Amazon Payments plus VPN = account closed
(1) "Hello from Amazon Payments."
"We are writing to inform you that we have closed your Amazon Payments account and cancelled all open orders."
"We took these actions because our records indicate that an unauthorized person has logged into your account. For your security, the credit card information stored on your account cannot be accessed via our website and your full credit card number is not displayed in your account."
"Due to this unauthorized access, your account cannot be reopened. In order to continue shopping with Amazon Payments, we ask that you open a new Amazon account. Your order history and additional features such as Wishlists cannot be transferred to your new account."
"We are unable to say how your sign in information was obtained since the activities used to obtain these details occur away from our website. Some techniques used to gain access include using malicious software to capture a user's keystrokes and Internet activity, trying commonly-used passwords, and sending fraudulent e-mails requesting recipients provide or update personal, financial, or other account information (commonly known as "phishing")."
"For information about safe online shopping, please visit the "Security, Privacy & Accessibility" section of our Amazon.com Help pages."
"We regret any inconvenience, and we hope you will provide us the opportunity to serve you as a customer again."
12 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] threadI know PayPal has an automated system which is rather pedantic about IP addresses. I think that it's safer to setup a proxy and use it every time you log into a service like PayPal because from I realized by reading user experiences it's either their way or the highway, even when their autmated alarm systems are 100% wrong.
I'm using NordVPN. It's the first time I've used Amazon Payments through VPN. As Amazon writes: "our records indicate that an unauthorized person has logged into your account" - I don't think it can be connected to anything other than using the payments through the vpn from another country.
The response would likely be slightly different if you were using a VPN on your own self hosted VM or something.
I didn't get any satisfactory answers, but this is exactly the kind of scenario I was afraid of.
A business that relies on AWS can be wiped out by an automated script in a different department. There is no mitigation since Amazon will also close "linked accounts", so having separate business and personal Amazon accounts isn't enough. It's super scary.
I tried tweeting @jeffbarr and posting in the AWS forums about these risks, but got no response from Amazon.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248690
It is good that Amazon is protecting user accounts. But the way it was handled in my case is scary - writing just that my "account is closed", it "cannot be reopened" and it's the end, when I have a few sites running on AWS managed to frighten me ;) Maybe they would try to contact me before by phone if I didn't live in Eastern Europe, who knows?
Fortunately, an hour ago I received an email from Amazon saying that my account has been reinstated, so these few times I've contacted them about this problem have an effect.
Since this is the way Amazon treats its customers, Amazon can go fuck itself. I don't plan to ever buy anything from them again and I strongly urge people to think of the ramifications of this happening to a business run on AWS. I'm currently working on moving our company's infrastructure off their system and writing a blog post about it.
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Hello,
We have noticed that you have returned a large number of your orders. While we expect occasional problems with orders, such large numbers of returns can suggest that customers are unaware of our return policies.
We want to call your attention to our returns policies because repeated misuse can result in the closure of your Amazon account. To learn more about our policies, search “About Our Returns Policies” in the Help section of Amazon.com.
If there is something we can do to help solve any recurring problems you are having with your orders, please reply to this email to reach an Account Specialist.
Sincerely,
Account Specialist
So for less than $100, I cannot imagine why they'd take this action. Is it a lot of returns on inexpensive things (e.g. 20 $5 items).
This scares me and makes me want to diversify my shopping with other retailers. :(
This seems like a very odd way to handle this situation. Just making a new account wouldn't really help anything if you are compromised. Also i find it strange that they are ok with you bypassing their ban, and just making a whole new account.