Quote:
Originally Posted by jocampo
Good luck :-)
Even if it's not fair, violating any contract or agreement won't give you the right to ask your money back. So yes, legally they can keep your money, even after taking your ebooks away.
Don't get me wrong, not saying I am not with you, just that such action will be futile.
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Violating the contract means they get to keep the money. However, having one's account closed *without* a violation would give the customer a good claim for getting money returned--and if Amazon is unwilling to say what the violation was, or what kind of connection this account had to the "related account," that's a good foundation for getting a refund.
In the US, even with her account re-opened, she might have grounds for a lawsuit against Amazon for the arbitrary closure of the account. (It'd be an expensive hassle to pursue, not worth it unless she has a lawyer-friend who wants to make a specific portfolio of cases.) Even a notice of "we can close your account at any time" doesn't mean "we can send you notice that you're in violation of the terms and close your account" when the customer is not; that's fraud.
Amazon *does* have the right to just randomly close people's accounts for no reason at all. It can decide that it's no longer taking payments from Chase Bank credit cards, and close all those accounts. It can decide that customers with "Q" in their names are bad for the database, and close those accounts. It can decide that anyone who hasn't posted a review in the last year is useless, and close those accounts. Or 10% of them chosen at random.
It cannot, however, inform those former customers that they broke the rules and *that's* why the account's being closed, at least, not legally. That's trying to hide their arbitrary decisions from those customers and whoever they talk to, to make it appear that Amazon acts in good faith with its customer base, so that other customers won't leave
en masse. Communication designed to deceive in order to make profit is fraud.