Hacker News Reader

Comment by icqFDR | Hacker News Reader

I’d advise anyone buying e-books on Amazon to think it through carefully. My account was banned recently because, years ago, I ordered two paper books that Amazon said would be split into two shipments. Both books arrived without any issues, but later Amazon refunded me for one of them, claiming that one package never arrived. This happened 4–5 years ago.

Apparently, during a recent review, they decided this counted as fraud and banned my account. As a result, I can no longer log in and lost access to all my Kindle e-books. They also remotely wiped my Kindle, so my entire library is gone. I appealed the decision, but I’ve been waiting for over six months with no resolution.

View on HN

A friend of mine received a double shipment for a $300 order. Being honest, he contacted customer service to arrange a return. Everything seemed fine until a few days later when he noticed they had also refunded his original payment. He reached out again to let them know, and they said they’d just recharge his card. Apparently, that transaction failed (no clear reason why), and without any warning, they banned his account, wiping out his entire Kindle library in the process. Amazon works wonderfully right up until it fails spectacularly.

I wonder just like retailers are required to account for local sales taxes (I know it is not that clear cut), there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally. Setup an agency which "legally" provides support for google, Amazon, and all those unreachable entities. Provides local jobs as well as quick grievance redressal. Maybe something like consumer protection agency but not federal, maybe at least one per county maybe more depending on the population.

Edit - I don't mind paying for the service. Maybe charge everyone $99 to file a case to avoid everyone piling on, but it helps resolve most egregious ones, and fee could be refunded at the agency's discretion.

I can't speak for how effective the process is, but this is the idea behind the EU/UK GPSR's Authorised Representative framework - though not exactly local (that would be excessive, since GPSR also applies to much smaller sellers too)

I hope it works better than the EU DSA dispute resolution, which I've heard multiple accounts of youtube just ignoring.

Haha, let me guess, if they're based in Ireland then this enforcement is up to Ireland as well, so it's as toothless as the other digital laws?

Some kind of court, for small claims?

Just need to outlaw binding arbitration

Amazon will reimburse arbitration fees if you win making it a cheaper option for consumers than small claims court.

Two problems with that argument: 1) Amazon would also have to reimburse small claims court fees if you win, and 2) arbitration is worse for the consumer in pretty much every other way.

"If".

[Edit, because one-word replies are uncivilized: one reason to be suspicious about binding arbitration is that the company against whom you'll be pleading is a repeat customer of that arbitration service. It's a non-transparent / non-public process, so it's hard to have confidence is fair, and over which we (ie, the public) have no influence if it were not.]

>is a repeat customer of that arbitration service

Who is locked in by the contract. The arbitration company gets their fees no matter the outcome.

>so it's hard to have confidence is fair

You can appeal to a court if it's unfair.

"We examine whether firms have an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration [...] We first document that some arbitrators are systematically industry friendly while others are consumer friendly. Firms appear to utilize this information in the arbitrator selection process. Despite a randomly generated list of potential arbitrators, industry-friendly arbitrators are forty percent more likely to be selected than their consumer friendly counterparts. Better informed firms and consumers choose more favorable arbitrators. [...] Competition between arbitrators exacerbates the informational advantage of firms in equilibrium resulting in all arbitrators slanting towards being industry friendly. Evidence suggests that limiting the respondent’s and claimant’s inputs over the arbitrator selection process could significantly improve outcomes for consumers."

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...

Businesses also incorporate in jurisdictions that are business friendly too.

It's 75 bucks in the EU without waiting for the reimbursement.

Does that include flying out to wherever?

That won't get you your account back.

We could call it "small claims court".

> there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally.

They are called courts and they exist.

Of course, companies like to require you to agree to binding arbitration, instead.

Or maybe pass some laws with more penalties for defrauding your own customers.

The solution to authoritarian problems is to organize.

In this case, we're overdue for a service that we all pay into, like a collective credit card, that only continues making payments to companies like Amazon if all of the members are happy. When you get banned without due process, payments stop until the matter is resolved.

Also, the collective can bargain-down rates. If it senses price increases beyond inflation, it just sends the adjusted amount, like 95%, until the matter is resolved.

We need this collective bargaining for housing (like tenant unions), the workplace, politics, pharmaceuticals, etc. The scale of this is so large that the collective could exist beyond any specific industry. So that it would operate as a meta economy beside the so-called free market economy (late-stage capitalism) that we operate under today due to the lack of antitrust enforcement.

Groups like the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) are working towards these sorts of goals on a number of fronts:

https://weall.org/

How would that work for countries where Amazon doesn't have a legal presence? A foreign court would be able to do anything.

