Amazon has some terms in their TOS that you have to go through mediation on their terms—I tried to get the process started but could never get them to respond when I/we contacted their legal teams. I probably should have pressed harder, I'm sure there was some way to do it, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.
I feel like if you've made a good-faith effort to start the arbitration process they require you to do, and they ignore you, that is grounds for a lawsuit. And I doubt a judge would look favorably upon Amazon in that case.
Good luck for the lawsuit. I read your story and I read some other horror stories in here as well.
How is it even legal that they can withold your 40_000$ for something like 45$ like its your money, it feels so blackmirror and sad :< I hope you are doing okay right now man.
I never understand what balls these companies have in making the customer's life hell when the bills are so low. I remember a guy from HN some time ago where Azure made them unable to pay because of an unpaid bill and they literally did so many shit to wanting to pay but can't, the bill was 20$ and the frustrated user actually I think worked at large company and started either migrating multi million $ worth of yearly deals to AWS (in this case from Azure) (personally I feel like aws is ass too but in that case better than azure, personally prefer hetzner though not a 1:1 comparison)
One of the reasons why I love companies with good support system (preferably small). So that such stupidity can be stopped & they can have common sense unlike Amazon in this case.
The TOS is worded in such a way that it's almost impossible for them to lose. The best legal minds who are paid 7 figures write these things to be impenetrable. Arbitration is slow, time consuming, likely to not lead to desired outcome. Retain a lawyer just means more money and time down drain, and these companies laugh at legal threats, knowing it it ever got that far they would still win either getting the case dismissed or attrition.
That was basically my sentiment and the sentiment of a few lawyers I consulted for it. I lost so much money in the entire process overall it hurts to think about.