from Hacker News

Merchant Service Horror: Amazon Pay and the Disappearing $2300

by foodstances on 1/10/22, 2:00 AM with 44 comments

• by ipython on 1/10/22, 3:58 AM

  Small claims court all the way. The demand letter alone should get their attention. Takes a few hours of your time - no lawyers needed.

  Also contact any attorney general office in your state. Amazon pay is licensed as a money transmitter. Threaten their license to perform their business and they’ll start paying attention.

  There’s a phone number on this page: https://pay.amazon.com/help/82972 of 866-216-1075 along with their license number and appropriate licensing agency for each state. My experience with obscure state licensing agencies is that they are looking for something to do - you bring them a slam dunk case and they will be happy to help and go to bat for you.

  Edit- Amazon pay actually links to each state’s agency website here: https://pay.amazon.com/help/201310940

  If OP is out there I’ll be happy to help.

• by p1necone on 1/10/22, 4:58 AM

  OPs support experience, with the seemingly automated responses to keywords with no human in the loop has been my experience with more than one large, household name company. It bewilders me that so many organizations get away with this, but I guess the downsides for having effectively non functional customer support aren't enough to cause them much trouble.

  The two that I've dealt with were EA and Uber. EA was years ago so I don't really remember much, but it was to do with incorrect linked accounts - I just got canned responses.

  The Uber one was more recent - the issue was with their navigation directions for their drivers being incorrect, leading Uber Eats deliveries to a road that had no entrance to my property instead of the one that had my driveway on it. Despite repeatedly explaining my issue to them they just told me to drag the pin to the right location before requesting a delivery (which doesn't help when they send incorrect navigation instructions for the correct location), and when I explained that that wasn't a fix I got the standard "try restarting your device, clearing cache etc" advice.

  As of ~ a year later the navigation seems to have finally been fixed, but I generally order from other delivery services now because I don't want to deal with Uber any more.

• by onphonenow on 1/10/22, 4:40 AM

  Wow!

  You are prohibited from making any statement about the service without Amazon's permission.

  "You must not issue any press release or make any public statement related to the Service, or except as expressly provided in this Agreement, use our or any of our Affiliates' names or Trademarks in any way without our prior written permission...."

  Disputes have to be settled in arbitration. Paragraph 11.3

  No liability for any "delays" in performance (which this might end up being)

  And lots more!

• by paulpauper on 1/10/22, 4:01 AM

  Between this and the Upwork story, this is a reason why so many young people especially are abandoning entrepreneurship and trying to get into FAANG companies instead. The pay is better and none of this BS. It's so hard these days to be self-employed, so many things that can and will go wrong.

• by brianhorakh on 1/10/22, 11:23 AM

  Amazon support is probably metric driven. Each person is punting or a bot which believes that it has the right answer. If you were bigger client then you would have a rep to escalate.

  Amazon is dysfunctional. I was first external person to successfully integrate with that api platform (amz hired my company as a 3rd party tester during the launch many beta years ago). Amazon is a horrible company to work with or for, highly dysfunctional. I moved to Australia and only shop on ebay and taobao - my point is, i can relate.

  Good luck. You can probably claim they have nexus in your state, small claims court is your best answer. Demand an apology, reimbursement, court filing fees.

• by KennyBlanken on 1/10/22, 4:17 AM

  Fantasy authors have been routinely finding themselves banned from Amazon and their royalties confiscated. They tend to only get reinstated if they have enough social media clout that there is enough noise, eventually someone from Amazon notices, and just as mysteriously they are unbanned...and in many cases, they never get their payments back.

  Never ceases to amaze me the level to which the world's richest man apparently feels it necessary to stoop.

• by irjustin on 1/10/22, 4:25 AM

  I'm not sure, but it feels like the writer could open another account at a different bank?

  The money is his and it's not like they're not honoring that?

  I've learned that if something doesn't work twice with ACH, you try something else.

  It may not be easy to open another bank account (if the seller is out of country), but 6 weeks, it's definitely worth trying.

  I agree that Amazon needs to fix their stuff, but lumbering giants have like zero motivation to deal with you.

• by WatchDog on 1/10/22, 4:16 AM

  Putting aside the abysmal support service, I'm guessing the root cause of the missing bank account digit, is due to the last digit being a check-digit.

  Some backend system probably interacts with other systems that expect the routing number without the check digit, while others expect it with the check digit.

• by bdowling on 1/10/22, 4:41 AM

  For those who don't recognize the name, Big Mess O' Wires is a prominent developer and vendor of modern hardware add-ons for vintage Apple and Mac computers, including the very popular and well-regarded "Floppy Emu" floppy drive emulator.

• by mh- on 1/10/22, 4:33 AM

  I'm not suggesting OP does this, but I would have been very tempted to add an extra digit to the end of my account number on Amazon, to see if it got truncated. (If it did, you'd get your deposit, in theory..)

• by user101hk on 1/10/22, 4:24 AM

  This is current situation of service industry. Once consumer bought service , they don't care.

• by KingOfCoders on 1/10/22, 5:46 AM

  Ah Amazon, the business side. Tried to open an account, they took money from the CC then closed the account without reasons given, when asking support they said "Case closed, do not email us anymore, we will not answer". Tried with a different phone number for signups, but they match all the data they have from you and close and larger family. Closed account without reasons given. As a customer sure bought things for several 10k from them over last 20 years. But could not

• by ForOldHack on 1/10/22, 6:44 AM

  Honestly, this is literally the very last person on the internet to get angry at you. Hackers talk, a lot. I hope he buries them deep. They have wasted an inordinate amount of his time, and his patience.

  Steve at BMOW, is a straight up guy, who can teach a lot of companies about customer service.

  I have the same beef now with "GoFundMe" and their ilk. "Its not my fault," and worse, "I am not going to do anything." followed by "It's our policy."

• by KingOfCoders on 1/10/22, 5:47 AM

  Several times when I had problems and support did go nowhere with Amazon I went to the police (Germany) and things were resolved.

• by ummonk on 1/10/22, 5:29 AM

  I'd try appending the check digit to the account number and see if that goes through. Maybe Amazon is stripping check digits, and the last digit here looks like a check digit?

• by op00to on 1/10/22, 3:45 AM

  True story or not, as a consumer there’s no benefit to me to use Amazon pay. Now this is an active reason NOT to use it.

• by CaliforniaKarl on 1/10/22, 3:51 AM

  Would it be putting good money after bad to either invoke small claims court or arbitration?

  I guess the other lesson is, keep posting in tickets. Maybe not every day, but every two days, post a request for an update.

• by 300bps on 1/10/22, 4:29 AM

  Try adding another 2 to the end of your account number?

• by frogger8 on 1/10/22, 3:57 AM

  “ On December 23 I contacted my bank and gave them the trace IDs for all the failed transfers. My bank determined that the account number was wrong on every transfer. All the failed ACH transfers used an account number ending in 62 instead of 622: the last digit of the account number was missing!

  Armed with this information, I returned to Amazon Pay merchant support, and here’s where I really started to get frustrated. I discovered that my original support case had been unilaterally closed without resolution, because five days had passed since the last reply, and apparently that’s their support policy. It’s not possible to reopen or reply to a closed case, so I had to create a new case and explain the issue all over again. This did not go well.”