Something similar happened to me with Blizzard. I'd buy subscription time and, a few days later, they'd cancel my subscription and refund the charge. After a few rounds of this, they suspended my account.

In that case, I appealed and was told, for the first time, that the reason for the refunds was that the card I'd been paying with didn't match the stored payment information saved to my account.

Both cards were equally valid and there was no indication anywhere that having saved payment information disqualified you from paying by any other method. As best I can tell, Blizzard just updated their policies one day for no particular reason, then made not complying with the new, secret policies a bannable offense.

i suspect the reason for such a policy is to ban fraud/stolen credit cards (probably used by professional bot farmers selling in-game gold for real life money).

The collateral damage on regular, innocent players is just an acceptable outcome.

I never bought any ebooks off Amazon without removing the drm at the time. I did buy a lot of shows and movies, but if they take those away, I'll just pirate them, given I've already paid.

Buying drm'ed shit, and removing later only indicates that DRM is acceptable.

Pirate it to start, and dont pay. You're an 'illegal' either way, with a tort copyright violation OR a criminal DMCA violation.

Unfortunately not everything is available on the high seas. For instance, it's impossible to find older seasons of MasterChef Australia (in HD). Heck even trying to view it legally, outside of AU, is a mission - Amazon is the only entity that has the older seasons. I ended up subscribing to a Prime account just for this.

Every season of MasterChef Australia is available on the right tracker.

Haven't found any, certainly not any with active seeders. If you know of a tracker (that doesn't require super special invites), I'm all ears.

S01-03 only exist in SD, from S04 onwards Full HD files are available on all trackers that I happen to have too.

What is the vpn of choice these days for bittorrent?

there's only one that's not extremely shady and has working port forwarding. If you don't need the latter, just stick to Mullvad.

What is the one with working port forwarding?

Proton, at least for me

PIA also supports port forwarding from non-US regions. And the Linux solution is better and provides a stable port, unlike Proton's 'run this command every 60 seconds and hope'.

I only use OpenVPN (another reason to move away from Mullvad), not their own clients. I moved away from PIA in the past, I don't remember why, it was a long time ago.

I was happy with Mullvad for a long time, especially being able to buy their scratch cards, but now I had to move to Proton due to the deprecation of port forwarding and openvpn at mullvad.

But PIA is american anyway so that won't work for me, I'm not signing up with new american services anymore since Trump came to power again.

At the time a lot of the things I was reading were only available on there or on paper.

That's the point of DRM-free ebooks though, isn't it? You download them and keep them safe so if the provider decides to cut access to your account, you remain in possession of the goods.

So the correct advice would be to avoid anyone buying DRM-encumbered digital property - the same as RMS has been making for who knows how long!

It's safer to assume that Amazon is always acting in bad faith and search to purchase your DRM free e-books from other vendors. There's plenty of other options out there besides Amazon

> There's plenty of other options out there besides Amazon

Often not in my experience. Abe and B&N.

If by Abe, you mean Abe Books, they're a subsidiary of Amazon.

I believe Baen sells some DRM free sci fi books, but it's a smaller catalog.

Pretty sure all of Baen's books are DRM free, and they offer virtually every ebook format around. They even used to include CDs with their hardbacks that would would include a huge subset of their collection. But they aren't a retailer, they're a publisher, so you're only getting the titles they publish.

Bookshop, Kobo, Google Play Books

https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bookshoporg-launche...

Banning long-time customers in otherwise good-standing for a mistake they made years ago, which would already be settled financially and such a minor cost is wild.

I can imagine something like this has happened to almost everyone.

So much for being the world’s most customer-centric company. That mission is dead.

Customer centric ended a few years ago

This may be your opinion, and mine as well, but it’s still in paragraph 1 of Amazon’s own about page. It seems they’ve forgotten their own guiding principles.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us

> Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. We strive to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, Earth’s best employer, and Earth’s safest place to work.

Hey Amazon, I have a great offer for to buy the Golden Gate bridge.

99.99% of the time when you read something on the internet and your reaction is "that's wild" / "wow that's crazy" / "that's unbelievable", then what you are reading is in fact likely nowhere near the actual truth / real.

My experience with online services and software in general is it makes mistakes A LOT. Like A LOT A LOT. And I have absolutely no problem believing there little to no humans in the loop here.

If you read up on Amazon's prior scandal(s) regarding their broken leave system, you'll believe almost any mistake is possible: https://web.archive.org/web/20211025011703/https://www.nytim...

