From WSAZ:
Thousands of Amazon customers are outraged, reporting they have been locked out of their accounts this week and without warning. When shoppers try to log in, Amazon tells them they have violated the company’s terms of service or that their account cannot be found.
Customers are taking to social media, saying they did nothing wrong to warrant their account’s deactivation or are unaware if they did anything wrong.
As a busy grandmother with a disability, Susan Steveson of Montgomery Heights, is always looking for a good deal and convenience, so online shopping and her Amazon Prime account make life a little easier.
“All the time. I mean, I purchase dog food in bulk by the month. I’ve been purchasing since 2011,” Stevenson said.
That was until several days ago when she was suddenly locked out of her account.
“I was told that my account had been shut down due to terms of sale violation,” she told WSAZ.
She was also unable to get in to delete her bank account and card information.
. . . .
Thousands of Amazon users have taken similar complaints and questions to social media, some using #AmazonClosed. A Facebook group: Amazon Account Closure Discussion Group is made up of users complaining about the issues and looking for answers has more than 3,000 members.
Stevenson’s account was reopened about a hour before sitting down with WSAZ. Amazon did not provide her any explanation for reopening or deactivating the account to begin with.
During the interview, Stevenson called the company, letting them know a reporter was listening to the conversation and recording.
The supervisor gave Stevenson a vague response to the reason her account was deactivated for approximately one week.
“They didn’t have any answers. All they said is I violated a policy,” Stevenson said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
She also asked the supervisor what she could do to avoid her account being deactivated in the future. The supervisor told her to read the terms and conditions on amazon.com.
According to CNBC, one issue could be with the third party sellers compensating shoppers for leaving a review of their product.
. . . .
Shortly after Stevenson’s afternoon interview with WSAZ, Stevenson got another email from Amazon, saying” We appreciate you being an Amazon customer and thank you for your patience. We detected unusual activity associated with items previously purchased on your account. As a result, we had deactivated your account while we conducted a deeper investigation. Based on that investigation, we have restored access to your account. Any pending orders will be processed. You can track the progress of your orders in the “Your Account” section of our website. We appreciate your patience while we conducted this investigation, and if you have any additional issues with your account, please feel free to contact us.”
Link to the rest at WSAZ
That’s what happen when you get BIG
Amazon has real problems with scammers,reviews etc. which it must address. I am a big Amazon fan. However, they are traditionally terrible in this area. They take action without notice, which is of course sometimes necessary, but then refuse to provide any meaningful information. This is an old story, and they need to fix it, irrespective of the merits in this particular case.
“Amazon has real problems with scammers,reviews etc. which it must address.”
It seems that every time they do someone starts yelling ‘Amazon is treating me like a scammer – but I’ve done nothing wrong – honest!’
“I am a big Amazon fan.”
There do seem to be a few of those here and there. 😉
“However, they are traditionally terrible in this area.”
Or so we’re told. It would be nice to see a graph or pie chart of all the Prime members vs those having problems and compare it to the same with other businesses.
“They take action without notice, which is of course sometimes necessary, but then refuse to provide any meaningful information.”
Meaningful information that could then be used by scammers to get around the new blocks? You have to remember that they can’t tell anyone without the risk of telling a scammer or a friend of a scammer.
“This is an old story, and they need to fix it, irrespective of the merits in this particular case.”
How do you suggest they do that little thing – without breaking everything else? If your answer has ‘use more warm bodies’ anywhere in it then that will raise the price and delay the delivery of things – the main reason most people use Amazon in the first place.
And just how does it help scammers evade new requirements to tell someone that the reason for the action taken is that they had received a gift voucher or credit for posting a review. Indeed, the customer (or former customer) should be told this when their account is cancelled or suspended, or before. This could be done with either a tweak of the algorithm which cancels or suspends the service or if the decision is actually made by a person a simple tick or checkbox. Failing this, or in addition to it, Amazon customer service should be able to provide this information and hopefully deal with it. One must also question the need to cancel or suspend an account on such an urgent basis without explanation or notice for this type of breach in most cases.
This particular problem if handled sensibly may well, as I set out above, be solved by better algorithms and equipping and authorising existing customer service staff to deal with these matters, or at least most of them. But even if extra staff are required, the idea that every additional staff member has a material affect on prices in a company the size of Amazon does not stand up to serious thought. As others have accurately pointed out, the percentage of accounts involved is minuscule. If the number of extra staff required to deal with this issue properly was so large as to have such a material affect then it would indicate that Amazon really does need to review the whole area. If someone’s account is being suspended for cause then a proper reason should be required.
Very good comment, Anonymous. You should put your name to it, so as not to get confused with inferior Anonymouses.
I would, but more of my comments get through the filters without my name than with.
Now I’m curious about your name.
My real name is Lexi Dick, and I had to change my user name when commenting on Telegraph articles. Although my comments made it through the filter, anyone trying to reply to me would have his comment deleted because of the @Lexi Dick at the start.
What does either Amazon or the consumer gain from a meaningful explanation?
