Amazon got so large they stopped paying attention to the details.

I wonder how much a 20-yr old Amazon account is worth on the grey market. Mine is about that old, and I have – legimately – returned thousands of dollars worth of goods (that were faulty or just didn't work the way I liked) and it is probably very difficult for Amazon to distinguish between my legitimate returns and a hypothetical alternative where I'm a fraudster that just purchased this old account and am laundering broken electronics through the returns system.

It's not only Amazon that has this problem btw. Lots of online stores do. Return fraud is so prevalent that you should expect to this to become more common. A few bad apples ruin it for the rest of us.

Payment details aren't enough to reliably establish identity in many cases. If fighting this stuff were easy they'd have done it already, they aren't idiots.

And crucially - Amazon doesnt do this tracking on purpose so they can have plausible deniability while screwing merchants.

Btw, if Amazon is a fault, where they can't shift the loss onto a seller or third-party, the delays will go on for weeks, if not forever. You have to do a chargeback.