Amazon owe me £53,000 and refuse to trace the funds

If it's in the UK as the reference to GBP suggests I would send them a Statutory Demand.

https://www.gov.uk/statutory-demands

When I was a Finance Director I found this to be by far the most effective way of getting payment from Debtors. It's basically going for the jugular by initiating winding up proceedings against the company. They always pay up rather than fight this.

himinlomax 3 years ago |

Someone wrote:

> I would suggest doing what i did with ebay, find their head office address and send a signed for letter stating all the transactions that need paying and proof that funds were not received

That's what I'd do, because that's the SOP in France and probably all of Europe. A registered letter / "signed for" letter / lettre recommandée / whatever it's called in your jurisdiction has some legal weight whereby the procedural clock starts ticking once it's delivered. The receiving entity is pretty much obliged to respond in a timely matter and escalate internally, because otherwise if the matter eventually goes before a court, they will, among other things, not be able to argue ignorance or negligence on the part of the sender. You can also typically send an electronic certified letter whereby the post office prints and delivers the letter, thereby effectively acting as a notary since they have a copy of the content.

avidiax 3 years ago |

I feel like we need a "Jeff Foxworthy" rule for determining anti-trust.

"If your counterparties are afraid to assert their rights, you might be a monopoly".

---------

For OP's case, I feel that someone changed his payment details, and now this dept. at Amazon is covering up and hoping that OP will go away.

gruez 3 years ago | |

Does Amazon really have a monopoly on custom printed tshirts? I didn't even know they offered such a service, and can think of plenty of other alternatives.

jeffwask 3 years ago | | |

No, but they have a massive one in the online sales space and there are plenty of articles talking about if you cared to look.

tromp 3 years ago |

Amazon claim they made a payment but the payee's bank shows no evidence of it.

There is this thing called MT103 which allows a payer to prove that they did in fact make a payment. That should resolve things, right?

But no, Amazon refuses to supply it, and says that's final. WTF?

pjc50 3 years ago |

The comment is correct that there are (fairly straightforward) legal processes for recovering funds. Unpaid invoices happen all the time. Sometimes you do have to send a written threat of legal action to get paid. Sometimes it does make it all the way to court.

They are also right that there's a risk of being blacklisted by Amazon, but are you really benefiting from a relationship with them when they don't pay you?

(UK: County Court Judgement; Scotland: Sheriff Court)

mcv 3 years ago | |

The have gotten paid for the next month, though. Most payments work fine, and they probably want to continue working with Amazon. It's just that this one payment ran into some sort of problem that this particular team at Amazon doesn't care to solve.

You can absolutely sue them, and that was also my first thought, but maybe it's better to escalate to some other channels at Amazon first. That might be cheaper and faster, and is less likely to ruin your working relationship with them.

millzlane 3 years ago | | |

Honest question: Who do you call when the proper support channels tell you there is no further info they will provide to you? If they won't even tell you who you can escalate to investigate further?

mcv 3 years ago | | |

Well, the reddit discussion suggests mailing jeff@amazon.com.

Clearly the team behind this sucks and needs to get reprimanded by someone a bit higher up, so that's who you mail. If that doesn't work either, you can always sue them later. But I'd first let your lawyer write them. That can sometimes shake them up. Maybe Legal will realise that they really do owe this money and they'd better avoid a lawsuit.

treis 3 years ago | | |

You write a letter to the legal department.

em-bee 3 years ago |

Amazon have advised that the payment has been made and there is nothing else they can do. This is their final decision and if I want to trace the payment I need to contact my bank.

which is wrong. payment traces must always be made from the sender side. the receiving bank has much less information to even figure out where to start searching.

i believe this is law too at least in the EU, but probably in the UK as well.

cripblip 3 years ago |

The lack of instrumentation for transfers like this is infuriating.

I used Transferwise for years until one day a transfer (US/UK) did not arrive. Transferwise said they sent it, HSBC said they did not receive, I was stuck in the middle and both TW and HSBC support were incredibly unhelpful. It got to the point I was looking up job functions in HSBC money transfer on linked in to try and understand the process from an engineer.

Somewhere in the ether must be show me all transfers to my bank account number with source.

Eventually the money arrived; I am no longer a TW customer.

Havoc 3 years ago |

Chances of this being a f up at an (intermediary) bank are very high. We see this all the time - random months fail because someone changed something in the chain of banks

That said amazon refusing to provide tracing info is ridiculous. Like being asked to find a bug in software but you’re not allowed to see the source.

jeffwask 3 years ago |

Imagine the future of business where it's impossible to actually talk to anyone, get a consistent contact on an issue, or even resolve your problem because you are trapped in a web of canned responses and AI chat bots.

badRNG 3 years ago | |

This has been reality for over a decade. You already need to either know an insider or go viral on HN/Reddit/Twitter to get anything resolved by a human

dboreham 3 years ago |

You just know that somewhere in all this there's an FTP command that failed.

commandlinefan 3 years ago | |

And a programmer who could resolve it, but he can't even spend time looking at it because it hasn't been approved as a JIRA ticket with an attached estimate from the pool of available developer hours by the time tracking approval board.