Topic: An Open Letter to Amazon.com - page 2. (Read 7476 times)

I don't know about US-Law, but I am pretty sure, that they can not forbid you from reselling gift cards in the EU.

could you please tell me, why you don't read the whole thread before commenting on it? OP already answered that.

Can someone please tell me what is the purpose of writing Open Letter to Amazon in Bitcointalk ? Should not it go under Amazon's forum ?

Customer Service phoned me. They told me, all my gift cards are valid and the E-Mails(2 out of 3) were wrong. They said, they wrote a lot of wrong E-Mails recently.
They also told me, I can not see, if a gift card is valid, before I redeem it, which sucks, since I planned to get rid of my gift cards over the next couple of months and not that early. That would mean, I have to redeem them all to be sure, none of them gets invalid over time and can not give them to other people.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=3122091

By reselling your gifts cards on eBay, you have violated the terms and conditions.

I did the same thing on purse. Today I got an E-Mail from Amazon,saying  that a gift card i used is invalid, but there was no invalid gift card in my account. So, I wrote them a Request, what there E-Mail is supposed to mean. They just answered, they made an error sending that mail and I don't have to do anything further.
I send them another E-Mail, if any of the gift cards I got via wishlist are invalid. They told me they are sorry for being not specific at first, but the gift card can not be redeemed because there are abnormalities and they can not give me any data about the purchaser. so, basically telling me the opposite of what they said in the first place and still not giving any specific information(what gift card they are talking about)
So, I wrote a third request, telling them, they should tell me which gift cards are invalid(Code and OrderID).

So far, Amazon Customer Support sucks ass.

I still don't understand. We're in agreement on your first sentence in the quote above, but then in your second sentence I perceive a contradiction because your threshhold for revoking a card is "a good chance" (i.e., less then 100%). That means that some percentage of the time a cards funds would be revoked despite being legitimately purchased, due to a premature judgment on Amazon's part.

All I'm saying is that a revocation should be based on specific evidence for each specific transaction. What I think might make more sense (and perhaps fit what you have in mind) would be a temporary hold on an account with a given level of suspicious/confirmed fraudulent activity, until things can be sorted out for each card. I'd be fine with that, pending the outcome of further investigation. But it doesn't look like that's how Amazon operates.

True. I did actually talk to Amazon a time or two in the July timeframe relating to a specific transaction or two, but didn't plainly ask them about the whole subject. If I were Amazon I would have this in their Gift Card FAQs warning about risks of 3rd-party gift card sales and outlining what can happen (such as in this case).

This is a very valid point, actually.  Long before purse existed, when people were selling Amazon gift cards and shopping services on bitmit, I chatted with Amazon support about this, because I was concerned something like this could happen, and Amazon talked me out of even considering it as an option.  They may have even recommended against paying a third party to send a gift via Amazon, and definitely couldn't (or wouldn't) provide confirmation on how such a scenario would be dealt with if the order of the gift was determined to be fraudulent after delivery.

ETA: IOW, the best way to avoid this would have been to talk to Amazon about it (not about BTC, just about buying gift cards if they turned out to be fraudulently obtained) instead of "testing the waters" yourself, which required relying on some assumptions that turned out to be wong.  Unfortunately, in that regard, what you have here is a very expensive lesson.

I am saying that if 80% of gift cards were purchased with cards that were reported stolen then the chances are the other 20% of gift cards were stolen as well (but have yet to be reported). From a risk management side, if there are a lot of gift cards purchased with different credit cards, there is a very big risk that they were all stolen.

I am not saying that if the cards were purchased via legit means (originally - how your purchased them does not matter) then the value should be revoked. I am saying that if there is a good chance the card was not purchased by legit means (from amazon) then the value should be revoked.

Amazon gift cards are not designed to be traded in this fashion. There are some gift card retailers that likely earn a few percent "commission" from selling their gift cards, however amazon never intended for their gift cards to be used as a currency.

My apologies for the lack of clarity, but you've misunderstood me. I was referring to my own payment for the cards in the first sentence. But in your second paragraph, you seem to be saying that a legitimate purchaser of cards (via 3rd party) should have all their funds revoked if some of the cards are not legit. Do you have any idea how outrageous that sounds to a victim like myself? Do you understand that saying you'd refund the payment method used to pay for the cards for the legit cards, that means the purchasers on Purse get their money back, but not I who paid them in bitcoin? So then they get a nice windfall, but I'm shafted by Amazon yet further for legit cards that I purchased! How is victimizing me further supposed to improve the situation? That's not ethical, and would be an outrageous and offensive decision.

These two paragraphs contradict each-other. Your first statement implies that you have evidence the gift cards were purchased via legitimate means (you do not), meaning not by a stolen credit card. Your second statement admits that you do not know one way or another if the gift cards were legitimately purchased or not.

