Today I deleted my Amazon Account. It was the second time I had deleted it in the past week.

It all began when Amazon rolled out Passkey authentication and I naively wanted to enable it for my account. Logged into my account as usual: Username, Password, OTP token. Navigated to Login options. And it wanted to verify again, but it said something with Amazon Web Services token. After trying all Amazon-related tokens in my password database, I gave up and contacted their support.

After explaining the situation we went through the whole logout, then login, then go to Login options thing again. They did some magic on their end and it still didn’t work. They suggested resetting all OTP locks on the account but for that I had to send them a picture of my passport via e-mail, which I declined because the last thing I want is the company of the penis-rocket man to have a copy of my passport on record.

The other option was to delete my entire Amazon account and create a new one. As opposed to Apple accounts where when you delete it the mail-address is burned and can’t be reused, I was reassured that all that would happen is that I’d lose the right to return my previous orders and would waive my warranty rights.

So I deleted the account that had been around since 2006 and created a brand new one under the same e-mail.

A few days later I wanted to order some minor things and continued to set the same payment method and delivery address as had been used on the old account and proceeded with the order. Got back an email that the order had been cancelled, no reason given. But more noteworthy was that the order had entirely disappeared from my account, though Amazon support could still see it on their end.

Contacted Their support again. The app helpfully offered a phone number that wasn’t connected, few pages later I got a different one that actually rang.

They assured me that this would happen fairly frequently. That it would be part of their fraud prevention mechanisms to block the initial order for a few days for safety reasons. Especially for new accounts without any orders yet in there. I call bullshit! The old account with the exact same combination of mail-address, delivery address and payment method was deleted in good standing and somebody who stole my identity wouldn’t have deleted the account, and would have ordered expensive products instead. Cancelling orders for the new account with the same data as the old account also doesn’t make sense, as actual scammers would neither use my mail address nor my delivery address. Not to mention of the chicken-egg problem of cancelling the first order of a new account because there were no previous successful orders *facepalm*.

I can’t believe that the company that runs statistical fraud models for entire neighbourhoods is unable to connect the old account with the new one.

The supporter that proceeded to fill out an “internal form” for the colleagues to unlock my account within the next few days and once that’s been processed, they’d be reaching out to me to help me place the next “first order” of the account.

Instead I just deleted my account a second time now. And I am not intending to ever create a new one again. I now face the permanent challenge of having to source all the things my local grocery store doesn’t keep from elsewhere.

Initially I set out to play around with new auth tech to make my account safer and ended up deleting the entire thing, making it the safest it can get. But Passkeys are still cool tech and you should enable them wherever you can. I know I will.