Amazon Freezes My Account for Buying Lots of 50¢ Gift Cards

Buying lots of 50¢ gift cards on Amazon? Read this first…

50¢ Gift Cards, Why We Care

Amazon gift cards come in many denominations, as little as 50¢ or as much as $2,000.

But first, a word is in order: why would we be interested in buying 50¢ gift cards?

There are a few reasons:

  • We may want to  purchase 50¢ gift cards due to the unique reward-structure of the new Amex Everyday card and Everyday Preferred card. In order to maximize rewards, you’ll need to use the card 20 times or more per month. Amex is hoping that you’ll make the card your go-to card, but if you have other cards that you like to use, you can just purchase a bunch of 50¢ Amazon gift cards until you meet the transaction threshold.
  • We often mention bonuses which various banks will give for opening a  new checking account. Usually, these bonuses have certain requirements involved, such as making a certain number of purchases using the debit card that comes with the checking account. Instead of dealing with making a bunch of small purchases at the grocery store, we can just purchase 50¢ gift cards on Amazon to meet the transaction threshold.
  • Similarly, many regular checking accounts come with monthly maintenance fees unless certain requirements are met. Sometimes, making some purchases with the attached debit card will keep the account fee-free. 50¢ gift cards are an easy way to take care of that.
  • Finally, suppose you have $.50 or $1.23 remaining on a Visa/Mastercard/Amex gift card. One easy way of draining the gift card is to purchase an Amazon gift card for the remaining amount. That amount will then be combined with your Amazon balance to be used for future purchases.

Of course, all these ideas will only work for someone who shops on Amazon. I personally don’t shop too much on Amazon, but I definitely make an occasional purchase. When I do, I’ll often use up my running Amazon balance on those purchases.

My Story

I got a promotional offer from my local bank that if I use my debit card 25 times in November, I’ll receive a $25 cash bonus. (This was an offer targeted to me as an existing customer. Don’t worry, if this was a publicly available offer, I’d have told you guys already.) Instead of using my debit card on regular purchases, I decided to just take the easy route and buy twenty-five 50¢ gift cards on Amazon.

On November 17, I made four 50¢ gift card purchases. On November 19, I made ten. Then on November 20, I wanted to finish up with another eleven orders, to meet the 25-transaction requirement.

Here’s a look at my gmail account:

 

 

The first eight orders went fine. But then I got an email from Amazon stating that my account was frozen:

I tried logging into my Amazon account, and I got this:

 

The reason for the freeze stated by Amazon is that “the billing details of your card did not match the details on file with the card issuer”. But I think that’s like the generic “we are unable to verify your payment information” that so many online retailers will use when they want to  reject your order because of various fraud concerns. I’m confident that the address was correct. Possibly, I wrote “st” instead of “street”, or something like that, but nothing more. Additionally, I had already many orders with the card and they all went through fine.

Apparently, there was some fraud-detection system which I bumped into. I made at least ten (and possibly eleven) orders in quick succession before getting the account-freeze email. The first 8 orders went through completely, and I received the 50¢ gift cards immediately, as usual. Orders 9 & 10 got the regular order-confirmation, but I never received the gift cards (and I never got charged). Instead they sent me the account-freeze email.

Follow-Up

At first, I was a little amused. Based on the wording of the email I thought my Amazon account would be up-and-running within the hour.

But after 6 days…I wasn’t too amused.

Of course, like a good boy, I followed Amazon’s instructions in the above email and sent them the billing information of the debit card I was using. I immediately got an automated reply email from Amazon:

 

Okay, so far so good.

Then I waited a few days. No response. Since it was over a weekend, I gave them a little bit longer. Still no response.

Finally, after five full days, I was already annoyed, and I called Amazon telling them so. The CSR did think it was too long, and she even tried getting her supervisor to intervene, but the verdict was that the only one who can unfreeze my account is the account-verification department, which is only reachable via email. She’s going to email them for me, and I’ll get a response within 24 hours. She twice guaranteed me a response within 24 hours.

I waited 24 hours. No response.

Now I called back really annoyed, and the CSR said that she didn’t know why I didn’t get a reply. She’ll email them again.

“But why am I supposed to believe that this time I’ll get a reply?”

