Amazon Adventures

Amazon returned first the correct amount and then three days later ALL OF THE REST of the money to my bank.

The fun begins. The first inkling something was afoot took the form of two letters devised by Amazon to wrongfoot the client with a falsified muddle.

Amazon were demanding €18,56 for the CANCELLED item of 28 June, plus €3 for cancelling it. Dated 5 July, i.e. 7 days after the above email.

Amazon separately demanded €99,28 that I DID now owe them (because they had sent this back too) also plus €3.

In the middle of this it turned out that the teller at the bank could not see on his screen any of what had been sent or returned. It was, to the branch, as if nothing had happened at all. I could see more than him on my PC at home, but still not enough to positively evaluate it all.

As it was still impossible to exclude an error by the bank I sought an explanation from the bank's HQ, which arrived on the 25th July.

According to Unicredit Bank Amazon messed up with the SEPA label system, putting FIRST when they should have put RCUR - and ultimately causing the whole transfer to be rejected (in two stages).

Yet still, of course, I was prepared to pay what I did owe, plus €3 for the cancelled item. Total now €102,28.

But Amazon doesn't want a paid bill, it wants an aggrieved and combative debtor, to make a delay which can be attributed to him. After all, they have played this trick thousands of times.

So technically - from Amazon's by now completely warped perspective - I owed part of each of two different reference numbers.

I refused to pay the other €3 because it was their mistake with SEPA and there was NO NEED for them to refund the €99,28 I had spent.

As a delaying tactic to fill the coffers of their debt collectors, Amazon now demanded I prove that they had emailed me, agreeing the cancelled item! Which I did, by sending this.

Note how they have planned for future confusion by claiming that the item was cancelled because it is "currently not available" - untrue as I had cancelled it at my end. Would any customer think this significant at that moment? Nope.

I wondered how long Amazon keep their emails, or what flags they have to tell them how things are going in situations like this.

Here's Amazon's final demands by post for both sums, explained. I started to warn them about vexatious claims.

Both these bills are wrong, and the correspondence shows Amazon deliberately evading discussion of the issues, their only message during the pre-legal phase being "pay the bill".

The bills are dumb. Their owner is mute and anti-cooperative. Under these conditions any deadlines are irrelevant.

Giving customers a deadline to send all over again the money it elects to return helps Amazon build an artificial situation - which can then be morphed, with the help of triangular relatonships, into a deepening legal quagmire they hope the victim will pay to escape. For cancelling one item!

It was time to warn both Unicredit and Amazon about their liability. On 23 July I wrote to both:

Amazon refused to consolidatee the reference numbers, AS THIS WOULD HAVE SHOWN THEY UNDERSTOOD THE SITUATION and WOULD HAVE RUINED THEIR PLAN TO FUCK EVERYTHING UP - prosecutors please note this important piece of corporate mens rea is being repeated in data processing between Amazon and their debt collecting agency on an industrial scale.

I am asking them to get rid of a reference number for a debt I don't owe, for goods that were cancelled and never received, which they have asked me to prove they knew about, which I have. They are threatening to sue me (in a different country) for this.

Amazon staff are looking at this, in person, ignoring facts which ought to be available to them, and they are actively refusing to diminish their mistakes.

Computers use set theory to process data. All data in a given set or combination of sets is treated equally. We can extrapolate our knowledge from this one instance, confident that identical inputs will result in identical outputs.

From this we can deduce that EVERYONE in the data category of AMAZON.DE CUSTOMER WHO CANCELS PART OF AN ORDER PAID VIA IBAN FROM UNICREDIT SLOVENIA logically forms the very smallest possible data set - until Amazon's server is instructed differently - who MUST enjoy a 100% probability of a non-existent debt being elevated to the rank of a legal debt.

Even in a best-case scenario, AT MINIMUM every customer meeting these four criteria would also have had a FIRST when they should have had a RCUR, if Unicredit's thesis is correct.

Nobody is sitting there deciding whether to write FIRST or RCUR. But whether we regard the unseen hand at Amazon.de as having five digits or two, is it guessing at random? If not, the same 100% are having their account handled idiotically, and exactly as described in my case.

Is it sneaking in as many wrong ones as possible wherever it can exploit the potential for confusion, in the most dimwitted fashion possible, as here?

The problem is, paying up front is a simple thing. The only deadline is, when are you going to start the transaction?

Being owed is much better. Then you can have deadlines, charges, interest. No bothersome goods are involved, it is a well of profit requiring only computers, paper and postage.