One of the primary functions of DRM is to remove a paying customer's access to the works they paid for. There's nothing "wild" or "crazy" or "unbelievable" about it.

98.378274% of the time when you read something on the internet quoting accurate probabilities they're making it up to push their biases onto you.

"99.99% of the time" is a figure of speech. Don't overanalyze it.

>the world’s most customer-centric company.

Those are big words Amazon certainly doesn't earn.

They failed to deliver a Pixel phone to me - they never even tried to deliver it and the status said "permanent delivery failure" so I assumed they'd automatically refund me.

Fast forward a few months, I never received a refund and they claim they have no record any more. I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...

(if anyone from Amazon is reading this, my email is in my bio!)

It seems wild to me to just accept a loss of $1000 for something that isn't your fault. I'd be persistent in each contact with Amazon and if you're really not getting anywhere I'd go to small claims court or do a chargeback.

Like, I know there are some really rich people around, obviously you see them driving around in fancy cars and living in big houses, but you kinda forget that some people can just lose $1000 and ignore it like it's nothing. Crazy.

For $1k stolen from me I think I’d go with not shopping at Amazon again, tbh.

Yeah, I get that Amazon is incredibly convenient, but $1000 is $1000 no matter which company takes it from you. If some local mom and pop shop effectively stole $1000 from me, you can bet your ass I'd never patronize them again.

They never said they continued to patronize Amazon. Given the thread kicked off with claims about loosing access to DRMed content due to an unrelated delivery/payment issue, the person involved may be concerned about loosing access to digital content. Some people spend a lot of money on books, movies, etc.. The $1000 may be a drop in the bucket.

> I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...

To some this could imply they wanted to continue doing business with Amazon, so accepted the theft. Not losing access is, in a way, continuing to do business. Not sure if that's what they meant, but I can see it being interpreted as such.

Maybe not continue to do business with them but rather not lose access to their past purchases tied to their Amazon account.

Amazon has no moat today. What is even unique on amazon store these days? Fake chinese crap is what. Which you can also find on ebay, same item same product photos and probably still shipped to you in 2-4 days like what prime has been reduced to. If you can wait you can opt for the 3 weeks from china option at literally a quarter the cost.

Just ask for the refund. If they lock your account you can always make a new one (gonna be a scary day when that isn't possibl cuz they use biometrics or something.....).

But if they just close your account in response to asking for a rightful refund.... Literal thievery

Something similar happened to me. The delivery company returned two packages, two separate orders, as damaged back to Amazon. They were marked as "delivered". They automatically refunded just one item in one of the returned orders.

I had to call them to get a refund for all the items on all the orders, and even then they had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was happening. Isn't Amazon supposed to be a world leader (maybe after Walmart) in this stuff?

Not too long ago I received an empty package from Amazon but luckily it was a low price item and they reshipped it without fuss.

Not sure what you'd do in such a scenario if they tried to fight it

the bigger the company is the less they can invest in customer support. Because what the client will do anyway, leave them to some alternative? sue them? very unlikely

No way I'd give away 1000 € in exchange to be allowed to buy from some store. Actually, I don't even have an Amazon account, but if I did, I'd prefer to be banned than to burn 1000 € like that.

Much less money lost, but Amazon is notorious for not providing free game codes that are supposed to be included with GPU purchases. The customer rep at first apologized and offered a small refund (less than the cost of the game). A later rep started implying I was trying to defraud Amazon.

Many people online share similar experiences. Wonder how much money this wide-scale fraud saves them.

Amazon doing dodgy things with PC parts is why I will no longer purchase them from there - I'll happily take the extra £10-20 hit to buy it from another "proper" retailer (ie, Scan or Overclockers here in the UK), knowing that issues can be resolved more easily

Man, for $1000 I'd definitely be checking to make sure it got refunded, and manually requesting a refund after a week had passed.

Waiting a few months is not smart because not every delivery service is going to store the delivery status details. I've generally found that after 3 months, data starts disappearing from services and refund options can become technically impossible. Like, on eBay, even if a seller wants to refund you after more than 90 days, they can't. Part of this is for accounting too -- at some point you just have to be able to definitively close the books and say here are the sales we made, that number isn't going down in the future because of potential outstanding returns.

Amazon no longer having a record of it is absurd given the volume of data they store about all transactions.

For a phone in particular I'd be demanding serial number/IMEI information for the police report and ensuring that the stolen phone was properly reported as stolen. Since they record all of that when they ship it should be readily available.

No, this is silly. Don't do this. You absolutely keep pushing for a refund and go via you CC provider if they don't respond.

