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Did anyone else just get signed up for “Amazon photos” out of the blue for $60?

68 points by fshbbdssbbgdd ↗ HN
Today I got an email welcoming me to Amazon Photos, and another email saying my $60 annual subscription will renew next month. When I went to cancel, it said I would receive a pro-rated refund based on my last payment… in 2015: https://imgur.com/a/VOmJCnP

I don’t remember ever using Amazon photos.

Has this happened to anyone else?

41 comments

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rolph
sounds like phishing
fshbbdssbbgdd
It’s all on amazon.com urls.
rolph
im not there to experience what you have in front of you, but there are some very good ones out there that play games, manipulating URLs or straight up proxy botting other computers.

they usually give a talk similar to what you posted, often there is an urgent deadline when "account charges are final and non-refundable"

they just want a click on a link or a mouse farm [harvesting natural mouse movement to spoof bot detection]

fshbbdssbbgdd
I went on desktop and looked at the email’s html, it links to real Amazon URLs. If the hackers own my iPhone and my Windows desktop I am truly fucked!
pessimizer
Better to just copy-paste the url to the url bar, delete the domain, and type it in yourself. Then you at least know that the scammers have figured out how to get Amazon to forward their scam, so it was both you and Amazon that got suckered.

Personally, though, I'd never follow a link in an email that I hadn't requested. If I can't get to the information through my Amazon account, I'm going to consider it bullshit, and even if it turns out not to be, the fact that I couldn't get to the information through Amazon itself will make a good ground for contesting any claims or charges.

gruez
>a mouse farm [harvesting natural mouse movement to spoof bot detection]

surely there are better ways of getting visitors to your site than sending phishing emails?

rolph
yes im sure there are, for example offer a product that primarily serves the user. some people are so pathological, they will take big negatives to preserve "my way or the highway" consider the legendary chair brandishing executive for example.
Jaxkr
Amazon Drive was discontinued and rolled into Photos
fshbbdssbbgdd
Ok, interesting.

I logged into Amazon drive, and I found a few files from 2012-2016. They consist of a small amount of music and some send-to-Kindle documents. I recall trying Amazon’s music service at some point. Also, sometimes Amazon would offer me a free $1 digit credit when I ordered a physical item, perhaps they also offered some free Amazon Drive storage?

My working theory: I had some kind of free Amazon Drive account (maybe created as an accessory to some other service?). During this Drive shutdown, some kind of botched data migration resulted in that being turned into a paid Photos account.

ceejayoz
They regularly have "try service x for $y" offers.

Example: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/ymmv-get-a-15-amazon-when-you...

fshbbdssbbgdd
Interesting lead. I just logged into the Photos app. It gave me a welcome/onboarding flow like I had never used it before and there were no photos in there.

On the other hand, I can totally imagine 2015 version of me signing up for a free Amazon photos account to get $15.

Victerius
No. The only Amazon sub I have is Prime.
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legrande
If you're in the EU, try getting the Revolut app. They have a feature called 'virtual cards' which are great for e-commerce purchases. The idea being, you use a card once and then terminate it after making a purchase. This means you don't get unexpected charges a year (or two) later as most services keep your card 'on file' now, which is a dark pattern.
thomas-st
Careful. My friend used Revolut virtual cards and forgot to deactivate the card after the purchase. Months (or a year) later he got a fraudulent charge and Revolut refused to waive it because they claim he should have deactivated the virtual card. If it were on a regular credit card he may have just been able to dispute it.
jack_pp
You should use their one time payment cards to be safe
KennyBlanken
Payment processing gateways can see what type of card you're using and many one-time/prepaid cards will be rejected for recurring service or deposit related billing.
lrem
Many if not most merchants I deal with refuse those. Which is terribly annoying when it's a shop with clunky checkout flow.
Teever
I'm baffled by the fact that the system is designed in any way to enable merchants to know that the card you're paying with is a single use card.
happymellon
They run two transactions, the first being £0 and it resets the card number causing the second to fail.
Dylan16807
That sounds like a bug on Revolut's side. It's supposed to be one payment per number, right?
awill88
No, it’s strategic. Feature not a bug. As someone who has integrated with Visa/MC/Amex using old school SOAP APIs, you will get higher quality context about what’s going on with the card when you hit it with a zero dollar transaction. Can’t say for sure if they are doing it primarily to avoid supporting this virtual card thing. But I found it conventional in my fintech stint
ScoobleDoodle
Parent is saying Revolut should handle both the 0 payment and the subsequent real payment without resetting the number so that this workflow succeeds. They’re not saying to fix the double charge attempt, which as you say gives more information.
solumunus
They're saying £0 isn't a payment and Revolut should ignore it. It's not a Revolut bug but it's missed functionality for sure.
happymellon
I'm not sure, the merchant is running a dummy payment transaction presumably for this scenario so they can avoid people not giving them a card to charge at will.

