I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon. I was using it exclusively for years, a happy prime customer, renting and buying movies, using the Amazon Music, etc. All was great. Then, out of the blue, they one day banned me from Amazon. They locked my account, and sent me an email that said:
Hello,
We have suspended your Amazon account.
Why did this happen?
We took this measure because the information available to us indicates that you may have provided inaccurate information to Amazon or used your Amazon account in violation of our conditions of use policy. This decision was made through a combination of automation and expert human review.Has this action been taken in error?
If you would like to appeal this decision, please reply to this email (EDITED TO REMOVE EMAIL ADDRESS)and we will further investigate.
Of course I appealed by emailing the provided address, asking what I possibly did wrong so I could amend my poor behavior, but that only got me this response:
Hello,
After a review of the information provided by you, we have taken the decision to suspend your Amazon account. We took this measure because the information available to us indicates that you may have provided inaccurate information to Amazon or otherwise used the account in violation of the Amazon conditions of use policy.
We will not reply to further emails about this issue.
Account Specialist
Amazon.com
Well, that was short and to the point-less.
I am really not sure what I did wrong. I don’t share my Amazon account with others. I do have 5 children, so perhaps they thought I was sharing my account with people outside of my home? The only other thought I had is that I build custom ROMs for cell phones, so I switch cell phones often, but I keep the same number, so was that it? Since they would not accept or give any further information about my requests, I will never know. I had to find a way to stop all of my auto-pay for channels on Amazon that I was not watching, and a way to remove all of my data from their servers.
Fortunately, you can send an email to us-datarequest@amazon.com which will allow you to delete everything from your account and close it, as well as stop all requests for channels/music/etc., so if you ever have the same problem I did, you can simply send them an email and they will honor your request. Or, at least they did for me.
If you are wondering what to write, my email was a forward of Amazon’s last response with a simple request:
Since my account has been suspended, I would like to delete my account and all personal data, but I can’t log in to do so. How can I delete my account?
They responded within 24 hours, gave me a special one time password that allowed me to get into my account, remove all financial information, unsubscribe from all subscriptions, and then close the account with them.
Very unfortunate that they would not discuss the matter with me in any way, nor tell me what I did wrong. I lost all of the movies I had purchased on Amazon Prime, all of my Kindle books I bought, everything, with no explanation. Very disappointing.
Linux – keep it simple.