[HN Gopher] Did anyone else just get signed up for "Amazon photo...
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Did anyone else just get signed up for "Amazon photos" out of the
blue for $60?
Today I got an email welcoming me to Amazon Photos, and another
email saying my $60 annual subscription will renew next month. When
I went to cancel, it said I would receive a pro-rated refund based
on my last payment... in 2015: https://imgur.com/a/VOmJCnP I don't
remember ever using Amazon photos. Has this happened to anyone
else?
Author : fshbbdssbbgdd
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-09-27 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
| ilamont wrote:
| I have to ask: are a lot of secondary Amazon technologies in a
| rickety state compared to other large technology platforms?
|
| Just yesterday there was a long thread for "Amazon walking back
| raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32982398) and anyone who
| deals with its selling platforms like Vendor Central, Seller
| Central, and KDP lives in constant fear of unwarranted account
| lockouts with no explanation or obvious triggers.
| [deleted]
| rolph wrote:
| sounds like phishing
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| It's all on amazon.com urls.
| rolph wrote:
| im not there to experience what you have in front of you, but
| there are some very good ones out there that play games,
| manipulating URLs or straight up proxy botting other
| computers.
|
| they usually give a talk similar to what you posted, often
| there is an urgent deadline when "account charges are final
| and non-refundable"
|
| they just want a click on a link or a mouse farm [harvesting
| natural mouse movement to spoof bot detection]
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I went on desktop and looked at the email's html, it links
| to real Amazon URLs. If the hackers own my iPhone and my
| Windows desktop I am truly fucked!
| pessimizer wrote:
| Better to just copy-paste the url to the url bar, delete
| the domain, and type it in yourself. Then you at least
| know that the scammers have figured out how to get Amazon
| to forward their scam, so it was both you and Amazon that
| got suckered.
|
| Personally, though, I'd never follow a link in an email
| that I hadn't requested. If I can't get to the
| information through my Amazon account, I'm going to
| consider it bullshit, and even if it turns out not to be,
| the fact that I couldn't get to the information through
| Amazon itself will make a good ground for contesting any
| claims or charges.
| oneplane wrote:
| Reported earlier as an upcoming change:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276698
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32773770
|
| Like Jaxkr wrote: drive is getting rm'ed, and Photos is their
| replacement.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| That must be related, although I wasn't a Drive subscriber
| either (maybe I was back in 2015 and forgot, but definitely not
| in 2022). The automatic signup for a paid subscription is
| what's really off about this.
| oneplane wrote:
| Yeah, that's a pretty wild one. You essentially have some
| free product, and happened to have a card on file and now
| suddenly you're subscribed to something.
|
| I don't know about US law, but in most of the northern
| western countries, companies aren't allowed to arbitrarily
| sign you up for stuff. Even if Amazon were to 'hide' this
| behind a "it is the same product but we changed the name and
| started charging" it wouldn't fly because they would then
| also have the service agreement changed which should be
| grounds for termination of the subscription rather than
| suddenly getting signed up for automatic payments.
| legrande wrote:
| If you're in the EU, try getting the Revolut app. They have a
| feature called 'virtual cards' which are great for e-commerce
| purchases. The idea being, you use a card _once_ and then
| terminate it after making a purchase. This means you don 't get
| unexpected charges a year (or two) later as most services keep
| your card 'on file' now, which is a dark pattern.
| thomas-st wrote:
| Careful. My friend used Revolut virtual cards and forgot to
| deactivate the card after the purchase. Months (or a year)
| later he got a fraudulent charge and Revolut refused to waive
| it because they claim he should have deactivated the virtual
| card. If it were on a regular credit card he may have just been
| able to dispute it.
| jack_pp wrote:
| You should use their one time payment cards to be safe
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Payment processing gateways can see what type of card
| you're using and many one-time/prepaid cards will be
| rejected for recurring service or deposit related billing.
| lrem wrote:
| Many if not most merchants I deal with refuse those. Which
| is terribly annoying when it's a shop with clunky checkout
| flow.
| Teever wrote:
| I'm baffled by the fact that the system is designed in
| any way to enable merchants to know that the card you're
| paying with is a single use card.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Privacy.com for USA.
| ketralnis wrote:
| Using cancelled cards and filing chargebacks is a good way to
| get banned from that vendor. Maybe you don't ever want to do
| business with Amazon again and more power to you, but if you do
| you're better off arguing with their folk over "just"
| cancelling the card.
| keerthiko wrote:
| chargebacks may get you banned, but cancelled cards are fine.
| It's on the business to perform dunning requests and maintain
| short billing grace periods for automatic renewal charge
| retries before retracting services.
|
| Revolut's method is to automatically cancel the virtual card
| after the user-initiated purchase goes through, not before,
| and not by issuing chargebacks. Obviously if you actually
| want to have a subscription autorenewed and stay
| uninterrupted, you shouldn't use the virtual cards there as
| you will be getting service interruptions every billing cycle
| and have to manually update your payment with a new vcard.
| Still, not likely to get you banned.
|
| A different risk of using virtual cards is that the merchant
| might not be able to issue a refund after the bank destroys
| the card.
|
| source: as primary billing engineer at our subscription B2C
| company -- cancelled cards give us no problems that make us
| consider banning a customer. The closest is when we have a
| customer using such a feature bombarding our support about
| service interruptions because of his own cancellations, and
| trying to calmly explain that they did that themselves.
|
| Chargebacks definitely do pose a problem though, as they
| increase the risk of us getting blacklisted as a fraudulent
| merchant, and also a more lengthy settlement process with the
| customer and bank, where we aren't even able to simply issue
| a refund and close the issue.
| davikr wrote:
| As a warning, Revolut was recently compromised with some breach
| of user data.
| Jaxkr wrote:
| Amazon Drive was discontinued and rolled into Photos
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Ok, interesting.
|
| I logged into Amazon drive, and I found a few files from
| 2012-2016. They consist of a small amount of music and some
| send-to-Kindle documents. I recall trying Amazon's music
| service at some point. Also, sometimes Amazon would offer me a
| free $1 digit credit when I ordered a physical item, perhaps
| they also offered some free Amazon Drive storage?
|
| My working theory: I had some kind of free Amazon Drive account
| (maybe created as an accessory to some other service?). During
| this Drive shutdown, some kind of botched data migration
| resulted in that being turned into a paid Photos account.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They regularly have "try service x for $y" offers.
|
| Example: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/ymmv-get-a-15-amazon-
| when-you...
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Interesting lead. I just logged into the Photos app. It
| gave me a welcome/onboarding flow like I had never used it
| before and there were no photos in there.
|
| On the other hand, I can totally imagine 2015 version of me
| signing up for a free Amazon photos account to get $15.
| Victerius wrote:
| No. The only Amazon sub I have is Prime.
| fairity wrote:
| I'm wondering if Amazon photos is a precursor to Amazon taking a
| second shot at building a new smartphone. The switchover cost
| from Apple to Amazon would be lower if files and photos were
| already synced, and Amazon invested a suspiciously large amount
| of money last Prime day to drive signups to Amazon photos ($10
| credit to download the free app and sync photos).
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(page generated 2022-09-27 23:02 UTC)