This is where the card numbers that you can generate are best because you can delete the card afterwards.

Mystery-Machine
This is simply not true. You're not talking about the same type of card. Tell me one website that doesn't allow Revolut one-time virtual cards (note that these are not prepaid cards)
happymellon
I have Revolut and have encountered this a number of times.

The flow is usually that the merchant runs a check against the card by doing a £0 transaction rather than the correct card active check which resets the card number and causes the second transaction of the correct amount to fail.

ketralnis
Using cancelled cards and filing chargebacks is a good way to get banned from that vendor. Maybe you don't ever want to do business with Amazon again and more power to you, but if you do you're better off arguing with their folk over "just" cancelling the card.
keerthiko
chargebacks may get you banned, but cancelled cards are fine. It's on the business to perform dunning requests and maintain short billing grace periods for automatic renewal charge retries before retracting services.

Revolut's method is to automatically cancel the virtual card after the user-initiated purchase goes through, not before, and not by issuing chargebacks. Obviously if you actually want to have a subscription autorenewed and stay uninterrupted, you shouldn't use the virtual cards there as you will be getting service interruptions every billing cycle and have to manually update your payment with a new vcard. Still, not likely to get you banned.

A different risk of using virtual cards is that the merchant might not be able to issue a refund after the bank destroys the card.

source: as primary billing engineer at our subscription B2C company — cancelled cards give us no problems that make us consider banning a customer. The closest is when we have a customer using such a feature bombarding our support about service interruptions because of his own cancellations, and trying to calmly explain that they did that themselves.

Chargebacks definitely do pose a problem though, as they increase the risk of us getting blacklisted as a fraudulent merchant, and also a more lengthy settlement process with the customer and bank, where we aren't even able to simply issue a refund and close the issue.

davikr
As a warning, Revolut was recently compromised with some breach of user data.
solarkraft
I understand that it works in practice since the vendor has no incentive to argue about it, but it's not really legal to simply not pay for a contract you've entered, right?
7steps2much
It's not, they can take you to court or take other measures against you if they care enough. At least in the EU (where this advice was aimed at).
oneplane
Reported earlier as an upcoming change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32773770

Like Jaxkr wrote: drive is getting rm'ed, and Photos is their replacement.

fshbbdssbbgdd
That must be related, although I wasn’t a Drive subscriber either (maybe I was back in 2015 and forgot, but definitely not in 2022). The automatic signup for a paid subscription is what’s really off about this.
oneplane
Yeah, that's a pretty wild one. You essentially have some free product, and happened to have a card on file and now suddenly you're subscribed to something.

I don't know about US law, but in most of the northern western countries, companies aren't allowed to arbitrarily sign you up for stuff. Even if Amazon were to 'hide' this behind a "it is the same product but we changed the name and started charging" it wouldn't fly because they would then also have the service agreement changed which should be grounds for termination of the subscription rather than suddenly getting signed up for automatic payments.

ilamont
I have to ask: are a lot of secondary Amazon technologies in a rickety state compared to other large technology platforms?

Just yesterday there was a long thread for "Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32982398) and anyone who deals with its selling platforms like Vendor Central, Seller Central, and KDP lives in constant fear of unwarranted account lockouts with no explanation or obvious triggers.

fairity
I’m wondering if Amazon photos is a precursor to Amazon taking a second shot at building a new smartphone. The switchover cost from Apple to Amazon would be lower if files and photos were already synced, and Amazon invested a suspiciously large amount of money last Prime day to drive signups to Amazon photos ($10 credit to download the free app and sync photos).
xyzzy123
Could also be a desire to harvest training data for rekognition?
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Terretta
There's a gotcha with this change from Amazon Drive to "unlimited" Amazon Photos.

Looks like any camera roll items that are videos, not photos, cost storage.

I logged in and found I have a recurring 1TB storage plan for a couple hundred family and travel video clips across my 15 years worth of camera roll photos.