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Comment by hnthrow234 | Hacker News Reader

> they just don't care about you

That's probably true, and it is a deeply unpleasant feeling. It seems like a binary customer experience: everything goes swimmingly, and that's great and you happily ingratiate yourself to the company, and then it doesn't, and it's very bad, but the company now has all the leverage and they can do whatever they want. The customer has no recourse, on an individual basis, with no collective power. Who is going to help, the regulator? Probably not in any impactful or timely fashion. At least with financial entities, the CFPB actually has teeth.

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> It seems like a binary customer experience

I agree. This is a side effect of automation. You are either part of the 80% the process is optimized for, or you're an edge case that nobody cares about because you're outside the cost/benefit calculation. I hate it too, but I think the only recourse is not to buy from places that behave this way.

Absolutely an algorithmic issue and your comment about edge cases is spot on. But when the algorithm flags an edge case, whatever happened to manual review by a human? In this case, any human looking at this transaction would have found nothing unusual.

I'm pretty sure there is a Black Mirror episode where someone ends up becoming an "edge case" and it all goes downhill from there. I haven't actually watched it but have read about it referenced in many similar contexts so maybe someone knows the actual episode.

>Also, my account has several hundred dollars of gift card credit that I've been using for purchases, including necessities like groceries, and that is inaccessible when it is locked.

I'm a human and I find that unusual enough to close down your account. Especially if those gift cards came from all over the world. That's a common MO for scammers. You probably should just submit the paperwork and move on with life.

True, gift cards can be scammy, but in this case, Amazon calls it "gift card" but it is basically just Amazon credit I have loaded onto my own account with my own credit card that I've already used on tons of prior orders. So it's a known entity.

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