Frankly, I just don't believe him. It's possible he tripped a false positive, but in my experience -- and I have to believe the people working at Amazon had more resources at their disposal than I did -- it's much, much more likely that he's lying.
That is not an argument. It's a pointless assertion that you believe in Amazon being correct, in the absence of any actual evidence.
I don't know akavlie personally, but he's been on HN for a long time. I think he's a rational person based on his discourse here.
I'm not saying he's not a rational person. Rational people lie all the time.
I have no idea what he was doing, but it seems most likely to me, based on experience and the facts at hand (that Amazon reviewed his account and still insisted on the revoking of his selling privileges) that he's lying.
In other words, like Amazon says, he probably had a previous seller account that got suspended for some reason and he's gotten by with this new one for a while but trying to sell the higher dollar item got his account flagged for review which resulted in him getting busted.
I'm no big fan of Amazon, and it's possible they made a mistake. But it's more likely -- in my opinion -- that he is lying and trying to garner public sympathy to put pressure on Amazon to reinstate him.
It's great you have so much faith in others, but we've seen this many times -- often in the case of people insisting they weren't cheating on Steam and they have no idea what Valve is talking about -- but I've seen it myself in my previous security work for a marketplace site.
I could be wrong, I don't know. I was just sharing my opinion but apparently the HN community decided that it was unwelcome.