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Still locked out of my AWS account

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Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#161

Post by birdman3131 »

colinmeinke wrote: post #2

8 days ago I tried to log in to my Amazon retail account, and received a password invalid error. As it turned out my account had been closed, as it appeared to Amazon that it had received a suspicious log in. This is the same account that I use for AWS - hosting websites critical to my business. Today it appears I am no closer to gaining access back to my AWS account than I was on day 1, even though I have been bille…

A friend had this happen to him (The unauthorized person accessing it). He sells on amazon and had all his inventory removed from being sold while this was going on. Calls did nothing.

What finally worked was the amazon facebook page. He posted on there, they PMed him and he was back up and going within a couple hours where he had been getting the run around for a week or two on the phone.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#162

Post by eridius »

Macha wrote: post #159
analyst74 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for what you have to deal with, and I think as an industry we have definitely not thought through on the 2FA-over-phone system. But I feel like asking for a notorized letter confirming you are actually "you" is quite reasonable. Otherwise it'll be all too easy for malicious social engineering.

What's the consequence of him being impersonated here though? Some fraudster pays his bill and gets nothing out of it?

Some fraudster shutting down an account that should actually be kept running, owned by someone who is merely very lax about paying bills.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#163

Post by Paul-ish »

They tell him to create a new account because they think the old one was compromised? I would be furious. I have bought a number of books on Kindle. If this happened to me, I would essentially lose all of the books I purchased. I'm not sure I would ever use Amazon again.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#164

Post by bryanthompson »

I'm one account flag change or one password reset from being in this exact situation, and it's terrifying. I have been an Audible customer since before Amazon bought them. Somewhere in their account aggregation process, I've ended up with at least four distinct logins for amazon that all use the same email address.

One email address... And i use one password for audble, one for amazon, one for aws, and one for amazon affiliate. If I password reset on any one of those services, my accounts are all bricks. I've made that mistake once and had to frantically call audible support & climb through the support chains until someone could basically undo my password change.

During the process, they offered to try and deduplicate my accounts, but I think we're going to need a team of senior-level DBAs to sort this shit out.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#165

Post by an_account_name »

falcolas wrote: post #105
Twirrim wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all seriousness, email jeff@amazon.com. The most likely outcome is that some relevant managers will receive one of the infamous "?" emails from him. If so, that'll result in two things: 1) Your problem will be resolved ASAP, managers right up the chain will be tracking it extremely closely, as they'll have to justify every action to Jeff. Everyone goes scrambling when one of those emails goes out. 2) A post-mortem…

I think that's gone the way of the dodo. Last I remember, he didn't read those anymore, and they were automatically just shunted into the normal escalation flow. Too many people got wind of it and abused it.

It definitely still works that way, in my experience.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#166

Post by gingerlime »

joelrunyon wrote: post #27
colinmeinke wrote: post #2

8 days ago I tried to log in to my Amazon retail account, and received a password invalid error. As it turned out my account had been closed, as it appeared to Amazon that it had received a suspicious log in. This is the same account that I use for AWS - hosting websites critical to my business. Today it appears I am no closer to gaining access back to my AWS account than I was on day 1, even though I have been bille…

This happened to me with instagram. I reset a password, then they detected "suspicious activity." I clicked "send pin via email" and the email never shows up. I've done it 3 or 4 times over the course of a week + it never works. It's a documented error + FB/Instagram refuse to addres it. https://medium.com/@joelrunyon/instagrams-security-features-...

We're having the same problem, and it's been well over a month now, and despite several phone calls with Facebook support and lots of emails, nothing is working. We've sent documents, escalated, etc. Nothing works.

We've spent over 200,000 EUR on Facebook/Instagram advertising so far (I guess that's still small fish), and still can't get it resolved.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#167

Post by garethadams »

Macha wrote: post #159
analyst74 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for what you have to deal with, and I think as an industry we have definitely not thought through on the 2FA-over-phone system. But I feel like asking for a notorized letter confirming you are actually "you" is quite reasonable. Otherwise it'll be all too easy for malicious social engineering.

What's the consequence of him being impersonated here though? Some fraudster pays his bill and gets nothing out of it?

> let me pay the bill and shut the account down

The account gets shut down

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#168

Post by allthecybers »

colinmeinke wrote: post #2

8 days ago I tried to log in to my Amazon retail account, and received a password invalid error. As it turned out my account had been closed, as it appeared to Amazon that it had received a suspicious log in. This is the same account that I use for AWS - hosting websites critical to my business. Today it appears I am no closer to gaining access back to my AWS account than I was on day 1, even though I have been bille…

I had this happen because of a closed AWS account with 2FA that locked out my longtime Amazon.com retail account. The 2FA factor was a business phone number that I had given back to my former employer a couple of years ago.

The best that AWS/Amazon support could give me is start a new Amazon.com account. At least the AWS account wasn't billing anything.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#169

Post by pierrebeaucamp »

stickydink wrote: post #141

I've been locked out of my AWS account for almost 3 years now. I have 2FA enabled, tied to a phone number I no longer have access to. I receive two emails per month. One invoice, for $0.80 (I cannot remember what is running on there, but I guess it must be something). One threatening, "Your AWS Account is about to be suspended". I've been "about to be suspended" for the entire 3 years. I want to pay the bill, I can't…

The exact same thing happened to me. In my case I still had a t2 instance running and was billed ~15$ a month. Eventually I shut down the instance over ssh, but that didn't change the overall situation.

I was studying in Germany at the time and access to a notary public costs about 40$ USD there. I asked the AWS support on the phone if letting the payments bounce would suspend my account which they confirmed.

Unfortunately every time I disputed the payment with my bank, AWS send me a physical copy of their terms and my billing address as a proof of contract and my bank would process their payment. Eventually, 3 months in, my credit card expired anyway, solving at least that part.

They still tried to charge me for about 6 months afterwards, but I haven't heard back from them since. Interestingly, I opened a second account, with the exact same billing address, but a different credit card without problem. But I don't really use AWS anymore since then.

I totally believe that they (AWS) just stuck to their process, which was enacted in good faith. But switching my phone number should have not caused that entire fiasco.

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