I say, creating confusion and deliberately wrongfooting customers is PART OF AMAZON'S BUSINESS MODEL, and this is a serious scheme propelling Infoscore Forderungsmanagement GmbH and the German courts. The fact that genuine, other people's debts exist does not justify this exaggerated overbooking system, wilful ignorance, or studied indolence while deadlines expire.

Do Amazon.de intentionally evade resolution to propel more account cases into debthood? Proof that they do - and worse - that creating debtors by default has become the default aim, an ideology, is here on this page.

Is Amazon.de's code deliberately and systematically misguiding operations to turn confused customers into debtors?

These are complex questions...a less complex one: how can my experience, echoed by others, be explained otherwise?

Excluding the random choice hypothesis, set theory predicts 100% of the users in the intersection of the four shapes would be faced with a demand for the money for their cancelled item.

Then, in the ensuing shambolic customer relations, economically designed to stall, not answer, and to prevent any reconciliation - so that more cases can be sent to the debt company - the same stock responses would fail to resolve the problem of the same 100%.

The target group for the creation of legal debt based on fake debt might be broader - customers of any Slovenian bank, maybe. Or of any bank at all. Using different payment methods. This, data authorities should seek to establish.

Whatever the definition Amazon.de's computer has of people who must be dealt with in a particular way, that would have to have been the same since the program was written, and built-in errors will continue to create victims and manufacture fake debts until redesigned to fix problems with transactions and not make them worse. And it is pouring that misery into people's lives today, 18th August 2018.

And so, with the bank looking increasingly exonerated I went ahead without the reasonableness or the assurances from Amazon you would expect, and paid my fair settlement of €99,28 for the goods already long received – all over again - and the €3 for the cancelled item belonging to a different reference, making this clear in the bank transfer payment form. Blah!

Amazon had passed it to Infoscore Forderungsmanagement GmbH, who by 5 August had added up the €102,28 I had paid on 26 July, €0,09 interest, €27 and €11,70 more in fees, and by 17 August had managed to get a letter to me from Mauritius demanding a total owed of…

...a debt collectors' calculation in itself so funny that I have posted it hoping it will be popular on social media. The German firm's letter, with its strange payment deadline of 28 August for its strange total of €48,65, took 12 days to reach Slovenia on 17 August.

By now the true total owed has been 0 for three weeks. But it was also zero at the end of June, when their accounts system first spotted a potential victim.

On 17 August 2018 I reported Infoscore to the Police in Gütersloh near where it is based, to the German intelligence service BfV, and to the German and Luxembourg Data Protection authorities BfDI and CNPD.

Over-reaction? I think under-reaction is more likely to be the problem here, reading these reviews of Infoscore (click the Google reviews at right)

Germany is famous for its manufacturing industry. Amazon boss Mr Bezos may give to good causes.

But the money he's donating cannot be raised by a fake invoice manufacturing industry, a non-Teutonic trade generating more heat than light.

It ends with some poor sod in a call centre who will get sacked if he agrees to something outrageous like:

The problem with this type of fraud is eventually you run out of people who don't know what they're doing.

On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 at 11:09, Amazon.de <ecr-team@amazon.de> wrote:

Dear Mr. Bohan,

Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience caused by a misunderstanding our customer service missed to clarify in the first place. I am happy to take the opportunity to clear this up, and to take any necessary action to assist you.

As I can see in our database, you have ordered the items "ASS 100-A Pharma TAH" from one of our Marketplace sellers named “mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke”. The total amount of this order with the order number 028-0547461-1705919 would have been EUR 22.19.
After you requested the cancellation, the seller processed this erroneously by choosing “currently not available”, and you received an automatic confirmation e-mail, stating that you have not been charged for this order.

Please be aware that we only debit your account when the items you have ordered are in the delivery process. If some items from an order need to be delivered later, we only bill them once they are being shipped.
That is what happened in case of your order 028-6864967-7014749. The order was split up in two deliveries, and therefore, you were charged separately for each delivery. The collection reminders you received are only related to this order. You have not been charged for the cancelled order 028-0547461-1705919. We do not charge cancellation fees either.

The first delivery of “Zinc-50 Depot | 250 Tabletten” has been shipped on June 29, the total amount debited for this shipment was EUR 18.56. The second delivery with the six remaining items of your order has been shipped on July 1, 2018, the total amount debited was EUR 99.28 .
After the direct debits for both of these charges failed, we asked you to transfer the outstanding amounts individually, but only received the amount for the second delivery. As we did not record receipt of payment for the first delivery by end of the second notice period, the case was passed to our collections partner automatically.

