The idea being that it wasn't Amazon that shut it down, but the fraudster.

I guess I fail to see the importance of difference. Legal reasons?

Amazon is responsible for making a reasonable effort to prevent anyone unauthorized from doing anything to an account. Swap "shut down" with "read personal information tied to account" or "upload a heinous webpage to the AWS server," whatever.

This is not one of those "by any means, achieve the ends" type scenarios.

Who downvoted you for saying one shouldn't be surprised when an account gets shut down after not paying for 3 years?

On that note: why hasn't the account been shut down for nonpayment?

Presumably because that only happens when it crosses a threshold dollar amount, and $0.80/month isn't enough to get it over that threshold.

(That price is too small for there to be a running instance; it's most likely for storage belonging to an instance that was shut down, such as a 16GB EBS snapshot. It is reasonable that Amazon would be very careful about deleting that.)

Maybe the debt needs to be groomed on paper before it's sold.

Please don't complain about downvotes

That's not particularly relevant to the question of whether a fraudster should be able to shut down your account simply by offering to pay the current bill.