Bitcoin Forum

I had over $1,000 in gift card balance, ready to buy something AND LOCKED ME OUT OF THE ACCOUNT

It's been over 24 hours, support DID NOT contact me at all, and they just said an "account specialist" had to work out the problem an they would email or call

Hmmmmm. How did you get the gift cards? Cheap cards from here, I assume?

https://localbitcoins.com/sell-bitcoins-online/US/united-states/amazon-gift-card-code/

all had cash paid receipts

i buying 500 dollar of amazon gifts code

from bipolarbob

it shuts down my accounts and they demand call them

he is scammer  >:(

I see. My apologies for making assumptions, then. This has been happening quite often lately with gift cards due to fraudulent ones. Expect to provide them receipts for every gift card when they call. You should be fine, though!

Please keep us updated as to what happens after you provide amazon the receipts

Yeah, if they want them. They've said nothing about anything so far as to why the account was locked, I had to figure for myself it was locked until I chatted when they told me, then they just asked for billing address because there wasn't one on the account yet. Was going to ship to amazon locker which I've done before

was the account brand new?

If The Receipt Holder Complains To Customer Care Even After Selling The Code, That THe Code Isn't Working, They Lock That Code Or Account That Used It, And Give The Receipt Holder Another Code.
Its Very Risky To Buy Amazon Cards Unless The Seller Is A Trusted One.

just a few days yeah


Thanks KimNam. No wonder there's 20% discount. It just is incredibly frustrating amazon tells you nothing of what is going on

Don't worry if the cards are legit. It will be restored by the account specialist team within 2 days. But they are very slow and the process take some time.

Gyft seems like the only safe source.

Even If The Cards Are Legit But Reported Stolen. Is A Problem.

These people all are buying Bitcoin at a huge premium (sometimes as much as ~20%), why do you think this is? Regardless of the "proof" that the AGC that you are buying are legit, the bottom line is that they are not, otherwise the sellers would have no reason to pay cash to buy a gift card and then buy Bitcoin at a premium, especially when ads for other cash payment methods buy Bitcoin at a discount, and you can even buy Bitcoin for cash by responding to ads for a much smaller premium.

Unless you genuinely think the seller is actually giving away money then any Amazon gift card that you buy from a seller who sells large amounts of these gift cards is not going to be legit. Period. 

but there's always some people who don't know. What if no sellers are close to them and no Bitcoin ATMS or they want to do it anonymously? Or they got gift card as a gift and want bitcoin? or expect bitcoin to rally

In most of the cases they would buy Bitcoin with cash without first buying the AGC.

The only case that I can think of a seller potentially being legit is if they received an AGC via some kind of gift and are trying to get rid of it, however there wouldn't be any sellers selling large amounts of AGC this way and the sellers probably won't have cash receipts.

Bullshit. I've got many codes of BiPolarBob (of multiple websites) and all were legit. In fact, none of them have been reducted. Therefore you're talking rubbish, but I don't think anyone here is taking you serious.

- -

If these codes are legit, (as you've got receipts), I think you will be alright too. It's sad that you can access your account now, but soon or later it will be solved. Please keep us updated!

This is probably the wrong section, but i think admins should make this sticky as a warn to all users.

Or unless you can hold your btc on escrow until you have the amazon goods in your hands.

After that you only have to deal with the risk of gc being carded but with a copy of the cash receipt that shouldn't be a problem.

5 months after, cops will be knocking your door.

Escrow will not protect you against cops, even if funds are held the risk to the seller is virtually zero, so they could still try to sell the gift card with escrow and agree to have the funds held for 6 months.

Yup,

You can buy AGC free-of-risk from gyft at 5% off,

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys :D

Still?

Like they don't have nothing else to do...

Unless you do this by the 10.000's and send the goods to your real address.

carded you mean credit card fraud?

Indeed. I often see people suggesting to use Gyft for buying these cards. Some people also recommended Egifter (https://www.egifter.com/) to buy such giftcards. You might need to pay a bit more than you have to pay for such gift cards on this forum, but now you're sure these cards are legit. In the end, it might spare you some money (as you do not end up with a illegal gift card - and therefore your balance deducted).

I dont think bipolarbob is a scammer. Its more likely you thought based on the trust I already see.

And most of his cards are legit, cause I won something in the past by him and bought something off amazon.

I share your vision, as I already mentioned a few posts ago (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1158954.msg12222969#msg12222969). I've received multiple giftcards for multiple sites (Steam, Amazon etc), and they were and are all legit. People should stop calling him a scammer, BiPolarBob gave already away more than $10.000s worth in giftcards only on this forum. People should accept that great people still exist :).

- -

However, it is good to warn people for illegal Amazon Gift Cards like this topic does. Remember: if something appears too good to be true, it often is. Especially the (very) new members on this forum are likely to offer illegal giftcard codes. I think you can still buy these cards of trusted members of this forum (as they are not likely to ruin their account for just a few bucks) - go look for some trusted members if you are looking to buy such giftcards or use proven websites such as Gyft and Egifter (as has been mentioned before).