After some back-and-forth, she did some research and realized that the account-verification department had in-fact replied to her email. They said that they can’t do anything about it since it pertains to an Amazon seller’s account. I need to contact the Amazon seller’s department.

Now, it’s true that I have an Amazon seller account, and it’s also true that my seller account was frozen along with my buyer account, but the freezing was completely unrelated to my seller account.

The CSR told me that she’ll relay that info to the account-verification department, but I should email Amazon seller and see what happens. I sent an email to the Amazon seller address that I was told to send to, and I wrote the entire story of why I was contacting them. I prefaced the email in bold: “Please read this entire email before telling me to contact a different departement.”

Finally…

Within a few hours, I got the long-awaited email saying that my account was finally unfrozen.

 

I logged in to my Amazon account, and indeed it was up and running.

The only damage that remained was that all my credit and debit cards were gone from the account, so I had to add everything again. My gift card balance remained intact.

How Much is Safe?

I’m not going to give a clear answer on this question, but here are my thoughts:

  • I mentioned that I’m unsure if it was after the tenth order or the eleventh that I got frozen. I’m inclined to believe that it was after the eleventh. This would also explain why I was previously able to do ten orders without a problem. (Of course, that could be explained other ways too.) Based on this, I’d recommend not doing eleven orders without a break.
  • In my case, all the orders were placed in quick succession. I’d guess that if you spread the orders out over the day, you can do more orders without a problem.
  • There’s a slight chance that staggering the value of the gift cards could be less of a red flag. In my case, all the orders were exactly 50¢.
  • Amazon did mention something about the address on the card being incorrect. While I’m fairly confident that the address was correct, it’s possible there was an insignificant discrepancy which contributed to the problem. Possibly, without that added factor, my account wouldn’t have been frozen.

Practically, I’ve recently been doing five in quick succession without a problem. If I need more than that, I’ll do it a different day, or at least take a break between orders.

Epilogue

So what do you think was the first thing I did after gaining access to my Amazon account? Why, I ordered some 50¢ gift cards, or course. After all, I still had 3 more transactions necessary to meet my above-mentioned bank bonus…

Has anyone done more than ten orders straight without a problem? Has anyone else gotten frozen by Amazon? Please let us know in the comments.
    Chuck
  • On December 15, 2014, 06:00

View Comments (37)

  • PSA: Also don't buy 1-cent ebook from Amazon for 10 plus times....
    It's not worth risking your account getting shutdown or blocked

  • Earlier this year I did 100x (50x for me, 50x for P2) $0.50 reloads with my Citizen's Bank debit card on Amazon. Not a single issue or notification at all. These were done on January 28 and January 29, 2021. Last year I did a couple rounds of 10x (also $0.50) reloads as well with no issues with another random credit union debit card.

    Seems to be a selective problem...

  • PSA: Amazon can close your account for reloading small amounts. I can't recommend to others to do small reloads. Mine was closed 2 weeks ago, and I'm in the process of trying to recover it.

    I've had my Amazon account for over 10 years, and have spent thousands there. Even more in the past year due to the pandemic. Like others in the DOC or Reddit churning community, I've purchased tons of Visa prepaid gift cards over the years. Usually I've been using them up by prepaying my bills.

    In December, I had 3 visa prepaids with <$5 that I wanted to drain, so I added them to my Amazon account to reload my gift card balance. After making a purchase, I received an email saying "We have temporarily placed your Amazon account on hold and canceled any pending orders or subscriptions because we detected unusual activity on it." They wanted me to fax over banking statements for the card ending in XXXX (one of the visa prepaids). Obviously, prepaid gift cards don't generate proper billing statements. I called Amazon and explained this to them, and they told me to just upload the transaction history, and that an account specialist would unlock the account. A few days later, I received an email saying "After a review of your details, we have determined it is necessary to close your Amazon.com account. Any pending orders have been canceled."

    I've been calling into Amazon since, but it seems like the representatives cannot see any of your account details at this point, and just takes down your information to forward to an account specialist, which I guess was previously called the "account-verification department" based on DOC's post. The account specialists are email only, and they just seem to respond back with automated responses, I've never received a personalized email from them. Some people have had success with emailing Jeff, and this will be probably be my next step.

