A slew of user reports is now beginning to surface which may indicate that Amazon has been closing down Prime member accounts with little to no reasoning given for the closures. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of clear pattern to the deactivations and users aren’t being notified about the action until they attempt to log in. Making matters worse, the closures aren’t at all consistent in their veracity. Some users are allegedly able to access some Amazon Prime services, such as video or music, but are unable to place orders on the site. Still, others are able to access their wishlists and place digital orders but not physical ones. That’s despite being told at login that the account in question had already been deleted. This all may point to a deeper problem in the company’s account database itself, as opposed to being linked in with bad behavior on Amazon’s part.
However, the mystery surrounding the issue only appears to have been made worse in those cases where the company did respond to inquiries about specific closures. In several cases, the company cited policy violations but didn’t include which policy was breached or clarification about what the respective customers did to earn an account deletion. In at least one case, Amazon representatives have said that the behavior was caught by an algorithm intended to halt review fraud but no clarification was provided about which reviews were triggering the action. The whole situation is further convoluted by private admissions from some banned users who say that they had knowingly violated policies about the review process.
All of that is exacerbated by reports from at least one unnamed Amazon employee who claimed that representatives are as confused about the closures as the customers. According to that employee, these don’t seem to all be “ordinary” closures at all. Amazon has responded to the claims by saying that it is looking into each closure on a case-by-case basis. Having said that, until the company comes forward with some sort of official explanation as to what’s going on, it’s going to be impossible to determine exactly what the issue is. In the meantime, some customers are already threatening a class-action lawsuit and others are threatening to not use Amazon at all anymore. So this definitely looks like yet another issue Amazon will need to address quickly.