level to which the world's richest man apparently feels it necessary to stoop.

Often the people who suffer at large corporations are the anti government ayn rand types, they often have views outside that of society and it’s more profitable to dump them. Freedom of association etc.

Rather ironic that they campaign against the only organisation that can help

I'm not sure, but it feels like the writer could open another account at a different bank?

The money is his and it's not like they're not honoring that?

I've learned that if something doesn't work twice with ACH, you try something else.

It may not be easy to open another bank account (if the seller is out of country), but 6 weeks, it's definitely worth trying.

I agree that Amazon needs to fix their stuff, but lumbering giants have like zero motivation to deal with you.

This is kind of what I'm wondering as well. I understand the compulsion to try to get the other side to just fix their shit, but when a gnat is buzzing around Godzilla, the gnat can't exert enough pressure to convince Godzilla to dance.

Go to another bank or go to CashApp or TransferWise (now called Wise I think) or any number of the dozens of apps-masquerading-as-banks and get a new set of ACH details. Get the $2,300 you're owed.

So you just kick the can down the road to the next person? Imagine if we treated bug reports that way? “Oh, my software doesn’t work on a Tuesday that also happens to coincide with a full moon? Well, that’s your fault. Wait until Wednesday to do your work”

This learned helplessness is not helping anyone. There are still regulations, laws and rules that empower you as a consumer and business partner. Use them or lose them!

Well, for one, I'm not a software engineer. I do system administration work and, yes, it happens a lot that there's the "bang my head against it for weeks to make it Be Correct" outcome or the "I've beaten my head against it for a week and the user or my boss or both are mad and time to do the obvious workaround."

They've told him what they want: a bank account. So...give them another one? If the author wants to keep spending hours trying to get $2,300 to go exactly where he wants and debugging Amazon's system, he is of course free to do so.

Me, I would have done one thing he did--remove Amazon Pay--and gotten my $2,300 four weeks ago. That's not a criticism, just a difference in tactics.

I guess we may not be too different in opinion. I definitely think the OP should NOT try and “diagnose” the issue. It’s not their problem to fix and in the worst case, trying different account numbers as others suggest in this thread may end up with your money in someone else’s account - now you have two problems instead of one. Imagine trying to explain why you took those actions to a non technical peer (maybe a judge). “Well your honor, the luhn check digit algorithm…”

But it's not free. Small claims court still costs money.

You're asking the article writer to spend their own money/time by skipping the free attempt to "show the big giant they're wrong and save the next person time".

Personal choice for sure.

Would I do it? Not by choice.

It’s free to file complaints with the state licensing agencies.

Also fees to file a small claims action are usually less than $100. And you can ask for that as part of your renumeration if you win your case.

Their state's licencing agency seems to be good motivation.

Putting aside the abysmal support service, I'm guessing the root cause of the missing bank account digit, is due to the last digit being a check-digit.

Some backend system probably interacts with other systems that expect the routing number without the check digit, while others expect it with the check digit.

My guess is it’s cause checking account string length is variable, the system that stores the info gets it all. But when read by the process generating the ACH batch file it’s dropping the last character. I can’t be specific but I feel like I’ve seen this occur with raising an exception in some language/environment.

It’s essentially reading a full varchar(17) into a varchar(16) so the last character gets chop’d.

I think, while possible, 17 character account numbers is quite rare. If it were more common it would be a massive problem and surely Amazon Pay would be well aware/compelled to fix.

If Amazon was dropping the last digit from the routing number the ACH credit transaction attempt would have never made it to the destination bank. The fact that the destination bank was able to tell a digit was missing indicates the routing number was correct. A transaction with an 8 digit routing number would have never have left the OFDI because routing numbers are 9 digits.

For those who don't recognize the name, Big Mess O' Wires is a prominent developer and vendor of modern hardware add-ons for vintage Apple and Mac computers, including the very popular and well-regarded "Floppy Emu" floppy drive emulator.

