Amazon's response
On 11 April 2023 I mailed Jeff Bezos to ask for a comment:
Subject: Made a website about my experience with your customer service
Hi Jeff,
How bad my experience with your customer service was? I paid for a domain+hosting for 10 years in advance out of my own pocket. That bad.
I'm reaching out both here and to @AmazonHelp on Twitter to give Amazon an opportunity to comment on the story. The URL: https://nocarder.com/
Have a good day.
Best regards,
nocarder.com
The next day, I got a reponse:
Subject: A Message from Amazon.com Executive Customer Relations
Hello,
I'm Johnny of Amazon.com's Executive Customer Relations. Jeff Bezos received your email, and I'm responding on his behalf.
Your email was sent from an email address which is different from the one we have on file for you. I realize you're concerned about your experience with customer service. It's never our intention to prolong this process but in order to protect your privacy, we can only send or discuss account information to the email address associated with your account. Please send this request from the email you used to open your Amazon account. We appreciate your understanding.
We hope to see you again soon.
Thank you for your inquiry. Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=*****&k=hy (URL redacted)
If no, please click here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=*****&k=hn (URL redacted)
Regards,
Johnny * (single-letter last name redacted)
Executive Customer Relations
Amazon.com
The language ("different from the one we have on file") would suggest they did figure out what my account is (which they could've done using the victim list), but instead of contacting me there straight away I got this mail. I do understand they couldn't (and shouldn't!) divulge personal information carelessly, so that's good.
The request "Please send this request from the email you used" isn't quite clear. Send this request from the email you used.. okay.. where to? Jeff's mail? The reply-to of Johnny's mail? (crs-replies+FOOBARABCD1234@amazon.com) I just hit reply and selected the SMTP server of my original Amazon account. Then I repeated this for the mail address of my second Amazon account, but the second mail instantly bounced. ("You are writing to an email that doesn’t monitor direct write-ins.") As I promised in the first mail to send a mail from both accounts, I used Jeff's address again.
Side note: strictly speaking, my actual request was for a comment on the story which I'd expect to be handled by Public Relations, not Executive Customer Relations. But if they can solve my problem, that'll be a start. Of course, this website won't go away until Amazon addresses the root cause.
It's a bit odd that their system apparently doesn't allow suppressing the "did I solve your problem?" feedback links as they're obviously not appropriate here. And yes, I "hope to see you again soon" too, of course, that'd be much easier if my account wasn't suspended..
After waiting for 24 hours, I was wondering if my mail arrived at all. I'd have expected a confirmation they received my message, a request for more information, a schedule for a proper reply, something. Figuring that Johnny's mail perhaps only accepts mail from my nocarder.com address, I mailed Johnny once more with a list of all mail addresses I used for Amazon accounts. Don't you ghost me Johnny..
In just under 4 hours I got a remarkable reply:
From: Amazon.nl (ecr-replies amazon.nl)
Subject: RE: Forwarded Contact: Re: A Message from Amazon.com Executive Customer Relations
Dear customer,
Thank you for contacting us.
Our Executive Customer Relations team is investigating the issue and will get back to you within 2 business days.
Thank you for your patience.
Vriendelijke groeten,
Robin
Uw feedback helpt ons om het meest klantgerichte bedrijf ter wereld te zijn
<a href="http://www.amazon.nl" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.nl</a>
What you are seeing is not an error on my part. This mail is plaintext only and it includes HTML code which gets rendered as text. The subject reads "Forwarded Contact:", so.. did Johnny hand this hot potato to Amazon Netherlands? The reply originated from amazon.nl and while it's written in English, the (presumably automated) signature is in Dutch. ("vriendelijke groeten" = "kind regards", "Uw feedback helpt ons om het meest klantgerichte bedrijf ter wereld te zijn" = "Your feedback helps us being the most customer-oriented company on earth")
2 business days. This mail arrived on 13 April, a Thursday, so to be continued.. after the weekend.
