Amazon blocked my account forever because I have no fax

Yesterday I decided to buy a board game on Amazon. I’m living in The Netherlands, and order things from amazon.de much cheaper than from amazon.com because of tax. I logged in, choose a product, filled all information, paid, and was logged on. I logged in again, and…

That’s everything I can see in my account. Broken form and uninformative message.

Hm, but the transaction was successful, and Amazon received my money. Anyway, let’s check the e-mail.

Tons of German words.

Ugh… Let’s translate it.

We removed your access to this account because we were unable to match your iDeal payment details with the financial institution. You will not be able to access your account or place any orders until we have confirmed your information.

To clarify this matter, please send the following information to our secure fax number…

Wait, what? Fax? I’ve never seen a fax in my life. I created a reply with explaining the situation and attached documents, press “send” and…

SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<adressen-bestaetigung@amazon.de>:
host amazon-smtp.amazon.com [207.171.188.180]:
550 #5.1.0 Address rejected.

That message was sent from non-existent email. No worries, let’s contact support! Open the help page, press “Contact us” and… We again on the login page. You can’t contact support if your account is blocked! Contact by email? No way.

After all, I’ve contacted them by Twitter:

This is the long thread of ineffective communication. They said they will refund my money, but my account blocked forever.

How to provide the worst customer experience

We can learn from Amazon how to hate our customers. Let’s review all story and turn it into advice collection.

1. If something bad happened, block the whole account. Does the client have issues with payment? Block everything! Turn account into a brick. The client doesn’t need any information from the account like orders list, payment info, personal info. Let’s motivate them to do what you want.
2. Ask your users to log-in on every step. Do you have the change of your account state? You need to log-in! Do you want to contact the help center? Log-in again!
3. Provide as uninformative messages as possible. Just say: “Your account has been locked for security purposes”. That’s everything your user wants to know.
4. Ignore language preferences. Has the user selected English as preferred language? Don’t care about it, use country language! No-no-no, not of the country from the delivery address. Just the default country for the site. Do you want to buy anything on amazon.de? You must learn German!
5. Never trust technologies. Ask to send documents by fax. Or even better by pigeons. Telephonic transmission (and pigeons) much safer than e-mail or anything else.
6. Cryptography doesn’t work. The Guardian has the page “How to contact the Guardian securely” with information about messengers with end-to-end encryption and public PGP keys to allow you to encrypt your e-mail message. That’s the bad way of cryptoanarchy. When I asked Amazon about RSA public key to encrypt my documents and send them by e-mail, they just ignored it.
7. Avoid any feedback. All your messages should be sent from no-reply e-mails. Don’t publish e-mail of support in the help center. Don’t add “Contact us” page. Don’t allow your users to talk. Just ask them to send you by fax everything you need.
8. Forbid communications between departments. The security department is blessed and never do mistakes. So, nobody can contact them and ask anything, especially customer service. If they blocked the account and ask some documents by fax, it can’t be unblocked any other way than providing these documents by fax.
9. Start to care about users only after public negative feedback. Any user wants to get a good service and products from you, not to give negative feedback. So, if you get negative reviews or negative public feedback, it means you already haven’t provided support when the client faced some issues. However, it’s not Amazon’s way to care about support. Amazon’s way is starting to care only after public negative feedback, not earlier.

After all, my account on Amazon blocked forever, and I have no idea when they will return my money. Amazon has a bingo in “hate your users” game. Can you bit it?