Amazon just told me to log into someone else's account – and delete it

The I have too much time on my hands approach is to self-publish a short story to this person on how to get in touch with you and buy it from their amazon account.

So Amazon&#x27;s Kindle account creation process doesn&#x27;t ask the user to verify their email prior to associating it with an account?<p>Sounds very sloppy. Could it be a regression, or was it always this way? I wonder if this could be used to spearphish or scam someone somehow?

I managed to get (first name)@(popular).com, and man, it&#x27;s a core sample into what a bunch of people all over the world are doing. Signing up for cable or satellite tv, buying iPads&#x2F;iPhones, sending each other family photos, ordering dinner, taking cabs, buying bus tickets, getting divorced, offending their condo association, signing up for dating&#x2F;hookup sites, opening stock-trading accounts, applying for jobs, posting jobs for people to apply to, and more. And none of them know their own email address.

The practice of checking the validity of email addresses seems to be lost on many (most?) businesses. I&#x27;ve found in my mailbox, from at least 4 other &quot;A Roberge&quot; located in either the U.S. or Canada the following:<p>Health insurance form and other information for a child<p>School report for a child<p>Mortgage information<p>Book library late notice<p>Nail product order confirmation<p>Multiple confirmations of job applications<p>PS4 account information<p>Various invitations to family gatherings<p>etc.<p>Whenever I could find the relevant information, I contacted the various people that send me the original email to correct the information. Most did not respond (including the father of a child with the above mentioned information who was copied on one email).<p>Sometimes the emails contained an unsubscribe button (yay) but, upon trying to use it, it asked for a password (which I obviously did not have). So, off to the spam folder...<p>So, I completely agree that Amazon&#x27;s registration process is very flawed ... but there seems to be a lot of clueless people and businesses out there as well.

I had a very similar problem with ebay. Account made with my email, not me. Again, no email verification. To make it worse I couldn&#x27;t log in and delete the account since ebay required security questions to do a password reset. I ended up trying to track down and call the person, it was a while ago but I think I even sent them snail mail. (there was enough info in the emails to track them down, maybe a shipping address when they won an auction?)<p>Eventually they stopped, but no thanks to ebay.<p>Why is email address verification not more standard?

If we can use trust law as our starting point (trust = shared title to property), then we see that an Amazon&#x2F;Kindle account is just a trust between you, amazon, and this other party. The only one investing money in the trust is this third party.<p>If you delete the account, you have two of the three parties&#x27; agreements documented. You need all three, in order to be able to claim that nobody&#x27;s rights are being infringed. This can be done by making a good faith effort to notice the third party via multiple forms of communication. Even if they don&#x27;t get to the party, you need to at least make the attempt. Send a first notice, wait ten days, if no response, send a second notice. If no response, consider that your acquiescence, and delete the account.

This guy doesn&#x27;t seem to be willing to actually help you. I&#x27;d consider trying a new chat session with, hopefully, a new guy who&#x27;s capable of doing his job.

It&#x27;s just bad customer service workflow (that you weren&#x27;t escalated, but locked into the script) and bad interface design (that addresses aren&#x27;t verified.)<p>It&#x27;s some ratio of lack of imagination:care.<p>I called paypal last week to remove an expired card from my account. At some point, Paypal has started doing background checks to come up with security questions after the fact, <i>all three of which</i> have to be answered correctly in order to have a discussion about your account.<p>One of the questions was my father&#x27;s wife&#x27;s (who he married when I was in my late teens and both lived in a different state) birthday month. Another was a friend&#x27;s street address that I used to get an Oregon ID, and slept on her floor for about 3 months <i>20 years</i> ago.<p>The operator was sympathetic, but what could she do? She had no way to escalate, and there was no contingency for if a question was asked that the customer may <i>never</i> have had the answer to. It&#x27;s just sloppy.

Reading the chat log it doesn&#x27;t seem like the replies are from an actual person. Are Amazon outsourcing their customer support to a collection of AI constructs. :-)

This is the burden of having firstlast@popular.com email address.<p>Once, my wife had someone setup some sort of financial account with her email (CC, IIRC). They didn&#x27;t verify the address!<p>My wife called and tried to do the right thing, but the people on the phone just didn&#x27;t understand the concept that the email address was wrong. It simply wouldn&#x27;t compute for them. Since my wife had the email address, she &#x2F;must&#x2F; have been the account holder. Right?

&quot;Low level customer service rep at Amazon just told me to log into someone else&#x27;s account - and delete it.&quot;<p>Clearly, someone made a mistake. This is not some official policy sanctioned by Bezos and handed down from above, despite what the clickbait headline reads.

Here&#x27;s how you can send the original owner a message so that you don&#x27;t have to delete the account.<p>Log into their account, and order, to be delivered to their address, something that gives them the first letter of your message. For instance <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Sterling-Silver-Initial-Pendant-Necklace&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00CIOBWHQ&#x2F;ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1414518915&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=initial" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Sterling-Silver-Initial-Pendant-Neckla...</a><p>Then do it over and over to send them a message that their email address is wrong. You&#x27;ll have to space them out by a few days, so they arrive in order.

I had the same issue with my Adobe account. Someone created an account in another country, with my email address. I took the liberty of doing a password reset own my to reclaim the address. Luckily, the user had purchased nothing.<p>I had to then go through Adobe support to reset the country, as I couldn&#x27;t do it on my own.<p>I too was surprised that there was no process to verify the email address. What a joke!

I would place a bet that now that this is on HN, someone at Amazon will tell you no, don&#x27;t do that, we&#x27;ll fix the issue.

Madness. My friend is getting emails from 3 different dating sites, all to a person who has a very similar name and managed to sign up for all these sites using the wrong email address.<p>Somehow none of them bothered with email authentication.<p>It seems as if, technically, these sites (including Amazon in this scenario) are engaging in illegal spam practices. But who knows.

Shouldn&#x27;t Amazon be verifying the email address before they just start treating it as valid?

It is such negligence that so many companies do not validate email addresses.<p>It is especially frustrating that nearly every time this happens it comes from a &quot;do not reply&quot; address within the company so you can&#x27;t do anything about it.

I recently bought a Kindle Paperwhite, and also noticed how easy it was to tie the Kindle to an email account upon purchase, all without verification. This seems like something Amazon definitely needs to fix.

It&#x27;s gmail, sheesh just create a filter to delete the emails.<p>If you delete their account you may be committing a crime somehow, just logging in may be committing a crime, not worth it.

Why not just create a filter to send those emails to the trash? I certainly wouldn&#x27;t log into the account, that&#x27;s likely illegal.

I applaud you taking the time to do the right thing. I probably would have just created an email filter, and called it a day.

Actually, the best thing to do is to make this very, very, very painful for Amazon.<p>First, it needs to become very obvious that Amazon goofed in not verifying that the kindle owner owns the email address.<p>Second, the person with access to the account needs to rack up so many charges that they max out the credit card.<p>By making &quot;not verifying email addresses&quot; an expensive product mistake, this problem can be solved quite quickly.

having the email address my last name @ gmail.com I have gotten a lot of this sort of thing. The best one was 3 years worth of income tax returns from some accountant in New Zealand.

Why not just set up a filter to delete them?