18 April 2023: two business days came and went. Utter silence. Brilliant. So let's reply to Robin.
Subject: Re: Forwarded Contact: Re: A Message from Amazon.com Executive Customer Relations
Dear Robin,
When I got a mail from ECR that said "Jeff Bezos received your email, and I'm responding on his behalf", I really believed you would resolve this issue swiftly. 2 business days plus the weekend have passed in every time zone. I'm sorry to say, but I feel like a gullible fool. Why didn't I get any response?
Best regards,
Three hours later:
Subject: RE: Re: Forwarded Contact: Re: A Message from Amazon.com Executive Customer Relations
Good afternoon (redacted my name),
I have forwarded your request to the correct department, they will contact you and provide you with a answer.
Kind regards
Vriendelijke groeten,
Met vriendelijke groet, Floris
Your first question is probably: what is ? It's HTML code for a non-breaking space. It's.. um.. yeah. We get a "Kind regards", "Vriendelijke groeten" and "Met vriendelijke groet" which is essentially triple kind regards, which is very kind. Floris is a typical Dutch name. Which explains the spelling mistake. ("an answer")
I'm wondering about a few things. Why didn't my reply go straight to the correct department? What is the correct department? Who is investigating my case now, Amazon US or Amazon NL? And when can I expect an answer?
On 19 April, 24 hours after receiving the above mail, I replied to Johnny C's mail once more to ask for an accurate schedule, whether it's Amazon US or NL who is investigating and whether they need help. But I don't think Johnny is answering anymore. So on 21 April I replied to Floris:
Good morning Floris,
When will they contact me? What is the correct department? Who is investigating, Amazon US or Amazon NL? Do you need help? It's been a week since Robin promised your Executive Customer Relations team would get back to me within 2 business days.
Best regards,
And Floris (the same person!) swiftly responded:
I have forwarded your request again, they will contact you and provide you with a answer.
Oh, yes, that worked so well last time. Wait, it didn't. This mail is HTML now, so no more codes. Guess somebody learned something.
But I'm done with this BS.
To: Jeff
Subject: You forwarded my case. This is what happened next.
When I told you about nocarder.com, you forwarded my mail to ECR. I sincerely want to thank you for that, and give you a summary of what happened after that.
ECR US forwarded the case to ECR Netherlands. 8 days ago they promised to get back to me in 2 business days. They never did.
With kind but saddened regards,
I no longer dare to expect a solution, even if a part of me keeps hoping. Which is insane, because it's an incredibly simple problem. Have one competent person look at it for 4 minutes tops, conclude I am no way a carder, tick two checkboxes. Done. According to Glassdoor, Executive Customer Relations agents make about $90K+/yr. 90K to ghost your customers? Where do I sign up. If they never manage to resolve this I'll keep telling my story. And I'll likely cost them some sales, perhaps some customers. It wouldn't be the first time. Too bad, but failing so spectacularly will hurt your company's reputation sooner or later.
The solution
6 weeks. Dear Lord. That's how long it took. On 5 May 2023 I decided to call Amazon Netherlands again. I had a new billing statement but my original account no longer gave me a document upload form. So I only called to make my account active so it would allow me to upload my billing statement to Amazon US once again. Specifically my original account because after finally satisfying their documentation needs my fourth account was ultimately closed because it was associated with an existing closed account. I've done this once before, and after they reactivated it trying to log in on Amazon Netherlands resulted in an error that I had to resolve an issue with Amazon US before I could shop on Amazon NL again. And Amazon US would present the document upload form.
So I called and a friendly woman picked up. I explained: my account was locked, mailed jeff@amazon, got a reply from Amazon US, Amazon US forwarded to Amazon NL, Amazon NL ghosted me. Gave her my email address and she asked if she could put me on hold for just a tiny moment to enquire about what she'd have to do to resolve the issue.
Exactly 2 minutes of royalty-free classical piano music later..
