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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

i feel like there's a part of this story that we're not hearing. given amazon's excellent customer service reputation (including my own experiences) it's hard for me to believe that this could happen without there being a reason.

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Amazon is a sufficiently large organization such that I'm sure this sort of thing actually happens more often than you think.

By the tone of your comment, I'm assuming the "part of the story we're not hearing" involves the customer doing something wrong, rather than Amazon? If that's the case, I can't really think of what that thing might be that would give Amazon the right to lock this guy out? Also, why would he bring this issue to light and risk exposure if he really had done something so wrong?

I find it much easier to believe that a large corporation allowed an individual customer to fall through the cracks than some fraudster launching an elaborate plan to scam Amazon out of $1000 in e-books.

Not to take anyone's side, since I don't know the details, but maybe they suspected the account was using an stolen CC? I know companies tend to aggressively protect credit card holders (specially since rollbacks are so expensive). I'm sure amazon must be the target of stolen credit cards consistently.

That said, regardless of their size, they should expedite this type of check, specially for accounts that are not new!

I led a problem resolution team at a large company. If we ever knowingly received three calls from any client for the same problem (through any method of client contact source), or the complaint was vocal or serious enough on the first call (or first identifiable call), the incident would be forwarded to us and we'd deal with it directly. Rarely did the most complex issue take more than a day or two to resolve. On occasion it took a week or two if it was especially complex, but we'd contact the client directly and offer to give them a daily update so they'd know what was going on.

I'd be quite surprised if Amazon didn't have a similar team, even if just a dozen or two staff, if they are experienced, that's all that's usually required. The savings lost to poor public relations, and improved customer relations, easily make up for the cost of the team.

Out of curiosity, what would you do if the client got to this point, and your team determined that it was a fraudulent claim?

Obviously, if it's legitimate, you would have the ability to fix the issue right away. However, what if there were enough red flags that it didn't seem entirely right?

Not saying that this is the case either way, but I'm curious what the standard procedure is in that case.

In the case described in the posting, if I found it to be a valid claim and could not resolve why the problem was occurring within 24-48 hours, I would likely suggest that we create a new account for the client and populate it with the titles we knew he had purchased and perhaps provide a $100 or similar amount as compensation.

For this case, my team would have resolved it within 24-48 hours, based on the information that he's posted. It doesn't seem overly complex, assuming no fraud (or his account was mangled in a data transfer or deleted in someway and he hasn't mentioned that), and the resolution takes a few hours of someone making the new account and searching for titles to add to the account.

As a longer answer...

We didn't deal directly with public relations or issue press releases concerning significant public domain complaints, as to the best of my recollection, we didn't have a large PR nightmare to deal with while I was with the team. So that aspect I can not comment on.

If it was an issue of fraud, and we had several instances of fraudulent claims, we would clearly state that was our conclusion to the customer (or claimed customer). Our company did not actively pursue legal action against fraud cases, including a significant internal fraud case that was discovered, because of the possible negative publicity and loss of public reputation/brand quality.

Though through escalation, if I could not personally (as head of the team) find a solution to the issue and we felt it was fraud, we would offer to arrange an in-person meeting with the customer and ask that they bring their (or a) lawyer as the department VP, along with our legal team, would like to discuss the issue in detail. I don't remember more than one client coming in for a meeting in a two year period and we had security officers in the next room (with blinds down and listening in) in case there was a problem.

> I can't really think of what that thing might be that would give Amazon the right to lock this guy out?

I can easily imagine several scenarios; the one I'm having trouble imagining is one where they can't tell him why he's locked out.

Honestly, the only thing that is even remotely reasonable is an investigation by a three-letter agenchy.

Your parent has past (positive) experience with Amazon. He has never met or even spoken to the customer. Why should he immediately trust the customer over Amazon? Because Business Is Evil?

Not necessarily that the guy did something malicious, but he could be making it exceedingly difficult for amazon to solve his problem. It seems like such a simple solution to me - if the account is for some reason not unlockable, create a new account, gift credit the guy all his purchases, and permanently close the old account. I know that the CSRs have the ability to do this. If they aren't, there's a reason.

Initial guess, from some experiences with chargeback happy customers, is that the guy started initiating chargebacks before giving amazon a chance to resolve his problems, and amazon is refusing to help him until he cancels the chargeback process.

Agreed. At the same time, it's a good warning that wisdom might be to backup your books in preparation for bugs.

In general when dealing with the cloud, I agree. But DRM often makes doing this very difficult by design.

I'm inclined to agree.

My own anecdotal experiences with Amazon customer service aside, something feels amiss about this whole situation. Why did they not call/email Amazon after a full 24 hours had gone by? Why are they disputing Amazon charges to their credit cards?

I just feel like something is wrong here.

What? You always call websites whenever you can't log into them? You don't allow for downtime at all?

They are disputing the charges because amazon stole their content!

No, I call websites whenever my content that I paid for is broken or inaccessible. Not to mention they already did it once, and were told to wait 24 hours, but instead they waited a month?

I understand why they're disputing charges, but that seems silly if they haven't made some concerted effort to figure out what's going on.

At least that's my take on it.

I think that it's silly to blame the user because they waited a month. You have no idea what was going on in that person's life to cause them to wait that long. You also don't know that person's personality. Maybe they are a major procrastinator. Maybe they are phone phobic.

To say that the person was obviously in the wrong/doing something shady/to blame just because of how long they waited seems like you're really stretching to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt.

Didn't say they were obviously wrong, just that something feels missing.

However, not sure how it's silly to blame a user if they waited a month. Personal issue? Fine. But procrastinator and phone phobic aren't really excuses for this. If you're really concerned about your Kindle (I would be VERY concerned if it were more than a day.) then I would do almost anything in my power to fix it.

Wait a month? But that's a whole month of me not reading my books!

this whole thread is ridiculous, because he clearly stated that he did contact amazon several times, with no result besides "sorry, we don't know/can't say what's going on either"

The letter clearly states he has contacted every Amazon support option he knows of:

  I have filed a complaint with the BBB, emailed everyone I
  could at Amazon, called the Customer Service Line, the
  Kindle "Executive" support line, and Corporate. I have 
  been apologized to by everyone I have spoken to and been 
  told that they have never seen this situation before.
 
  None of them can tell me if I will ever receive the 
  content I have paid for.

Fair enough, didn't read carefully enough. Hope it gets resolved soon.

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