Rant: Amazon Payments Woes

I use JungleDisk to backup my home computer, and it works well, with one exception.  I also signed up for JungleDisk Plus, which has various enhancements, and costs $1/month.  All is well with the backups, except JungleDisk/Amazon Payments can’t process the JungleDisk Plus payments.

When I go to My Account on Jungle Disk and try to Change Payment Type or update payment authorization, I get:

 

but when I  log in I get this:

Hrrrmph.

Meanwhile, if I go to Amazon Payments directly I get this:

 

I contacted JungleDisk – 13 minutes later they said (rightfully) that I needed to resolve the issues with Amazon Payments.

For the issue with your account, you will need to contact Amazon Payments at:
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/contactus

Amazon Payments (which took 2 DAYS to respond) gave me the following oh-so-NOT-helpful form letter in response:

Greetings from Amazon Payments,

This message is to inform you that we are unable to process your Amazon Payments Account transactions.

We have taken this action because it has come to our attention that this account is related to a previously closed account.

While we do not provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, we have thoroughly reviewed our records and confirmed that we have significant evidence that this account is related to another account previously closed.

Thank you for your interest in Amazon Payments!

Sincerely,

Account Specialist
Amazon Payments
https://payments.amazon.com
===========================

I have no idea what previously closed account this is referring to, and apparently Amazon is not going to tell me.

So I had Amazon call me through their Call Me feature – and after being on hold for 20 minutes, and explaining the situation to two equally helpless call center operators (nice, just without clue as to how to do anything about Amazon Payment issues) I finally resorted to this blog post instead.  Hey, ranting makes me feel a LITTLE better at least.

PS! Oh, here’s what you get if you google for amazon’s customer support phone number – did you know that Amazon Customer support can be shipped for free? ;-)

 

UPDATE:  This post + tweet to @amazonpayments seems to have done the trick – my account now works again.  I have yet to get any human response from Amazon Payments customer support, however.  Still BAD customer service.