Non-Existent Amazon Customer Service

karvala

My Amazon account was apparently hacked last week.  About half a dozen other people I know (and I don't talk to that many people about these things) also had their accounts hacked within the last month, so something strange seems to be going on, or it's just an unfortunate coincidence.

I had no gift balances, but I did have a stored credit card (as Amazon encourage you to, while taking no responsibility for criminal misuse of it on their systems subsequently) and that was used for some fraudulant digital purchases.

What is concerning is that there seems to be no plausible way this could have happened without it being an inside job.  Various things point to this:-

1. The password was long, unique and as far as I can see unguessable.
2. It is not on any list of known stolen passwords (and wouldn't be, since I don't use it elsewhere and I doubt anyone else does)
3.  My e-mail has not been hacked (not unknown successful logins, nothing else stolen, no unread messages read).
4.  My phone has not been stolen and my number has not changed
5.  I have not clicked on any dodgy links or entered the Amazon password any other site
6.  Scans reveal no malware of any sort on my machine
7.  In addition to the account hack - which clearly must have used the password since after changing the password there has been no further fraudulant purchase - a lot of the order history is missing (entirely; the fraudulant purchases are archived of course, as is apparently standard with this type of crime, but many legitimate purchases in the last few months are simply no longer there).  This strongly suggests a problem inside Amazon.

Getting any help or information is absolutely impossible, however.  They will not provide any detail of logins or IP addresses accessing the account, they will not refund the fraudulant purchases (I had to persuade the credit card company to do that instead, even though this is not their fault and my card has not been stolen) and they will not even investigate the missing order history (let's hope I don't need to return something!).  When I wade through the customer service chatbot experience to eventually find my way to a human (in the loosest sense of the word), they have nothing to say except that they will escalate it and I will receive a response from the team concerned within 24 hours, which of course I never do.  As far as I can see, that 'customer service' is nothing but a stonewalling exercise designed to block customers until they give up and go away.  I don't believe that those reps actually take any action whatsoever.

I used to defend Amazon and point out that its returns procedure, for example, was excellent, but this dismal lack of customer service when you need it has certainly made me revise my opinion and has already altered my shopping habits.  Caveat emptor, I guess!

flaneurs_lobster

Yours is not the first case like this that I've seen reported.

I've been proactive and now have a debit card with a balance of a couple of quid as the only payment method associated with the account. It gets topped up when I need to spend. A pain but more secure.

I wish I could simply shut my account and walk away but the services themselves are just too useful.

Olinda99

Just to ask - did/do you have 2FA on the Amazon account login ?

karvala

flaneurs_lobster said:

Yours is not the first case like this that I've seen reported.

I've been proactive and now have a debit card with a balance of a couple of quid as the only payment method associated with the account. It gets topped up when I need to spend. A pain but more secure.

I wish I could simply shut my account and walk away but the services themselves are just too useful.

Yes, that's a good idea and I've seen other people suggest this as well.  After this experience, that sounds sensible and probably something I will do from now on.

karvala

Olinda99 said:

Just to ask - did/do you have 2FA on the Amazon account login ?

No unfortunately I didn't; obviously I do now, but I appreciate that's shutting the proverbial stable door somewhat.  It would have been interesting if I had and the hack had still happened, certainly.

PHK

Are you sure you were hacked? I ask this because there’s a scam where you receive despatch emails supposedly from Amazon, you click the link or phone the number on the email. 

This put you in contact with the scammers who take your details. 

mjm3346

PHK said:

Are you sure you were hacked? I ask this because there’s a scam where you receive despatch emails supposedly from Amazon, you click the link or phone the number on the email. 

This put you in contact with the scammers who take your details. 

I had a call a couple of days ago from "Amazon" about an attempt to make a £300 gift card purchase from my account the previous day - didn't seem happy when I said the payment wouldn't go through anyway as money wasn't kept on the card I use, he kept talking for a while, including asking my age (which Amazon would know) but by then it was lunch time and I said I would have to hang up - so far not called again.

karvala

PHK said:

Are you sure you were hacked? I ask this because there’s a scam where you receive despatch emails supposedly from Amazon, you click the link or phone the number on the email. 