The Consumer gains the knowledge to effectively contest the decision and make representations, or not.
Amazon gains the goodwill of handling the matter properly, or at least avoids justified bad publicity. Don’t forget that in this particular case, as in others, Amazon reinstated the account.
I find myself becoming schizo about Amazon. I have stock in my IRA and it’s been very good to me, and obviously, as a stockholder I want that to continue, but as an author, I don’t even trust their ability to count.
Even simple things like the number of reviews don’t jive. I’ve watched those numbers on my author page change from day to day when there’s no change in the number of actual reviews. You can even go into the reviews and tally the number of reviews by #ofstars and it doesn’t match the number on my author page.
As a prime member, I no longer trust their “two day shipping” promise because sometimes they seem to think it’s okay if they ship it two-day even though it took them two weeks to get it out the door (that was on a item that was “in stock.”)
Recently, AMAZON offered me a coupon on something I was buying. The coupon gave me a sizeable discount. I wasn’t ALLOWED to leave a review because I didn’t pay full price. Come on. They’re the ones who said, “Here. Have a coupon.” WTF? And I was going to bitch about the product. So maybe it’s not me who is schizo. Maybe it’s THEM.
Hearing this story, I’m considering never reviewing anything again. It’s just safer.
And I will NEVER limit my market solely to Amazon again because they’re too unpredictable. I’m not willing to set myself up for a nightmare scenario when it comes to my book sales.
The review count is definitely weird. I’ve noticed that the star display doesn’t make much sense, and sometimes doesn’t seem to add up to the real average.
Of greater concern to me are the wild fluctuations on those KDP author reports. Sometimes I can tell that they’re stuck. It can go on for days showing almost no sales, then I suddenly get a week’s worth of sales in one day. This isn’t rare – it happens every month now, sometimes every week. The end-of-month accounting almost always seems to end with me getting paid for more sales than I thought I had. Last night, my 30-day average income went up by fifty bucks in just a few hours, with only a handful of sales. I’m sure part of this can be attributed to the unusual way they count sales based upon how they were paid (some sales not being instant, apparently?) I find KDP’s difficulties with reporting, including their general confusion about how to count pages, troubling. It seems like determining the difference between a sale and a not-sale should be the easiest part.
Exactly! From the beginning I’ve thought how easy it would be for a company selling ebooks to play fast and loose with sales. After all, there’s no countable inventory. How easy would it be to not count every third sale? After all, how would you catch that? (I was an accountant/auditor in my previous life. I know how tricky auditees can be.)
I don’t think they count a sale till the Kindle customer downloads it. I read that somewhere ages ago. I often buy a book, and then don’t download it till I’m ready to read it.
It’s not a sale until the goods are delivered/sent.
Which is awfully strange, because it’s certainly a sale from the buyer’s side, as in money has left their account and Amazon has received it. Sounds like Amazon is using that money as an interest-free loan in the interim, if that’s how it is.
In the UK I’m just outside the top 3,000 reviewers. And I get several emails a week offering me free items in exchange for a review, the deal being that I purchase the goods, review, then am reimbursed via Paypal. The sellers tell me there is no risk to me, since if they fail to pay, I can always return the item for a refund.
I don’t do this as it’s against Amazon’s rules, but I expect some people do.
Last week I received an email from someone offering to send me free merchandise in exchange for reviews. The sender told me she had been reading my reviews …. interesting feat, that, because I don’t review under my name, the email did not address me by name, and in the “to” line my email address was listed as a blind copy. I suppose it was a mass email to random addresses in the hope they’d hit an actual address. I sent the email to Amazon and received a phone call from someone wanting to assure me they had not given my email address to anyone (I didn’t think they did). I was asked if I’d ever heard about pay-for-reviews operations. Told them I had, but I would never participate in that.
I used to have my email address on my profile (I figure that if anyone wants to contact me, I’d like to hear from him). I believe Amazon has removed email addresses from profiles now – mine’s gone – but there must be lists out there being passed around.
Mass emails to random addresses seems a tad desperate :o)
I’ve never had my email address in my profile. In fact, the only info is my user handle and how many reviews I’ve posted. It may also say how many up-votes I’ve gotten.
Some of those account closures could be over abusing the return policy. Seems I remember a few people complaining about their accounts being suspended/closed and not being able to access their ebook libraries anymore, only to find out many of them had been returning high dollars items on a regular basis.
An interesting bit on the OP:
“Stevenson says she leaves reviews of the products she purchases often and has reviewed products from third party sellers in the past and then received a discount code from the seller. She says she did not know that is against Amazon’s policy. Even if that is the reason for her account being deactivated, she says she has not received a discount code from a third party seller in at least a year.
So far, over several email and phone conversations, Amazon will not tell Stevenson if these kinds of reviews are the reason her account was deactivated.”
If that (or something else she was doing) was the ‘reason’ Amazon won’t be telling people how to better get around their rules.
“Stevenson says she will still buy from Amazon but to better protect herself, will not keep her account information saved on the website anymore.