And risk being locked out of the world’s online marketplace and all of Amazon’s other businesses? Maybe a bit hyperbolic but that’s where we are headed for sure.

It's perfectly feasible to never use Amazon. I don't know your situation, but i think people should go out more and prefer quality over quantity. Most of the stuff that Amazon sell is crap anyway.

> but i think people should go out more and prefer quality over quantity

Whether you find higher quality in your local area depends on your local area and what you're buying. More generally applicable, you can find higher quality with independent online stores.

The world's marketplace is alibaba.com, or aliexpress.com for individual orders.

You can find 99% of the junk on amazon on aliexpress for a lower price, though without prime shipping.

True, especially the goods shipped "with prime". It's always a 5-10 bucks premium over the AliExpress price of the same item. It depends on how much in a hurry I am.

You can do without Amazon. Should you really want to get something you can ask a friend to get it for you but I really think you won't need that.

Have you never been banned in a video game and wanted to get back in? You create a new account and call it a day.

It's not like you should feel bad about playing dirty with a company that considers it fine to just steal $1k.

For $1000 I'd definitely risk it and kick up a fuss about it if they locked me out.

File in small claims court, they can't ban you for that and they have to send someone out

They can ban you for any reason they want

That should be the last straw. In the least, why haven't you closed your account?

> so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse... So you basically approve of this behavior. I personally learned some time ago to stay away from these companies.

wait is your email really username@username.net? I registered java.lang.string (at) gmail back when I was learning java 20+ years ago. Haven't really used it in over a decade though.

Just reach out to andy or bezos and the executive team will reach out and fix it.

I only got unbanned when I got hired at Amazon and emailed the head of the fraud team lol. I had the same issues you had with being stonewalled and ghosted while banned. Anyways, just downloaded them off of Anna's Archive or join private trackers. There's also still methods to de-drm the Kindle books, but many people will do it for u via requests on private trackers.

Poor customer support is a serious problem for Amazon, Google and Meta. Hope to see alternatives unseat these giants from their monopoly status.

I saw the writing on the wall when they recently removed the facility to download your own books. I downloaded all of them, removed the DRM with Calibre, and now obtain e-books through other sources.

They screwed me in a different way. I simply didn't log into Amazon for a couple years as I've tried to minimize my use of Amazon. When I went to log in, they locked my account without any way to unlock it. Talking with support multiple times did nothing. Now all my digital purchases are gone.

Edit: If anyone knows a way to get them to unlock the account, I'd appreciate it. They won't issue a password reset or anything similar, which seems ridiculous considering they never claimed fraud. Simply that it had been too long since I logged in.

"Now all my digital purchases are gone."

If you used to be one of those good consumers who would never even think of breaking DRM, I hope you reconsider it now.

If you're in the US just look up the small claims process local near you, and do it. The fee is small and you'll learn how it works, and that's worst case.

What is that you say? Stallman was right again?

https://stallman.org/amazon.html

I'm also particularly skeptical of Amazon because our Kindle Direct Publishing account was banned also for no reason. They said something about me having had a previous account before, but I'm not sure that was true and I think it was a very extreme measure. We were actually selling books at the time until we got banned. They obviously also "forgot" to pay out the most recent month.

I buy all my ebooks. I search DRM free, if there is DRM only I'll buy it the cheapest I can then download it from Annas Archive. I like to support authors but I need to own what I buy.

I'm more into the satisfaction of breaking DRM, but this is good too. Kudos for supporting authors!

Unfortunately bad press is likely going to be the only thing to give you your account back. You should write a blog post and let the internet and the media do its magic

Pretty much what I was going to say. I think Twitter (or whatever social media people use these days) would be a more appropriate place to put the company "on blast".

That's not a sensible solution for us all.

> They also remotely wiped my Kindle

I wish the CFAA were used to go after people like whoever at Amazon was responsible for that, instead of people like Aaron Swartz.

I work at Amazon and can escalate this if you're interested. Let me know the order ID and I'll see what I can do.

Damn that is scary. I’ve been reading on Kindle since 2017, I have about 200 books on there.

I doubt I would re-read many of them, but my partner is still going through some of them (with the family library thing).

I’d be pissed if it got wiped.

I'd download epubs of everything from Anna's Archive and/or soulseek (Nicotine+ is nice) and kindly tell them to fuck off with their account.

I can't believe Soulseek is still a thing. Kinda warms my icy heart.

I regularly use soulseek to download archival copies of music that I pay for. The artist makes their money, and I don’t have to worry about my account access.

