Last week, hundreds of Amazon users woke up to find their login credentials not working on their accounts. Even paid Prime members were affected. A few days of trying to reach out to Amazon yielded no results until Business Insider ran a piece on the issue a week ago. Soon afterward, many affected users got access to their accounts again.
The frozen Amazon accounts were related to abuse in the Amazon review policy. Amazon has long prohibited paid reviews, and back in 2016 they stop allowing incentivized reviews where the reviewer got the product free or discounted in exchange for a review.
Amazon somehow picks up on these illegitimate reviews and has been known to ban reviewing privileges of those participating. This recent wave of frozen accounts went a step further where the entire account was deactivated due to improper use.
The review issue seems to have been the primary cause for these frozen accounts, though apparently some of the frozen accounts may have been due to other misdoing.
Be aware of what you are risking with monkey business on Amazon. I once had my Amazon account frozen for making too many back-to-back purchases, and it wasn’t a picnic getting it reinstated. Probably not a good idea playing around with Amazon, and certainly worth keeping anything which can be misconstrued as such on a separate dedicated Amazon account with the hopes that a shutdown won’t effect your main account.
