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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Must be fun and confusing for people checking their accounts from a coffee shop or from home if the dhcp from their ISP assigns them a "bad" ip.

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That's what I was thinking reading these replies. Amazon must be checking if you log in from the same IP as another seller, but how is that reliable in determining if it's a dupe? Why even allow users to log in from different computers if the only way they check for duplicate seller accounts is if someone else logs in from the same machine?

It seems like the author logged in to his seller account from a public wireless network (coffee shop, office) where another, previously-banned seller account had logged in from at one time, and Amazon assumed both accounts were from the same guy. Maybe they sold the same type of products.

I'm sure they get a lot of sellers who get their account closed and just try to make a new one, but I'd rather have Amazon not catch the sellers who are dumb enough to create an account from the same IP than catch them and get legitimate sellers banned in the process.

All of my weekend listing was done from home. Don't remember accessing my seller account anywhere else recently.

Does your ISP give you a static IP or is it dynamic?

Not completely sure, Cox (my provider) says in the small print:

"Static IP addresses may be required or dynamic IP addresses may be assigned without a static IP request, depending on location."

http://ww2.cox.com/business/arizona/data/pricing.cox

I don't take notice of my IP address much, so I can't say if they assigned a static IP address in my case. If they're filtering on IP addresses, I imagine that they get a lot of false positives.

If they are filtering on IP and you're not paying for a static IP address, then Cox's DHCP server could have given you a new IP address that matched someone else who had been banned. Not out of the ballpark of possibilities when IP is used for selection / banning.

Would you have accessed it outside of your home at any point? It could be possible that Amazon keeps a record of where you log in, you shared an IP with a previously banned account at some point, and then you listed an item the other seller had listed.

I'm sure there's a simpler explanation, though. That seems fairly complex.

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