Assassinated by Amazon, con't

Interesting correlation. My Amazon account was assassinated just about a week after I installed a whole bunch of links to Amazon materials on several blogs and websites. By assassinating my account, those links stay intact, driving traffic to Amazon, but Amazon will never have to track or PAY ME for those referrels. Oh, and all this just happened to take place a week before Christmas, the busiest click-through time of the year.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but it’s certainly a convenient coincidence on an account that had been active for years with nary a problem. So not only is Amazon suggesting that I do all the work to create an entirely new account, with a new email ONLY for their site, but also, I would be required to go back and delete or repair all those links. Perhaps I really will have no choice but to never patronize Amazon again, but in the meantime, I’ll continue to post any replies, explanations, or lack thereof, here, for the record.

This kind of reminds me of the old phone company scams, where the telcos got caught charging millions of customers just a penny or two more on their bills … largely unnoticed by the vast majority, but resulting in serious $$$ for the telcos. If Amazon were to encourage large numbers of “micro affiliates” to go out and put links up everywhere, and then assassinate their accounts, it could result in some powerfully effective grass-roots traffic to their site. By cutting off all communication after the assassination, in the name of, “we don’t believe you are the same customer we’ve had for the past five years,” they could completely get away with this for a pretty long time; possibly forever, if nobody ever compared notes.

Mine may be only one story today, but if I share my experiences, and others see similar bad behavior, we can eventually have a real impact on the corporate miscreants. I prefer not to attribute to malice what can be sufficiently be explained by incompetence, but we’ll have to see how this saga plays out before we can truly know what Amazon is up to this time.

Onward.