Isn't this the point of the monetary hold? You can just raise it until the amount of entries become manageable. I'm sure higher level orgs would easily put down $10k to talk to a developer at Microsoft. For indie devs, numbers like $100 or $1000 could be manageable, as long as they can trigger the refund and close the case whenever they want.

Arguably this does block out poorer people from receiving "special" customer service, but there are not really other things people are willing to lose (or put up as collateral) for this type of service. I can't really ship Cloudflare my toaster or car until they resolve my case.

The first person to do that might at least be able to get their attention..

I like the setup my bank's Ombudsman has -- you must first take your issue to first level support, then escalate it with them if not resolved. If the second level of support denies you, then and only then can you reach out to the Ombudsman.

Any requests that haven't gone through the proper process get auto-rejected.

That is the logical way for things to work, but it requires first level tech support letting you escalate, which is not always the case with non-bank industries.

The current go-to move is to tweet a complaint at the company's Twitter account. This is surprisingly effective across multiple industries and actually was something my wife did that helped resolve a time-sensitive AirBnB issue.

This may be due to banks having regulatory requirements - they don’t want regulators in. Because of this, resolving issues before regulators are contacted is in everyone’s interest.

Tech companies being inundated with complaints would actually be expected. Making it easy to complain to ombudspersons will cause the complaints to dwindle naturally as tech companies stop the unethical, even criminal, behavior they engage in.

Very few people will complain about their lifetime Google ban after Google employs appropriate personnel to evaluate such cases.

Today very few people complain about Steam's refund policy, after Valve rewrote their refund policy to actually include refunds, after a judge ended their decade-long crime spree that saw an estimated 20,000 Australians robbed and an unknown quantity globally.