I'm not suggesting OP does this, but I would have been very tempted to add an extra digit to the end of my account number on Amazon, to see if it got truncated. (If it did, you'd get your deposit, in theory..)

Or you just deposited $2300 into some random person’s account…

This is current situation of service industry. Once consumer bought service , they don't care.

> This is current situation of service industry. Once consumer bought service, they don't care.

It isn't a question of human emotions, such as caring, or not. At every touch point, someone in the corporation does "care" or want to do the right thing. The executives of the corporation are highly educated people who design systems to make money in the most competitive industry in the world, in accordance with the laws of the societies in which they operate.

And yet, the problem exists. Why?

The reason the problem exists is that the corporation leverages the friction of compliance against the customer. It sets the default outcome in favour of the corporation, placing the onus on the customer to do work to tip the process in favour of the customer.

This is common sense. But it still isn't "fair", and that's where the system could be improved.

If customers had to be compensated for the work they do to overcome friction, either retrospectively for legal reasons or through market based forces of competition, our consumer experience would be vastly improved.

A consumer bill of rights could set this up.

Behaviour like this would be made illegal:

> I discovered that my original support case had been unilaterally closed without resolution, because five days had passed since the last reply, and apparently that’s their support policy. It’s not possible to reopen or reply to a closed case, so I had to create a new case and explain the issue all over again.

Small claims courts could have a process to evaluate the cost of friction and award some multiple of it to successful applicants.

Once the systems exist, corporations could use outcomes to pitch for business. Imagine if the Average Friction Compensation Per Transaction Per Year was publicly available. Corporations would boast of low scores and list their performance as a feature.

How do we get to this new way of doing things?

We just need a consumer bill of rights, and for the legal system to follow suit and redesign their local processes to be in harmony.

How do we get this bill of rights?

For that, we need a responsive democratic system, designed and built in the interests of the people.

Ah Amazon, the business side. Tried to open an account, they took money from the CC then closed the account without reasons given, when asking support they said "Case closed, do not email us anymore, we will not answer". Tried with a different phone number for signups, but they match all the data they have from you and close and larger family. Closed account without reasons given. As a customer sure bought things for several 10k from them over last 20 years. But could not

Honestly, this is literally the very last person on the internet to get angry at you. Hackers talk, a lot. I hope he buries them deep. They have wasted an inordinate amount of his time, and his patience.

Steve at BMOW, is a straight up guy, who can teach a lot of companies about customer service.

I have the same beef now with "GoFundMe" and their ilk. "Its not my fault," and worse, "I am not going to do anything." followed by "It's our policy."

Several times when I had problems and support did go nowhere with Amazon I went to the police (Germany) and things were resolved.

I'd try appending the check digit to the account number and see if that goes through. Maybe Amazon is stripping check digits, and the last digit here looks like a check digit?

True story or not, as a consumer there’s no benefit to me to use Amazon pay. Now this is an active reason NOT to use it.

Would it be putting good money after bad to either invoke small claims court or arbitration?

I guess the other lesson is, keep posting in tickets. Maybe not every day, but every two days, post a request for an update.

Small Claims Court is absolutely the way to go. You pay some filing fees (usually less than $100) and submit your case. You can pay to serve the corporate secretary, and they will get served. Add the fees you paid for the filing and service to your claim. You will absolutely get all of your money back (minus the value of your time).

I have done this. It works.

Try adding another 2 to the end of your account number?

hah, I just commented the same suggestion^Widea above.

Instructions unclear, arrested and charged with attempted hacking.

“ On December 23 I contacted my bank and gave them the trace IDs for all the failed transfers. My bank determined that the account number was wrong on every transfer. All the failed ACH transfers used an account number ending in 62 instead of 622: the last digit of the account number was missing!

Armed with this information, I returned to Amazon Pay merchant support, and here’s where I really started to get frustrated. I discovered that my original support case had been unilaterally closed without resolution, because five days had passed since the last reply, and apparently that’s their support policy. It’s not possible to reopen or reply to a closed case, so I had to create a new case and explain the issue all over again. This did not go well.”

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