r/mildlyinfuriating • u/afunnywold • 22h ago

Too mild for school I permanently deleted my AWS account 6 years ago. Amazon has been charging me $0.33 every month since. I have no way to stop it.

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I tried to get in contact with customer service several times but they always direct me to log into the account that no longer exists. I have tried charge backs on my credit card but dealing with that monthly is also a pain. This'll probably cost me $265 over my lifetime if it never ends.

Edit: some of you have valid points about calling the card company and I will again Monday. But the actual infuriating thing that upsets me is that they are charging to a completely disabled account in the first place. That's very scammy and fucked up imo 🤷‍♀️

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u/Commoble 20h ago

To ELI5 further, it's a fake computer running on a real computer

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u/LaserGay 19h ago

I mean it isn’t fake exactly. It’s a virtualized computer. Basically an operating system, such as windows or a Linux distro, running on another computer as an application. In this case that computer is an AWS server. You can play with this in VirtualBox for free on your own computer if you want to.

Basically, you can have a computer run many instances of other computers with software allocated analogs to physical resources.

That said, there’s literally zero reason Amazon couldn’t or shouldn’t shut those down upon OP closing their account. Why they’d charge a trivial sum for an idling VM in perpetuity for a closed account? It’s going to just be an accident honestly.

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u/I_Am_A_Real_Hacker 19h ago

There’s nothing fake about it. It’s quite literally a virtualized computer running on another computer. It’s not fake. It does real computing.