This put you in contact with the scammers who take your details. 

It's a reasonable question, but yes, definitely hacked.  I keep all e-mails and I have no fake despatch e-mails from Amazon and I never click the links in despatch e-mails anyway (or pretty much any other e-mail for that matter).  If I ever want to find out the status of Amazon orders being delivered, I just go to my account on the website via my bookmark.  I definitely didn't click any dodgy links and I have never phoned Amazon (or anyone pretending to be Amazon).

I've also never told anyone else my password, either on the phone or online (or in person).  As far as I'm concerned, if someone even asks for my password, then they are a scammer.  No legitimate individual will ever ask for your password in any situation with cyber security norms as they are now.

karvala

I just wanted to provide a follow-up on this.  Having given up on the online people, I hunted down a phone number and called customer service.  Their explanation for the missing order history, as follows, highlights just how bad their customer service is.

The account was hacked on April 17th (for about 5 minutes - with three digital orders placed by the hacker before I changed the password and blocked their access).  Amazon detected this as unauthorised access and locked the account as well, and I recovered it and regained access okay.  However, as a result of this they have now flagged a whole bunch of random items going back months before the hack took place as being unauthorised and therefore deleted from my history!  They claim there is no way to restore these because they are flagged as unauthorised.  I pointed out that if they really regard them as unauthorised then should refund them, but they said since I actually received them they cannot be refunded, apparently unable to join the dots and accept that this also means they were legitimate orders.

So essentially, when the unauthorised account access took place on April 17th, they locked the account, went through deleting various random items from my order history going back months without any obvious reason and absolutely no possibility of them being actual fake orders or with any problems around them reported or identified at the time, and refuse to restore them.  Quite unbelievable.

There are two punchlines here:-

1. They did NOT delete the ACTUAL unauthorised items, which are still there (and unrefunded) on the order history.  This is more evidence that it's an inside job; they clearly needed to flag something as unauthorised after locking the account so just chose a random selection of recent(ish) items while avoiding the actual unauthorised items.
2. By deleting them - including for some quite expensive items - they are effectively preventing me from proving that I ever bought them or claiming any kind of warranty action should I need it in the future.

I will certanily minimise my Amazon spending in future based on this; they clearly cannot be trusted.

Spikeygran

I'm showing my age - I still save copies of transactions twice, to phone/pc and storage.  Its saved me a few times over the years.

If you have lost the information on  purchases that should be under warranty,  I would search your emails and try and locate a copy of the relevant information before it drops out of your inbox.

I agree its a daft way of doing things, I assume AI identified similar suspicious transactions deleting them just doesn't make sense?  Ebay delete all information of a current purchase, if they remove a seller, leaving the buyer having to ask their funding source for help.  I assume theres some legal or financial reason they both delete rather than just flag them up??

karvala

Spikeygran said:

I'm showing my age - I still save copies of transactions twice, to phone/pc and storage.  Its saved me a few times over the years.

If you have lost the information on  purchases that should be under warranty,  I would search your emails and try and locate a copy of the relevant information before it drops out of your inbox.

I agree its a daft way of doing things, I assume AI identified similar suspicious transactions deleting them just doesn't make sense?  Ebay delete all information of a current purchase, if they remove a seller, leaving the buyer having to ask their funding source for help.  I assume theres some legal or financial reason they both delete rather than just flag them up??

Yes, I also keep everything, so I have all the e-mails still; that's how I know which transactions have been removed (otherwise I wouldn't remember!).  The problem here is that Amazon use an entirely automated system for refunds and warranty returns, which means if something develops a fault and needs to be returned, I can no longer access the system to do so.  I could contact customer service to try to persuade them to do so manually, but given that they can't/won't do something as free and easy as restoring the deleted orders to my history, how much less likely is it that they would actually refund something when there is no evidence on their system that I bought it in the first place?  I can forward them the e-mail of course (well not really, since they don't take e-mails, but perhaps they have a secret address for things like this), but the order number links to nothing now, so they will probably call it a fake.