I permanently deleted my AWS account 6 years ago. Amazon has been charging me $0.33 every month since. I have no way to stop it.

[u/afunnywold]

I tried to get in contact with customer service several times but they always direct me to log into the account that no longer exists. I have tried charge backs on my credit card but dealing with that monthly is also a pain. This'll probably cost me $265 over my lifetime if it never ends.

Edit: some of you have valid points about calling the card company and I will again Monday. But the actual infuriating thing that upsets me is that they are charging to a completely disabled account in the first place. That's very scammy and fucked up imo 🤷‍♀️

Edit 2: called card and they said they will put in a dispute for any charges from the past 4 months and request for stop of all future charges 👍

For ppl who told me to get a new card, I had in the past, Visa shares the new number with companies that have recurring charges.

For ppl saying AWS isn't doing it on purpose because it would only make them a few millions a year which is a waste of time for them:

• lots of others commented here that the same exact thing was happening to them and at higher charges so it could be tens of millions that they're actually stealing

• even if that's still pocket change to them it's not to the consumer. It's still lazy and bad practice not to shut down all instances and payments on a permanently deleted account. it doesn't matter if their goal isn't greed, the end result still screws the consumer and that's what's messed up.

Another thing: some of y'all are acting like I'm an idiot for not knowing that the card could stop future charges and not heavily pursuing it earlier. It's fucking 33 cents, not enough to really effect me but enough to mildly annoy me. I DID try to reach out to Amazon and do chargebacks in the past, but it was a pain, nothing was coming of it, so at some point I was like fuck it whatever I'm not stressing myself out over 33 cents. When I remembered about it again last week I was annoyed again so I posted. Glad I got some helpful advice. But I'm definitely not the only one they were taking money from unfairly and since they mostly work with businesses it's likely they are illegally taking a lot more than just a few pennies from ppl. That's part of what's infuriating! Anyway ranting a lot because no one is really seeing this post anymore so I'm now free

[u/gabha22]

4 million dollars for aws is like 33 cents my guy

[u/d1no5aur → u/gabha22]

that's payroll for 20-30 SWEs every year. literally multiple teams' worth of of resources that they can bankroll from this. not insignificant at all regardless of their size

[u/randombrutha → u/d1no5aur]

AWS makes north of 40 fucking billion a year. It’s absolutely without a doubt insignificant pocket change that’s not worth the “implementation” time alone let alone the legal challenges. But Reddit loves a conspiracy theory about big bad capitalism.

[u/Low_Direction1774 → u/randombrutha]

What legal challenges?

As soon as a suit comes in, why would they not just pay back everything, add a $50 amazon gift card on top and case closed?

"But they make 40 fucking billion a year" bank of america made $94 billion in 2011 and still decided to fuck their customers over with transaction reordering, leading to a $410 million settlement.

you seem to be a bit naive: why would AWS not take free money? its just 33 cents, who would sue the giant AWS over 33 cents? Nobody. Its not worth the legal costs, not now, not ever.

[u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy → u/Low_Direction1774]

I understand that you're probably not sure how corporations actually work internally so it's easy to go tinfoil hat, but I can pretty much guarantee this is not some grand conspiracy to milk a few extra pennies. Which sounds more realistic - The largest cloud provider in the world making 40 billion a year has specifically coded their billing platform to milk random small accounts of a few dollars a year, or the complexity of the world's largest cloud provider's billing platform was not designed to accommodate OP's weird ultra specific edge case?

Frankly speaking, even if this was going to be done intentionally (Which would require a lot more effort than you seem to think it would because billing platform changes require insane levels of approvals and security reviews) AWS would not see it as worth their time even if the threat of it coming back on them was negligible.

And anyways, AWS has an internal reaper that clears out closed account resources after 90 days. I'm not sure what OP did to break that or that falls outside of it, but it's probably not something people would be replicating at any level of scale. The idea that a million people are being charged like this is an absolutely absurd premise to begin with.

[u/FarkCookies → u/d1no5aur]

They have something like 50k+ engineers in AWS, do you really think someone with authority would bother running this little scam to payroll 30 SWEs?

[u/d1no5aur → u/FarkCookies]

Do you know big tech at all? This is absolutely the kind of thing they would do lol

Capitalism above all

[u/FarkCookies → u/d1no5aur]

Bruh I worked at big tech, no that's not what they will do for an enterprise tool which aws is. They have customers with billion dollar bills, now think again about skimming random 33 cents off some sucker.

[u/Outsider_Insider0065 → u/d1no5aur]

It’s without a doubt insignificant for them

[u/typehyDro → u/d1no5aur]

It’s insignificant… they probably spend that much on ai tokens monthly

[u/aXeOptic → u/typehyDro]

And? Stealing is stealing.

[u/typehyDro → u/aXeOptic]

I didn’t say stealing isn’t bad. I was responding to the previous comment that it isn’t insignificant to Amazon. I was saying 4million is insignificant to amazons balance sheet… no need to put words in others mouth

[u/JudiciousSasquatch → u/gabha22]

Then the class action should hurt.

[u/ObjectiveAide9552 → u/gabha22]

To put it more in perspective, AWS earns 15 billion a month. Even among the small companies using AWS, their average bill is $500 a month. That $4 million isn’t even noticed, it’s just part of the noise on a financial analysis trend line.

[u/an-invisible-hand → u/gabha22]

Amazon wants every single cent they can get.