Soulseek is brilliant.

> As a result, I can no longer log in and lost access to all my Kindle e-books.

Can't you file a suit in a small claims court?

The only reason for a recent review (like with all the recently banned Facebook accounts from 2009) is firing up AI tools that didn't exist 5 years ago.

Or general auditing purposes.

Yeah, welcome to tech. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize completely with you. It's an outrage. But it's incredible that Every. Single. One. of these companies has terrible automation with no ability to file a ticket for a human to look at it

Facebook is marginally worse than the others because Facebook left you with no way to actually contact the friends you accrued https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

Seems this is a possibility with any service. Even stuff like music streaming. I tried to listen to loveless on spotify the other day and apparently it has been removed from the service. It is time to start making rips of physical media I own or rent from the library again. Back to the high seas again too. We traded control for convenience and that comes back to bite us.

> I appealed the decision, but I’ve been waiting for over six months with no resolution.

Sue them.

I have 5 kindles at home and they're all collecting dusts along with some Alexa and Echo devices, the only thing I need Amazon for is its ecommerce shopping site. The phone just replaces all those gadgets and it probably has nothing to do with Amazon. Still it's a nice move to support ePub and PDFs on kindles.

Amazon used to be really customer centric 5-10 years ago, I remember once I ordered a physical book which was late in delivery and I urgently needed that book, so they gave me a free kindle edition till the book got delivered.

Last week I had a vendor tell me that they did warranty service through Amazon, and I should contact Amazon for a replacement, even though I was outside of their return window. It turned out to be a lie. But Amazon refunded me the full amount anyway, without prompting. The handful of times I've contacted Amazon tech support this has been my experience. The previous one was when they replaced a $250 porch pirated delivery, no questions asked.

This behavior genuinely earns them more of my business.

The "danger" of their policies (and I've benefitted from them, too) is that they obviously can be gamed, and they obviously have to have defenses against that - which means if you cross some invisible line (and now likely AI-monitored) you're doomed; no recourse.

Well also the danger is to who ends up eating the cost. In some cases its other businesses not Amazon.

I always find it surprising that apparently it is easy to BAN someone's account but nobody has the power to UNBAN.

But I suppose when you get to the size of Amazon a million bans becomes a statistic...

About Kindle, if you're in Europe, you could try Nextory or BookBeat. They don't have as much content, but are good services nevertheless.

That really stinks. As much as I love my kindle, I recently started buying paper books again, in part because of stories like this.

As have I.

At least Amazon is clear we don’t own the book.

>They also remotely wiped my Kindle

Not sure if this legal or not, the cost of fraud in physical book purchasing (even if it's genuine) will probably never exceed the entire Kindle book library collection.

If this is true, I need to be extra careful buying stuff, virtual or physical from Amazon.

Fyi for anyone reading, it is very easy to break DRM on old kindle purchases. I think they rolled out new DRM for things published this year and it may be harder but still possible. I would encourage anyone here who has a kindle library to back up their purchases.

That is truly insane - sorry that you’re unable to access the books that you rightly purchased.

Though I highly doubt this alone was the reason for an account ban. Is it possible your credentials were stolen/misused without your knowledge?

That’s possible, but I can’t know for sure because Amazon never provided any concrete details. I didn’t receive any warning emails, only a cryptic message after the ban:

> "Amazon.co.uk found that the rate at which refunds were occurring on your account was extraordinary and could not continue."

After looking through my order history, the only refund I could find on this account was the one related to the book I mentioned above. If there was any other activity or misuse, Amazon hasn’t disclosed it to me, which makes it impossible to verify or dispute their conclusion.

Surely, you take them to small claims court over it, they won't bother so send anyone because their lawyers cost more per hour than your entire account was worth, you win by default?

Yeah I recently downloaded all my purchased content (while that was still possible, it isn't anymore) and liberated it all.

I'm not going to buy any more DRM content.

I would claim (to an FTC lawyer) that they might be doing it (double-sending) on purpose to get me to buy my library again (after they cancel it).

Might be worth trying.

Do you live in a place with consumer protections? Sue them - small claims court.

This has terrified me. In the past I’ve received items, then got apologies from Amazon for them not being delivered.

I could have easily gotten a refund, but there was no way for me to say “I received the product!”

So bizarre.

I’m used to dedicating time to dealing with being screwed by random companies. But this doesn’t fit that description- so I don’t go too far out of my way.

File suit.

remote wiping purchased stuff is diabolical, especially over something so far in the past you can't do a charge back.

What are you using for e-book reading now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com