Last week, I was creating an FBA account for my mom’s Amazon account. I went through all the steps and noticed it then made me add 2FA to her account, which I did. However, on the last step, she had an old cc on file and so FBA couldn’t use that credit card. I then updated the card with a new expiration date, but mistyped the year. Got an error of course. I then went to her Amazon account and noticed there were nearly a dozen VGC that I had loaded in the past. I then cleaned all those out and fixed the 2 cc’s that were left and made sure both were current.
Sure enough, hours later, I try to log in and I can’t log in. Resetting the password did nothing. I’ve been soft-banned by Amazon a few times and every single time it ruins my day. I think what really pisses me off is that I still had a ~$300 GC balance in the account that I’ve been spending down and it could potentially go away if they don’t reinstate. I then called into Amazon and got a rep who said he’d escalate.
A few days later, I got an email saying my order had been cancelled (not sure which order/item) and that I would have gotten a 2nd email on how to reinstate my account. Sure enough, I never got a 2nd email. I then emailed address-verfiication@amazon.com (that’s who I talked to in the past) and asked them what I needed to do to reinstate my account. This morning, I get an email from them saying my account is re-instated. Just so frustrating this black hole.
I was expecting to maybe have to show cc statements and with all those VGCs from years ago, I would never be able to dig them up again, even if I did have the last 4 numbers. I definitely dodged a bullet here.
Things to do going forward – 1. Clean out your Amazon account with any VGC or cc’s that you don’t recognize anymore. 2. Only have a GC balance that you wouldn’t cry if it was taken away. 3. Try not to do too many things at once (I think it was signing up for FBA with a bad cc that triggered the whole thing.) I think Amazon is being more careful these days with hacked accounts and/or people using bad cc’s.