Every week at AWS we have an account protection meeting; it's got the teams who handle fraud and abuse detection, compromised accounts (e.g. when a customer has a security issue on their side), non-payment, forgotten creds, as well as our support team. You'll find the most junior members of those teams, all the way up to VPs, in the same meeting diving into the nitty gritty. Every week.

Disabling a legitimate in-use account is one of our absolute nightmares, and I don't care if it was an account paying $3/month we would be having a review of that with our top level management (including our CEO - Matt Garman) no matter how we found out about it. For us, there is not some acceptable rate of this as a cost of doing business.

> Disabling a legitimate in-use account is one of our absolute nightmares

Might be your nightmare but at the same time there is no way for your customers to report it or your own support agents to escalate that something wrong might have happened and someone should look again ...

So, the key is somehow finding a way to bring problems like this to the group's attention, it sounds like. HN lamentations are great when they work, but they don't exactly scale.

At least one layer of human support needs to have the ability -- not just the ability, but the obligation! -- to escalate to your team when a customer service problem occurs that doesn't fit a pattern of known/active scams and they are unable to help the customer themselves. Sounds like that's not currently the case.

Without prejudging the COE; it won't surprise anyone to learn that there are bad actors out there who try "every trick in the book" to have accounts that they don't pay for, and lying to customer support is absolutely one of those tricks, as is trying to be creative with changing payment instruments.

In these cases, it's also really important that customer support stick to a script and can't be abused as part of social engineering, hijacking, or fraud check bypass. "No we can't reset your account" is a very important protection too. I agree that there is an obligation to escalation, but I suspect the focus of the COE will be on how we could have detected this without human judgement. There's got to be a way.

I love the irony that an issue caused by a failing automation was solved due to human escalation but let's not try to improve the escalation process but add more automation ...

We do both; automation never forgets.

Right, obviously you can't give the level-1 schlubs the keys to the kingdom, but they need to be able to escalate. What you're doing now, trapping customers in a maze of no-reply dead ends, isn't OK. It's never a good long-term play to let bad actors drive your business model. (Well, all right, maybe PayPal has to do that, but you don't.)

One obvious approach would be to charge for access to human support. I'll bet the OP would happily have paid $50 to talk to someone with both the ability and inclination to escalate the issue. In rare instances such as this one where the problem really is on your end, the $50 would be refunded.

It might not be for you, but it is an acceptable cost of doing business for whoever is high enough up the chain that is setting the budget such that sufficient customer support is not available.

And disabling an in use account was not the issue here. There not being a way to get the account re enabled is the issue.

In this case, I am high enough in that chain.

As the cited ‘boss’ I’ll say the publicity wasn’t the concern. The concern was that someone wanted to use our services and we had made that so frustrating that they were writing blog posts about how it had gone wrong.

The various teams (anti-fraud and support) are investigating how we failed this customer so we can improve and hopefully keep this from happening again. (This is the ‘Correction of Error’ process that’s being worked on. And CoE’s aren’t a punitive ‘blame session’ - it’s figuring out how a problem happened and how we can fix or avoid it systemically going forward).

To be fair, the publicity did mean that multiple people were flagging this and driving escalations around it.

> The concern was that someone wanted to use our services and we had made that so frustrating that they were writing blog posts about how it had gone wrong.

I'm concerned that you're being very unspecific talking about "our services" and "it" going wrong.

What went wrong here is AWS not spending enough money on humans in the support teams. And of course this is a neverending balancing act between profitability and usability. Like any other profit vs. usability consideration, the curve probably has a knee somewhere when the service becomes too unusable and too many people flee to the competition.

And it seems current economic wisdom is that that knee in the curve is pretty far on the "bad support" side of the scale.

Which is to say, the cynic in me doesn't believe you'll be making any changes, mostly because that knee in the curve is in fact pretty far on the "bad support" side, and economics compels you to exploit that.