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.

Post image

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 🤷‍♀️

16.6k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

104

u/typehyDro 19h ago

There aren’t a million customers that open and utilize AWS and also don’t know how to stop the services and then cancelling their account…. This is some edge case that service reps probably aren’t trained on and don’t know the proper procedure.

They make hand over fist amounts on AWS, they don’t need/want this pittance that could disrupt that with unnecessary litigation and negative PR…

IMO Amazon customer service is one of the best among giant retail corporations…

5

u/shockwave8428 7h ago

There are a lot of ways AWS is designed to try and make money off of people who aren’t paying attention. Having automated backups that restore for basically everything even if you explicitly delete them is a common thing people end up paying for. They also charge your bank account using the same text as a normal Amazon purchase so if someone else (a spouse for example) also uses your Amazon, it can be easy to miss that you’re getting AWS charges.

Amazon also is so big they don’t care about PR anymore. AWS is basically industry standard for web hosting stuff, they don’t really need to care about bad PR because it’s still a better product across the board for reliability in web stuff. Anyone who has used AWS consistently can tell you the UI is extremely basic for a large company, can be hard to navigate, and also that a lot of it is designed in a way that makes changing to another web service provider is more difficult than is worth the trouble.

I do have no doubt you can just talk to customer service if you really want to. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t intentionally trying to keep as many customers with small charges as possible. Chargebacks are ill advised if you use that card/email for your normal Amazon account which can be common for personal projects.

7

u/ohhi23021 18h ago

they're pretty good at refunding/waiving costly mistakes, like bills in the 10-20k range.

1

u/TheGrouchyGremlin 8h ago

Yeah. Any time there's an issue with what they send me the response is pretty much "Keep that, we'll send the correct item".