Suddenly D. picked up, not the woman from before. It appears that D. is an account specialist. Account specialists from Amazon US never ever speak on the phone, but I guess Amazon NL is different. When I asked, he said these kinds of issues are usually handled over the phone. He didn't ask any security questions. He didn't hassle me. He said my account was temporarily closed as Amazon had suspected it to be compromised. And that he couldn't really see any details otherwise. So I had to pick a new password on my next login and that was it. He just unlocked the account. I don't mean to allow uploading another billing statement: after changing my password I could log in again. On both Amazon NL and Amazon US. I even placed a small order, though not pushing my luck I used a new virtual card instead of the credit card from my bank. It shipped and the card was charged. D. even offered to unlock all the accounts I had created in the process. As those have no order history I said it wasn't needed, one account is enough for me. After this, I received a mail from primary@amazon.nl from D., asking me to rate the phone conversation. Never seen that before. I gave him 5/5 stars.
One remarkable thing to note: Amazon did not use 3-D Secure for the credit cards from Rabobank and ING NL, leading me to believe Amazon simply didn't use 3-D Secure at all. This turns out to not be entirely correct. To my surprise they actually did use it for my virtual card. They just skip it for cards from Rabobank, ING NL and likely others despite the fact that the cards support it. This may or may not have contributed to Amazon's fraud bot getting triggered.
So my account has been reopened, but.. how? Didn't I still have an issue with Amazon US? D. didn't mention anything. In order of likelihood, these are my speculative guesses as to what happened:
- It seems I never uploaded any document using my original account. All the mail from account specialists declining my documentation is in my other inbox. The last two relevant mails are an automated mail saying they "believe that an unauthorized party may have accessed your account" and they disabled my password and another one saying "Your account is currently under review by the department in charge. We will be reaching out to you via email in the next 24 to 48 business hours. We ask you not to open new accounts because any new orders that you place may be canceled." after which they ghosted me. So maybe my original account never entered the "verify payment through document upload form" status and it was only considered potentially compromised? If this is the case, I'm lucky not to have asked D. to unlock my other accounts.
- When Amazon US ECR forwarded my case to Amazon NL ECR (I gave them the email addresses for all my accounts), US ECR could have marked all issues with all accounts on Amazon US as resolved while leaving my account suspended. Amazon NL ECR ghosted me because reasons. When I called, D. had no clue about any of this history and only sees an account that was automatically suspended, so he just unsuspends it. Simply following the call script. This would be a case of the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
- Amazon's backend could be completely busted and as I called, D. accidentally overruled Amazon US and the issue they had with my payment method. If this is the case, it would be a risk as a carder could call any international Amazon to have their account restored. That being said, serious carders don't bother calling. But with advances in AI and text-to-speech this might become a thing in the future.
In the end, one can only speculate. And did this website or my social media activity make a difference? My mail to Jeff? It seems not, but we'll never know. I noticed an odd account on Reddit that made one post in 2020 and suddenly became very active in the Amazon support thread. And they commented kind of like a customer service agent could. That might be Amazon testing the waters, but again, it's speculation. And 2 days after I mailed Jeff the link to this website, user amazon-ModTeam was registered on Reddit. Probably a coincidence, but I wonder what the odds are. Initially it only deleted help requests that were posted as new threads with the instruction to post them in the central help thread. But recently it started enforcing a new(?) policy: no hyperlinks allowed. Like, none whatsoever, not even to Amazon.com's customer service. A necessary evil in the fight against spam? A rough policy that needs more polishing? An attempt to stop users from posting links to news articles and threads that Amazon considers bad PR? Or an attempt to cripple r/Amazon to drive users to Twitter where Amazon has representation? Your guess is as good as mine, really. I don't know who makes the rules.
Only one thing is certain: Amazon has severe issues with communication, both with customers and internally. I really did pay for this domain and hosting for 10 years, so this site will remain as a reminder of that. I will add a bit more to the FAQ to help others deal with Amazon, but no major updates after that. It's time to bury the hatchet.
A few days ago as I was thinking about the whole ordeal, my vision seemingly turned black-and-white and I almost fell down. Never mind I literally got some new grey hairs. This has been hard on me. You'll just have to trust me when I say I had a good reason not to give up.