Amazon could have just flagged the cards for being high value and being placed on a new account

That's why I am very interested to see if they unlock the account once you provide receipts.  If you provide receipts and they do not accept them, then you know something is up  ..fake receipts possibly?

If you can prove you have nothing to do with it worst case scenario you get your items seized and it's a very remote chance.

They always flag new accounts with Gift card value more than 100 USD or something. They put on hold and no support through email, chat or telephone resolve this matter for you. This done by the account specialist team manually and they will take minimum 2 days to release the account after a complete background verification on the account and the giftcard redeemed on the account. This happens even if the card is legit. This will be the response once they verified the account and processed gift card successfully

"Greetings from Amazon.com.

Thank you very much for contacting us regarding your account. We have resolved this matter, and you should now be able to access your account without incident.

Please do let us know if you have any other questions or concerns or if we can help you in any other way possible. Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.


Sincerely,

Account Specialist
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com
========================="

If there is any problem in processing the giftcard or the giftcard obtained through fraud then they will sent an email with the following content.

"Greetings from Amazon.com.

We have experienced a problem processing the gift certificate you redeemed as payment for your order. Please contact the customer who sent you this gift certificate for further details. If they have additional questions, please have them contact us directly.

Also, please note we have placed a temporary hold on your account until this situation has been resolved.

Please let us know if you have any further questions, and thanks for shopping at Amazon.com.


Sincerely,

Account Specialist
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com
========================="

Still you have a chance. You can convince them with receipts and proper reasons they might unlock it for you.

So Amazon fixed the issue - as we already expected?

That's great! A good reminder for everyone though: be sure that you keep the receipts if you buy these giftcards (by paying cash) or ask the seller (who tells you that he or she bought these cards with cash) to provide the receipts. :)

AFTER I sent them receipts and cards showing they were bought in store with cash, the next email I got:

LMFAO, "continued"?

yeah, my accounts been closed for like a week, I only had ONE order on there, and then gift cards added after that order. The order was like $15.

I can't even call them vague because they're more than that. Their information and correspondence is shody; information is missing or error laden.

It looks like I made a mistake (and thought Jakez was the topic starter). Sorry about that!

What are you going to do now? I mean, I guess you continue taking action as more than "$1,000 in gift card balance" is quite a lot to loose. What are your following steps?

It's also weird that they are talking about orderS if you only have had one order over there. Is there any possibility they are thinking you are someone else? / They are confusing your account with that of someone else?

They LOVE to send their messages early in the morning:


$100 reward if anyone knows someone working for amazon that can help us with this issue; I'm tired of talking to robots.

From the looks of it, they are banning your alt Amazon accounts because one of them was found to be repeatedly trying to loan stolen Amazon Gift Cards onto them.

What exactly is the issue? If you were using stolen AGC on one account that caused them to close that account, don't you think they would close your other accounts as well? From the looks of it, they got it right considering that you got the email.

so anyone can give you stolen gift cards.

where's the evidence?

theres 4 differnet gift cards; they haven't explained anything if any one specific card had a problem with it.

I have cash paid receipts and they didn't say ANYTHING about them

https://gethuman.com/phone-number/Amazon-com

You are right that anyone can give you stolen gift cards, and that is exactly why you would only purchase gift cards from reputable sources/people. As I have mentioned several times above, I am not sure what you expected when you were getting large discounts (larger then other cash methods) for these gift cards.

I am not sure what exactly the person who sold you the gift cards did, however it would be possible that they reported the AGC as being stolen, or they could have paid with cash, then immediately asked to return the gift cards and paid with a stolen credit card, or something similar.

They said this issue must be responded by an account specialist who you cannot talk to on the phone they only email 'within 24 hours later' which is always 48 hours or more


Good points; but that would then point to an inefficiency in their system (every currency sucks compared to bitcoin); because they were all redeemed correctly and showed in amazon balance. I never got an email or message that "there was a problem with X gift card"

It is in their TOS that you must agree to when you apply a gift card balance that Amazon has the right to void a GC (and/or close your account) if they suspect it was obtained fraudulently.

It is up to you to verify that it was in fact obtained via legit means.

I was also ask you for the nth time, what exactly were you expecting when you purchased $1,000 worth of AGC at a 20%+ discount? Did you think that someone was just being really generous to you and wanted you to have that $200?

I would definitely contact amazon though and share with them where you purchased those gift cards.

Why to buy Amazon gift cards that are stolen? Some just manage to get these stolen gift cards to work while some don't. Only those who are selling genuine AGCs via websites like cardpool and here are genuine sellers else don't buy gift cards for 20-30% of the face value. Don't expect them to work then.

Sorry but i sell agc on 30% off usually. Why? because i live in europa, and i receive amazon gift card (for .com) from my CPA network.
I'm sure that some guys sell stolen gift card, but in my case my location sucks big time, and if i want to order something from amazon.com, i must deal with customs, pay 10% duty fee and 20% VAT.
Not to mention notarized letter and so on bullshit. And the fact that on 50$ amazon mini sound box, i paid additional 50$ for shipping.
Hope that i makes sense now, why some guys sell their amazon gift card on a good discount.