“I definitely learned my lesson there. I’ll definitely use a pre-paid card from now on,” she said.
During Stevenson’s phone call Friday, Amazon agreed to give her a $10 credit in exchange for the inconvenience of not being able to access her account this week.”
So even this wasn’t enough to make her quit Amazon. Not sure how she thinks not letting them ‘hold’ her card info helps/hurts as they have the data already.
“By Jatara McGee | Posted: Fri 7:37 PM, Apr 06, 2018 | Updated: Sat 9:51 AM, Apr 07, 2018”
So this news ‘breaks’ Friday evening after everyone’s weekend has started and they point you at some facebook group (with more than 3000 members!) for confirmation. Funny we haven’t heard of any tweet-storm over it as well.
I think I’ll wait until next week to see if this has anything or is just more made-up news to try to get you to look at facebook …
So she was getting kickbacks for leaving nice reviews? I should think the seller should have been penalized with removal, not her. Take away her ability to leave reviews, but let her keep spending her money. What is the logic in keeping a customer out of your store? Unless she was causing such a ruckus that other customers were fleeing out the virtual doors.
“Stevenson’s account was reopened about a hour before sitting down with WSAZ.”
Funny on the timing – as there was nothing to show.
“The supervisor gave Stevenson a vague response to the reason her account was deactivated for approximately one week.”
Yet this is the first bit of noise we hear of it? There’s enough anti-Amazon types that certain papers and CNN would have been blaring it day/hour/minute one – and on prime time – not after business hours Friday.
I did a Google search of: “Amazon accounts issues”
All I found was the WSAZ piece of the OP. I did look under the ‘ConsumerAffairs’ hit that came up, they do have ‘3805’ Amazon.com customer reviews and complaints, but only 4 of them were for cancelled accounts in the last week (I’d expect a few more if this was a real problem …)
For what it’s worth, here’s an article from ars technica about it, and theyre not generally known for being an anti Amazon website
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/04/amazon-customers-take-to-social-media-after-mysterious-account-closures/
Someone suggested that it might be the case that scammers are using the names of real people and that somehow, the Amazon bots have decided to suspend the real accounts along with the fake.
Agreed, it could be that, though I find the timing interesting: “VALENTINA PALLADINO – 4/6/2018, 2:35 PM”, just before WSAZ reports it.
One thing that people need to bear in mind is that even ‘if’ all their complaints are legit, this is 3000 out of how many millions of Amazon Prime accounts/users? It’s not even a rounding error on their scopes and it takes a while for the problem to be noticed/dealt with.
It’s a bit like every time we hear that Amazon needs to clean the scammers out of KU and the rest of the system, Amazon does and we hear of a couple writers that thought what they were doing was ‘okay’ and Amazon shouldn’t be being mean to them.
I’m going to give it a week or three to see if it grows – or fades away. (Hmm, me wonders how many of that 3000 with be closing their facebook accounts Monday? 😉 )
You need to check that google is working for you because I googled “Amazon account issues” (with the quotes) and got back: About 3,660 results (0.42 seconds)
I don’t think you’re google is working for you. I did a search for “Amazon accounts issues” (with the quotes) and got back: About 3,660 results (0.42 seconds)
Then I checked the facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1519885701643780/) They have >3k members. Not to mention this isn’t the first time Amazon done this sort of thing.
They do it regularly.
Now, it could be algorithm glitches (“To err is human but it takes a computer for a world class screwup.”) but in the past it turns out the closures are for cause and the louder the scream, the bigger the cause.
Does anybody think that all the fifty million plus customers Amazon has are pure as the driven snow?
3000 out of 50M?
That’s about 1 out of every 2000 customers.
If I had to bet, I’d bet on customer misbehavior first, computer glitch second, and Amazon malice/incompetence third.
Sorry about that, but I figured that if it was this ‘massively big deal’ it would have made Google’s first page.
Checking now, the wsaz and ‘ConsumerAffairs’ links have dropped off the first page, seems there wasn’t enough interest to keep them on top (and yeah, 155,000,000 results in .32 seconds, but considering the second page has things like:
Twitch | How to Link Your Amazon Account
Amazon’s Chinese counterfeit problem is getting worse – CNBC.com
Ultimate Ears Blast – Ultimate Ears Support
My Amazon Account was Hacked and How I Made it More Secure …
How to Contact Amazon Customer Service – wikiHow
And the one I loved:
Seller Account Suspended? | 98% Satisfaction Rate $199
Let’s see who is squawking what come Monday …
I agree that the seller should be penalized, not the buyer. The buyer most likely wasn’t aware that being compensated for a review is against Amazon’s TOS.
I’ll admit that I did take advantage of one of these offers in the past. It was a product I really do like and I’d already left a positive review before I received the email. It never crossed my mind that it was against Amazon TOS to accept the free product.
On the other hand, I have sitting on my desk an enclosure that was sent along with a recent order by the seller. This promises me another identical shipment (it’s something you definitely need more than one of) in return for the review with proof by giving them your public name and order number. I’m now wondering if I should contact Amazon about it…