[toong]

Wow, the idea that he really doesn't have the tools to help out didn't even enter my mind. I was just assuming ignorance/incompetence ?

Still .. Hanlon's razor is in my head :-)

Edit: if the customer-support-tools really are locked down, shouldn't they have a procedure to escalate ? Telling a user to break the law to help himself out should not be standard practice after all.

[exelius]

He may not have the tools as a security precaution: when you're a huge company like Amazon, you're going to hire a few bad apples. So you don't want to give all of your support reps access to every account (though maybe you have a few managers who do), which is why the security questions exist.

Furthermore, I don't even know what Amazon is supposed to do in this instance. They would normally e-mail the user, but that's obviously not going to work in this case. I guess they could send a snail mail letter, but even then this is probably enough of an edge case there's no policy around it, and as such no automated form letter to send or system to send it from. If their support reps are taught to never deviate from policy, he may have gotten confused and given up (this happens any time you hire anyone under ~$15/hr: you have to pay them enough to care).

I would guess he could have gotten a better response by jumping on LinkedIn and finding a VP of customer support and e-mailing them directly. At a company with the velocity Amazon has, they still see one-in-a-million errors a few dozen times a year, so it's not a bad idea to address them as they come up.