Amazon's customer service backdoor

When I trained Apple techs the clear communication was that people use pretexting for not just mundane things like credit card theft, but to commit violence against other people (especially in the case of domestic violence where they have some personal details and can try to get more).

Anything but the strategy of verify only is putting people's lives in danger.

But their "redesign" and presumably the backend changes tied to it (or lack of them, whatever the real case is) resulted in the worst experience I've ever had with this kind of service in years, culminating in what was the last straw - one of my domains getting shut down five times in a single month due to bogus "domain contacts verification" procedures, which their support wasn't able to solve from early December to when I finally decided to move away in mid-January (from a short exchange after I moved away I assume it's still broken today as they were apparently "investigating it" even after I was gone. That after having it in some or some other way "fixed" for about three times during the previous support exchanges.) Honestly though during that time my tickets mostly kept bouncing back and forth through customer reps that insisted on politely suggesting things like "to check my spam folder", even though I specifically explained every time that I was in full control of my mail servers and that it is them who don't deliver any kind of verification emails to those servers, so there was really nothing that could even end up in "a spam folder" and that yes, I actually thoroughly checked that, several times over. Yet my requests for them to check their own mail logs because I'm here actually losing access to my domains without being able to do anything about it were each time politely swept under the rug with generic assurances like "they're working on it and will keep me informed"... Then quickly closed the ticket as fixed. Every time after the one particular domain went dark (and with another domain randomly flipping into bogus unverified states in the frontend interface, clearly lingering on the edge of the same fate), the domain was reactivated either by me or the customer support, was either set to have its contacts covered by WhoisGuard (which doesn't even use the contacts verification process at all), or at a later point even manually set back to fully verified by their techs (and one time completely having all my zone data wiped without explanation or apparently without whoever caused it having a backup at hand to restore it from) - only to again and again end up suspended as "unverified" several days later, losing me access to its emails, websites, everything...

Now I could still go on and on about how clunky the entire new interface compared to the old one is (yes, the original was lackluster, but not even remotely this level bad and in fact I've never had a single technical issue with it, other than being somewhat hard to navigate) and that ever since the redesign the new frontend frequently displays outdated or plain wrong information, crashes with cryptic errors, sometimes just decides to log you out five times in five minutes for no reason, but I think this is getting too long as it is anyway, so enough.

When I finally grew tired of running through their customer support in a neverending circle (to their credit, they were always very polite and nice, but it felt like that's all that Namecheap support was really trained for. And that clearly doesn't make my domains magically work there), I moved to Gandi just basing on their overall popularity and good reputation with a few people. Already in a week time I had two great support experiences with them and got my issues resolved each time in literally a single step of exchange. In the first case I've received about a page-length of actual technical reply from their support rep that not only bothered to carefully read through several issues that I ran into when trying to run a Python app on their web hosting platform that I ordered for the domains moved there, they even included a how-to custom tailored to my specific use case that was way beyond what I originally asked for and that ended up saving me quite some time discovering it on my own, and also acknowledged that they had a major issue in their documentation system and that they had it quickly fixed in meantime. Now second time was less technical, as I accidentally burned a discount code while customizing and re-customizing some orders in what was probably an unexpected way for their interface, that ended in the code never being applied to any order but still ended up as used and lost... I wrote down the problem in a few sentences, customer support quickly verified it and issued me a new replacement code right with the initial reply in what had to be less than an hour. Can't really say I'll be missing Namecheap any time soon.

This is really bad. The security implications are different between the two.