I am sorry that our customer service did not explain the situation properly and, of course, I will follow up internally on the contradictions for the chargeback reason with the relevant department.

As a gesture of goodwill as well as to apologize for this lack of service, I will account the outstanding amount of EUR 21.56 (EUR 18.56 + EUR 3.00) and inform our collection agency to close the file. As soon as the internal refund is processed, your account will be reopened automatically.

Furthermore, I can understand that the situation has been very upsetting and therefore I would not like to leave it like that. Therefore, I have arranged for an Amazon.de gift certificate in the amount of EUR 30.00 to be redeemed in your customer account. May I ask for your patience? It may take up to 48 hours for the gift certificate to be shown in your customer account.

You can use the gift certificate for your next order with Amazon.de or Amazon.de Marketplace. Since the claim code has already been redeemed you do not have to enter it anymore.

To use your gift certificate for an order, please place your order via your basket, not via 1-Click. In the order form you will automatically be shown your balance from gift certificates.

In case the invoice amount exceeds your balance from gift certificates, please settle the difference by credit card, direct debit or invoice. If the invoice amount of your order is lower than your balance from gift certificates, you usually do not have to enter an additional payment method. The remaining balance from gift certificates will be saved for future orders in any event.

Via “Mein Konto” top right on our website (http://www.amazon.de/mein-konto) you can always check your current balance from gift certificates. Please click on “Saldo anzeigen” under "Geschenkgutscheine". There you can also retrace the use of your individual gift certificates.

I hope I could be of help and the solution is suitable for you.

Viele Grüße
Stephan Schuetz

Executive Customer Relations
Amazon.de
http://www.amazon.de

My Dear Stephan

Thank you so much for allowing me to help Amazon debug its system as well as to star in yet another fantastic tale of modern-day mass-modulation.

Yes, I was once a multi-year victim of Lincoln City Council's Council Tax computer, but really of those who stood by its convulsions of billing nonsense, working in partnership with rest of the UK's alienating, two-faced welfare system www.nfl.si/twata.

After prolonged nonsense from their computer, by then with about 19% of the authority area's households on the court list, Lincoln actually did send the bailiffs round - 44 times - before they realised how pants it was and gave it all up in a puff of smoke. They had won for no real reason at the Magistrates' despite floundering abysmally under questioning by the only person to actually turn up. Guess who! No tweeting in those days, just photocopiers. Just so you understand if I sound a bit sensitive about things like this. It's a mission for the age, Antibadata Man or something.

So I'm surprised, if you're saying that if Amazon thought the seller was planning to restock or something, it would refund my money. Why? Ideal would be a choice whether to wait, or wait for a contractually agreed amount of time, and/or me telling it or being told by it that I wasn't going to wait!

Cancel the money = cancel the order. Cancel the order = cancel the money. But you seem to say, Amazon cancelled the money, yet the order was allowed to remain, like a haunting. What was meant to follow? When? Did Amazon, in the interests of the 100,000%-profit byte-shuffling classes, want me to pay the bank of Unimuddle another 70 cents to wrestle with their dumb IT again? When?

About SEPA, says https://blog.revolut.com/ swift-sepa-how-international- money-transfers-actually-work/

Transfers usually take 1 day to reach the recipient's account

Transfers are generally free for both the sender and receiver

Free banking is NOT a thing in Slovenia. In fact everyone basically expects their bank to disappear without warning at any moment, although this hasn't actually happened since 1991. Nowadays you get warned before you lose it all.

https://twitter.com/ turizemptuj/status/989929475809869824

https://twitter.com/ turizemptuj/status/1032778775526862849

https://is.gd/XKTeqh

In Amazon.de's favour is the potential horror of a 30 euro fee at BOTH ends in a transaction with America, and for dealing with Slovenia's unique modus operandi this may indeed seem justified.

Being an Amazon seller is legally impossible in Slovenia https://twitter.com/ turizemptuj/status/ 1032227364988702720 so I don't really have anyone I could ask about the seller's perspective on this except you. So I must ask politely and for the sake of completeness what is Amazon's definition of "later" (paragraph 3 of your email)? Defined in the seller's T&C, presumably.

It seems clear to me sellers of many cheap pharmacy items either won't deliver to Slovenia or only at astronomical cost. And
https://twitter.com/ turizemptuj/status/ 989929475809869824

Back to now. It is certainly interesting that a single erroneous click by seller mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke can be magnified via Amazon systems into a SEPA error with results which can, along with all the victim's protestations, be completely consigned to the bin-of-no-profit by a boxed-in response system for the entire duration of his travel towards the bailiff.