    From searching online through various forums and Reddit, it seems like these account closures have been very common, especially in the past year. And it seems like the closures usually have to do with gift cards to some capacity. I've also read that once your account is closed, they'll close down any associated accounts as well as ban your billing and shipping address, which obviously makes it very difficult to be an Amazon customer afterwards. They'll also close any new accounts you make if you try to order to your current address.

    I don't know if DOC has posted any recent posts regarding Amazon frozen/closed accounts, but please make an update post asking if this has happened to others recently. I know many of your readers probably have similar Amazon behaviors that they may consider "irregular". Thank you, J.

    TLDR: Please don't add prepaid gift cards to your account to reload your gift card balance. If Amazon asks you to send in a statement, you will not be able to produce one as it is not a proper banking statement. Amazon will lock and close your account, and potentially permanently ban your address from ever receiving orders from Amazon.

    • Agreed. I bought a lot of 1-cent ebooks on Amazon today.
      My account was also locked/blocked temporarily.
      Thankfully I called them and answered a lot of their questions to verify my identity.
      Some are tough questions.
      My account was locked and is working fine now (products getting shipped, returned items got refunded).
      I won't do it again. It's not worth the risk of getting your Amazon account closed.

    • While what happened to you is lousy, the line I quoted below doesn't seem accurate. It appears using a prepaid card on your account is the primary (or entire) reason for your banning. Wouldn't you agree?

      "PSA: Amazon can close your account for reloading small amounts."

    • Have you gotten your account reinstated? My Amazon account was just closed down a few days ago as well for reloading my account from a prepaid visa gift card. I have called in, but was told that an account specialist would contact me within 48 hours.

    • Could you advise whether you used a credit card or a debit card? If a credit card, which one? Thanks.

      • Sorry, email didn't notify me of your reply. Debit card. I have done many more .50 reloads at 10 a day since, with no problem.

    • I haven't heard of Amazon being super sensitive about that. Lots of people use two spouses, for example, on the same account. And lots of people have more than one billing address on an account. So I'd guess it would typically be fine.

      • FYI: As of 2021, we have a single Student Prime account with frequent usage by credit cards from 4 different people for ~3 years. All have the same billing address, but there are three different frequently used ship-to addresses (2 kids away in college with their own cards), and ~10 infrequently used ship-to addresses (friend's houses, AirBnB's, etc). We have not had any problems so far (But I just did 7 small reloads today after reading the article, and before reading these comments :) ...I think I stop for a few hours)

  • I was doing 0.5 with 16 times in one days, and everything is fine...didn't see nothing wrong,
    the reason why i'm doing that is im try to get Discovery bank debit card reward,so yes i made it and i get the reward , and i contuned like 5 days everyday likes around 10~20 i cant remeber it
    that is the day i bought it...

    ORDER PLACED
    December 11, 2015
    TOTAL
    $0.50

  • Please I need help! my amazon account was blocked and after sending the over email, fax and even the phone what they asked for, they still didn't unblocked my account, till I email at jeff@amazon.com to see how can I use the balance that I had left and they answered back saying that my account was reinstated, however, the next day i tried to make a purchase and the blocked me again. I write again t them and they told me that my account was blocked for beeing related to another closed account (how is that possible since this is my first account), I emailed them again saying that whay could I do to use the balance left and the told me that "Since you raised concerns about the GC balance in account, I would like to inform you that the GC has been unlocked from your account"

    What does that mean? they erased the balance left or they will give it to me to use in another account? my account still blocked.

  • I reload my own amazon gift card online for 1 or 2 dollars each transaction. I don't think I usually do more than 5 or 6 at one time. I also use this to finish off small amounts(1.30) left over on visa GCs.

  • Be careful with Amazon and these small debit card charges.
    They will target your acct and attempt to steal your Gift card balance if you do this.
    If you have a high Gift card balance and you do this you will be more of a target.
    Its just like what airlines do to frequent flyers, if you have lots of miles they FIND ways to kick you out of the program and steal your miles. And just like airlines that are protected by Supreme Court rulings, Amazon is protected by its T&C and arbitration clauses, except in a few states. They will steal your gift card balances just like they do for closing accounts of customers who do too many returns. You will not get that money back.
    Be very careful.

  • I setup allowance today with my discover debit card. I managed 12 transactions before being locked on the 13th. Now I must wait like you did. Hopefully they don't take a week since I do a majority of my shopping with them.

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