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Comment by waterphone | Hacker News Reader

They're draconian in some other areas, too, which affect regular customers. I was blacklisted from Amazon Payments, which I've only ever used to fund a few Kickstarter Projects. They will not tell me why, will not consider an appeal, and will not respond to further inquiries anymore.

From reading online, this is due to their use of Experian for identity verification. But if you don't have any credit history, as I do not, you do not exist within Experian's system and are automatically considered by Amazon to be a fraud threat and so are effectively cut out of the system and blacklisted without recourse, even if you're a longstanding good customer with other Amazon products.

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I hate to say this but you basically have to trust these types of authorities when it comes to this type of "trust." You wouldn't believe how many people are out to scam. It's endemic in anything that involves money. I'd say "few bad eggs" but it's mostly shit eggs amongst a few good eggs.

I think it's really more that the bad "hens" lay many bad eggs, and the good ones only lay one good egg at a time.

I think I kind of get this. Sounds like Steam accounts. Cheaters galore with family accounts? Rust (game) nailed this by recently deciding to nuke the hen and its eggs.

How did they do that? Hopefully not something like Warden, Blizzard's cheat-detecting rootkit.

Yeah I don't know or care, to be honest. If it keeps those assholes from walling me then I'm okay with it.

So for those of us who simply don't meet their definition for an identifiable individual (e.g. someone who borrows money and allows their borrowing history to be monitored by commercial and government entities), what, we're just shit out of luck? Credit history being a requirement for identity verification is becoming more and more pervasive, and I am increasingly locked out of participating in both private and government services because of this shit.

Amazon's was especially bad because it allegedly had an appeal process that allowed submitting other forms of identity documents to bypass Experian's failure, but it never functioned correctly and attempting to verify my identity would fail because I had not yet verified my identity, and then the fact that I wouldn't verify my identity manually sent up a bigger red flag that permanently blacklisted me from the service with zero recourse now, even as I explained that I was unable to because their system wouldn't let me. Their customer support people would just say "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You are not allowed to participate in this service anymore." I lost a lot of respect for Amazon at that point.

If you've opted not to use the services of the finance industry, then you may not be able to use the services of the finance industry.

I leaned a long time ago that hating the game and trying to fight it doesn't do much to change the game; the choice personally was more "play and figure out how to win" or "lose and be bitter about it". I now have great credit and don't pay any interest on things but receive a cut of the reward from their ridiculous merchant CC processing fees.

Yes, you're shit out of luck. You can post paragraphs onto the Internet until you're blue in the face but this is their reality, not mine.

Pro life tip: just get a credit card or two and nurture your credit score. Don't fuck over your utilities and make sure your payments are on time. Voila. You're a real boy. Not my rules or something I endorse but hey someone here had to say it.

Unprovable people are a liability to Amazon. They're minimizing liability to their business. In their eyes, a broken appeals process might be a benefit. If a would-be customer is enough of an outlier to need a special process, it makes sense to handle them quickly, and less sense to handle them correctly.

In my area, it's almost impossible to even rent an apartment without good credit history, and it's absolutely impossible to rent a non-crappy apartment. Why? Because there are enough people with solid credit histories to fill the buildings, and because of the lower risk, there's no reason not to rely on credit checks.

I don't currently have any credit history and have had no issues with Kickstarter/Amazon Payments, so that might not be the specific cause as to why.

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