Apart from "Why me!!!?" this raises a nerdy question, which I am sure you were hoping I wouldn't ask.

Does Amazon hold mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke legally responsible for the mistake? This is the sort of thing they get really excited about in Slovenia and underemployed lawyers will descend like jackals on such topics.

mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke might argue against the design of the cancellation system as presented to them by Amazon. If the data really was processed as they were entitled to expect - under these circumstances that is an if - you would probably win that one.

For this reason a screenshot of the choices as presented to mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke would be helpful - a drop down list might make for a lazier default choice than buttons in a circle, for instance.

If you could provide that, or at least describe what mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke saw and the manner and order in which the choices were presented, mundane human imperfection may be better distinguished from the kind of systemic flaws by which I have previously been miscategorized, sensitized, and not forgetting hounded while all I wanted to do was stop multinationals lowering your kids' IQs with some P T Barnum story and insulting everyone's common sense. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/ landing_pages/datacenter? offset=0&result_limit=10&sort= relevant&category=systems- quality-security-engineering& distanceType=Mi&radius=24km& latitude=&longitude=&loc_ group_id=&loc_query=&base_ query=&city=&country=&region=& county=&query_options=& It takes a lot of time countering mass Angloprophylaxis, which is a PR-led industry. Do you dare gaze upon what they're up against, just for fun? www.solarpanel.si

Now, does Amazon say that the error in selection it says was made by mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke was directly the cause of the SEPA error as described at www.a2z.si/amazon? Does Amazon say that this error between FIRST and RCUR could not have happened if mycare – Die Versand-Apotheke had not made this mistake?

Why? Because that error would have been the same, whatever the reason for the refund, simply because FIRST is an incorrect description of something which hasn't come first, and presumably counting to two is part of Amazon's data processing for which no seller can be held liable. If you agree with Unicredit's diagnosis, you haven't made sense concerning Amazon's data event.

Nor did you explain why, if Amazon thought the sale was delayed, it sent me a demand by post for the money refunded without any further important developments having occurred, such as the arrival in stock and/or despatch of the item you didn't think I didn't want. When this gets translated into Slovene the nation's unemployment problem is going to disappear overnight.

Another key point I would like to make is that there must be a limbo area for credibly contested counterclaims as what Amazon has done is incredibly rude, and all Stephan Schuetz has done must be done by somebody or something with a similar overview and power to intervene, before those accounts are shuffled off to Infoscore.

Groundless and vague accusations like "unconventional payment method" cannot be used as a substitute to bat away anything that is not really being understood.

Agents must surely know when they are being unhelpful or disingenuous and being able to hit the red button at the first sign will be cheaper for you and less stressful for them. Oh, and the customer.

Amazon's blundering catch-all alternative is mechanised fraud in practice, however distasteful that might sound. And we must remember to shed a tear for the poor jurists whose authority is diminished by their being hurled at the innocents, unnecessarily.

It is of course excellent that you were able to crack the case only a day after the Police were summoned to Infoscore but I don't think you would have, this soon, without the extraordinary amount of assistance and diligence shown by me, beyond the performance of the average Hausfrau. So I'm going to see it through to the bitter end, in order that I can reassure Slovenia that it is finally going to be able to safely internationalise its surpluses (mainly clacking bird-scaring windmills).

Therefore you will understand if I query whether you have rightly capitulated having arrived merely at the earliest wrong route taken by my account (on day 2?) yet failed to account for the many other failures on many other days further down the flow diagram. It seems your agents were all stymied. I trust you will properly examine all my moans and defend your corner reasonably and fairly - without giving up the secrets of your success.

Finally I wholly resent Amazon's derisory offer of 30 euros compensation, although I accept Amazon's admission of (partial or whole) liability. Pending your responses to the above I note that people with far more youth and energy than me earn six figure sums running these systems and a mere Programs Manager for Amazon in Germany can expect a gross of around 310 euros for each of 260 working days a year.

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as a more complete and credible explanation is forthcoming, with a summary of Amazon's intended upgrades in this area.

...and receive an email saying there are unpaid items on the account and it's suspended...

...too late, as what the computer thinks is happening is more important and they had already refused all the orders on false grounds (making another 70 cents for Unicredit bank at my expense).

This event shows that despite apologizing profusely nearly a week ago, and sticking the offer of a 30 euro credit on the order page, some part of Amazon's system still believes that I owe them the money they have already had twice.

No answer from Stephan. But I did begin this exchange with the Social Media Team who responded to a tweet.

If you are a Social Media Team member please note that I will not accept any explanations over the telephone. Everything in writing from now on please.