Fraud and abuse.

Treating Amazon like a mail-in library for books, tools, and other products is the easiest way.

Returning a huge number of your orders regardless of other forms of abuse.

Contesting valid CC charges.

Etc.

> I posit that someone who's banned from shopping at AMZN is more dangerous than someone who plays card games with a dark sense of humor.

I wouldn't necessarily say "dangerous". Maybe "untrustworthy" or "lacking in good judgement" or "lacking a strong moral compass".

They could be someone who cycles in and out of addictive or manic shopping. The word that comes to mind for me there is "tragic".

Sometimes, the projects you failed at eat away at you, daily proof that you are as big of a failure as you think you are, marking your failure as a person. When it's already hard to get out of bed, having to walk past hallmarks of your incompetence makes it even harder.

Rinse and repeat a couple times a year.

That's what mania is for me: a surge of confidence in myself, visible to others as pressured speech and hyperactivity, occasionally leading to irritability. It varies from person to person, though.

Example I've heard: buying all the tubes of a certain kind of paint in an art supply store in anticipation of doing some huge project. The project realistically would've taken years to complete & their delusion was they were an unnaturally fast artist. Once they snapped out of it, they realized the work they'd done so quickly was shoddy, at best, though they couldn't tell in the grips of mania. They returned most of the unopened paint the next day.

doubtful that that is a strategy or else there would be a ban on common names.

1. Set a cookie (lowest form since cookies get cleaned/deleted, but useful)

2. Recognize username + email address (tied to cookie so multiple usernames/emails can be used)

3. Address - physical shipping address is difficult to constantly change (for a normal person, scammers that use drop addresses are a different story all together)

4. Credit Card number w/associated billing address. The billing address is also difficult to constantly change and would correspond to shipping address.

There are additional steps a company can take, if necessary.

I probably wouldn't blindly trust someone who cycles in and out of addictive or manic shopping with a large line of credit or with carte blanc access to a lot of other people's valuables. Just because their addiction makes them untrustworthy doesn't mean they're a bad person.

Also, using Amazon as a library isn't necessarily indicative of manic shopping. It could just be that the person is acting in their own self interest and not taking into account the effects of their actions on Amazon's other customers.

Canceling valid CC charges has a lot of explanations -- maybe the person is just a habitual liar in way that's best thought of in a medical context.

But in all of these cases, empathy and judgement can go hand-in-hand.

Also, AliExpress is like second coming of Amazon.

Isn't that part of their business? I order stuff to try it out and if it turns out it sucks, I send it back. Isn't that the point of the online store to trump the disadvantage that I cannot try things out without buying them first?

EDIT: It turns out you have to do quite some abuse there and they even send you warning emails. So it won't just happen out of the blue.

EDIT2: What's with the downvotes? Here I was thinking this community is better than Reddit for certain things, but I guess I was wrong.

What's IMHO worse is that they remove Kindle access etc as well (I think here in Germany they've been sucessfully sued for that, so not sure if they still do it)

So now you've conclused she's dangerous, based solely on her standing with a retailer, without knowing anything about the situation?

EDIT: re How does that even happen?, link with some examples that I dug out for a comment further down: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/mar/18/banned-by-amaz...

I really wonder why people put so much trust in such decisions by tech companies...