And another update 
Yesterday I posted on Amazon’s fb page as did someone that follows my store on fb. I also twittered about my ongoing issues.
Last night, I emailed Amazon’s CEO. I laid out most of what had happened and what I wanted. I then ended the email with a line about how people are leery about cloud service and stories like this make them even more afraid and that basically I would become a PR nightmare if they didn’t fix this.
This morning, I received an email from the customer service rep I’d previously emailed and it said they’d move my cloud over to a new account (something they’d previously told me couldn’t happen). I’d lose everything else tied to my account, but hey, I’d have my cloud right? So I said okay and opened a new one.
Later in the day, an n Amazon executive customer service rep called my husband’s cell (the one on the account) and asked to speak to me. They called my cell phone an hour later and we talked about what was going on. He answered my questions and laid out what happened. I asked if it was normal to just shut down an account and he said yes and no. The reason the account was closed is because it involved my amazon payments account (used for things like kickstarter) and that involved actual money so protocol is to close the entire thing. I mentioned that maybe that shouldn’t be how it’s done any more and he assured me that it’s very rarely happened.
I asked how they knew my account was hacked and it wasn’t just me making odd purchases. He said they have certain things they look for and unfortunately, he couldn’t divulge what those things are because then the people who hack accounts would know and would change their m.o. Fair enough.
We talked about options. Basically my options were to have the account reopened with the amazon payments account permanently closed or have the account stay closed and they’d tediously move everything over to a new one. I opted for keeping my old account and no longer being able to use amazon payments on it.
The person I talked to was very polite and apologetic and understanding. More importantly, I’ll get my stuff back and they’ll look in to how the whole thing was handled so that it (hopefully) won’t happen again. Having nothing but rainbows and puppies to say about them before, I’m willing to let a bad experience go.
Thanks to this thread though, I now know how to back up my kindle book purchases once I have access to them again and won’t be storing them on just a cloud no matter how secure Amazon says it is.
Posted: January 20th, 2012 under Personal - 4 Comments.