Even if only a certain number of your gift cards were purchased with credit cards reported to be stolen, it does not mean they should not revoke all of the balances on all of your gift cards. Say for example you loaded balances from 25 gift cards onto your account and all 25 were purchased with different credit cards. This alone is very suspicious. Lets say that out of those 25 gift cards, 20 were purchased with credit cards that were reported stolen and the purchase of the gift card was reported as unauthorized. (you should remember that a card holder may not realize right away when their credit card is stolen and may not notice unauthorized transactions on their account until a long time after the charge shows up to their account - they have 60 days from the date of their statement to report a mistake on their account). Do you think it would be wise to revoke the other 5 gift cards as an abundance of caution, and refund the payment method used to pay for the gift cards? I would certainly say this would be a good business decision (and an ethical one).

Amazon is refusing to restore the balances despite my attempts to provide such evidence. They don't care. They won't even provide an explanation for their revokation of the gift cards, despite it being my account that is the one affected.

I'm not going to sue (amount too modest, would just make lawyers rich and goes against my grain), but suppose someone in this situation wanted to sue - they'd be launching a suit completely in the dark. It would require substantial discovery/investigation prying the details out of Amazon as to what is even going on. Only the lawyers would benefit.

Hopefully Amazon has good reason(s) for taking the actions they have done. Hopefully what they are doing is legal and involves a specific, correct decision for each separate gift card. Hopefully not too many other innocent people are getting ripped off (a purpose of this thread). And I hope that anyone else in a similar situation either avoids Amazon in the future (I'll be looking into shutting down my ~17 year old account with them shortly), or won't suffer further collateral damage from future decisions Amazon makes regarding their account.

I think this is exactly why people should do a better job to make sure the person you are buying something from is actually the legal owner of the property you are buying. This is not something the OP did, not is it something that the buyer of the car did in your article. Although it would have been easier for the person in your yahoo article to verify the chain of title the OP could have easily (and should have) asked for some kind of documentation that the gift cards were purchased legitimately and when the balances were zeroed out he could give such evidence to amazon to get them to restore the balances

Try $500

I would say that the OP is simply trying to engage in a smear campaign against amazon to try to force them to give him money (via gift cards) in exchange for nothing. He is hoping that their PR department will write off the funds from the gift cards as a loss. I personally consider this kind of behavior as fraudulent

If amazon does not keep the BTC, the price could drop. If amazon pay staff salary with BTC, the price will rise.

amazon implementing = BTC going to 50$

From the looks of it, you are not even a customer of amazon. You bought gift cards from purse, therefore you are a customer of purse, and you sold them on ebay, therefore you are a vendor on ebay. I do not see your involvement with amazon.

If you were to use newegg then you would not be able to engage in risky arbitrage as you did in this situation

It doesn't sit right with me at all, either.  It is how things work, though.  There was an article on the front page of Yahoo! again today about someone getting a car back that was stolen years ago.  The car was captured by customs on the way out to the Netherlands, and the buyer in the Netherlands is certainly out the funds spent to buy the car.  What really bothers me about this kind of situation is that, at least in the US, "receiving stolen property" is against the law, and I'm afraid there are plenty of innocent people being punished for that crime simply because they made the mistake of trusting a scammer/thief.  To that end, sadly, you should be thankful that Amazon doesn't do something so unthinkable as to press charges against recipients of gift cards purchased with stolen credit cards.

NewEgg accepts BTC as well...  At least in the US and Canada.

How else do you think they would have handled it? Serious question.
On the assumption we are all making so far:
Someone has tried to launder stolen money through them, buying cash equivalents with stolen credit cards.
Unless they think the scammers are sending random people gift cards out of the goodness of their hearts, they much assume that there is some relationship between the scammer and the recipient. (As indeed there was).
Amazon are out the purchase price. They have the ability to 'recall' the goods purchased with the stolen cards.
You think they should just shrug, and accept being scammed out of thousand of dollars, and the value being sent to people they have a reasonable cause to suspect is working with the scammer?
You knew you were entering into a risky transaction, and were paid a premium for this. They didn't.
Amazon have not reneged on any transaction with you, because you never entered into a transaction with them. You keep ignoring this, but it is a basic fact. Your transaction was with the scammer, their transaction was with Amazon. Your only relationship with Amazon is being the recipient of fraudulent obtained goods. What obligations do they owe you?
Your complain is against the scammer, not Amazon, who were used as a patsy by you and the scammer.

The result you seem to want is that the scammer gets their BTC, you get your cash + 25% profit, and Amazon pays for everything. How do you think that is fair?

Here is one of my posts to you from month ago:

Seems like Amazon did get fed up of being drawn into this scam, and have cancelled orders.