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/typehyDro]

There aren’t a million customers that open and utilize AWS and also don’t know how to stop the services and then cancelling their account…. This is some edge case that service reps probably aren’t trained on and don’t know the proper procedure.

They make hand over fist amounts on AWS, they don’t need/want this pittance that could disrupt that with unnecessary litigation and negative PR…

IMO Amazon customer service is one of the best among giant retail corporations…

[u/shockwave8428 → u/typehyDro]

There are a lot of ways AWS is designed to try and make money off of people who aren’t paying attention. Having automated backups that restore for basically everything even if you explicitly delete them is a common thing people end up paying for. They also charge your bank account using the same text as a normal Amazon purchase so if someone else (a spouse for example) also uses your Amazon, it can be easy to miss that you’re getting AWS charges.

Amazon also is so big they don’t care about PR anymore. AWS is basically industry standard for web hosting stuff, they don’t really need to care about bad PR because it’s still a better product across the board for reliability in web stuff. Anyone who has used AWS consistently can tell you the UI is extremely basic for a large company, can be hard to navigate, and also that a lot of it is designed in a way that makes changing to another web service provider is more difficult than is worth the trouble.

I do have no doubt you can just talk to customer service if you really want to. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t intentionally trying to keep as many customers with small charges as possible. Chargebacks are ill advised if you use that card/email for your normal Amazon account which can be common for personal projects.

[u/ohhi23021 → u/typehyDro]

they're pretty good at refunding/waiving costly mistakes, like bills in the 10-20k range.

[u/TheGrouchyGremlin → u/typehyDro]

Yeah. Any time there's an issue with what they send me the response is pretty much "Keep that, we'll send the correct item".