Comment by rju | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rju | Hacker News Reader

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"But certainly I would expect accounts would accumulate warning flags and at some point be banned."

They do exactly that, but sometimes, it goes wrong. It happened to me in October 2019 and I'm still trying to get out of this nightmare.

I bought a high-end desktop for $2700 from amazon, it was shipped with a GTX 660 instead of a RTX 2080Ti! The graphic card had been swapped by the previous person and Amazon blames it on me.

- They say they checked the item before sending it, they obviously didn't

- There was no indication when buying that this item had been previously returned

- They say I did this scam several times before but I order a couple of times a year and for low value. I never returned anything

- They refuse to listen to me and consider they made a mistake. The India-based chat support is entirely useless, they keep telling me "there is nothing I can do", "so sorry", etc. I sent an email to jeff@amazon.com and they tell me "we'll not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters, and any further inquiries on this matter won't receive a response."

In these cases go directly to your bank or payment card provider (Visa, MasterCard, etc.). You usually have ~6 months from the day of the purchase to make chargeback request.

If you chargeback Amazon, assumedly you'll never be able to use Amazon again which seems like a pyrrhic victory at best

Just sign up with a different card. As a matter of fact, if I ever did a chargeback I would probably insist I get a new card number and maybe consider changing my address with the bank to be slightly different (maybe spell out "street", use my full zip, etc.). Might not be enough, but clearly Amazon doesn't care much about detecting fraud. And, anecdotally, I've had three different accounts over the years with various Prime promos and haven't had a problem.

If this happened to you I doubt you would ever want to use Amazon again anyway.

I did contact the bank to chargeback, still waiting on their answer.

After seeing how good customers are treated when their processes go wrong, I'm definitely never going to buy anything from them again

The gap between the 2080ti n the 660 could be worth it....

I mean if I had to do a chargeback, honestly I probably wouldn’t ever shop with Amazon again. And I work there.

That's awful to hear. Did you try to do a chargeback?

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