Amazon has done something extraordinary.
It has closed a customer case without resolution.
After weeks of correspondence and documentation, I was told that my locked-out royalties and account access were now beyond help. The matter was, in their words, final.
The problem? A known technical failure that prevents valid international phone numbers from being accepted during Amazon’s own two-step verification process.
The request? That I record another video of the entire login process and provide timestamps to help their engineers “reproduce” the issue.
In other words: the customer must now debug Amazon’s systems.
Leadership starts where responsibility ends
Every leader knows this moment.
Something breaks, a system fails, and everyone looks to someone else.
At that point, responsibility either rises or disappears.
Amazon’s reply was revealing not because of what it said, but because of what it refused to say.
No ownership. No accountability. Just repetition.
That is not a customer-service failure.
That is a leadership failure.
Automation without responsibility
When companies grow to planetary scale, something quiet happens inside their systems.
Accountability dissolves.
Responses are automated.
Escalations are scripted.
Empathy becomes procedural.
The human beings inside the system are often good people. But they no longer have agency. They can only repeat the process, not challenge it.
What begins as efficiency ends as avoidance.
The illusion of closure
Amazon’s Executive Customer Relations team wrote that I had reached “the highest level of customer service within our company”.
That is a chilling sentence.
It means there is no one left to escalate to.
The hierarchy ends where accountability should begin.
Declaring a matter closed does not resolve it. It simply returns the burden to the person who raised it.
Leaders do this too, every day, in companies, teams, and governments. They close the file, reframe the story, or rename the problem until it disappears from view.
That is not closure. That is abdication.
Systems fail when leadership fails
Technology does not make this problem new. It only magnifies it.
When a trillion-dollar company can’t fix a known error because “the system” doesn’t allow it, what we are seeing is not a technical limitation. It is a leadership one.
A system without accountability is just bureaucracy at scale.
And when the customer becomes the quality-assurance department, you no longer have a service. You have a brand that has stopped listening.
What real leaders do
Real leaders do not hide behind process.
They step forward.
They take ownership.
They act.
They understand that the purpose of leadership is not to avoid failure, but to respond to it with integrity.
Because every time a system fails, leadership begins.
The question is never what went wrong?
It is who is willing to make it right?
Leadership takeaway
Accountability is not procedural.
It is personal.
It requires courage to face failure, humility to admit it, and enough moral intelligence to act before someone else has to.
Your customers can forgive an error.
They remember the silence.
Lesson for Amazon
Amazon calls itself “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
Perhaps it is time for all of us, as leaders, to ask what happens when “customer-centric” no longer means accountable.
Because when accountability vanishes, systems don’t fail. Leaders do.
My email to Amazon and the Attorney General of Washington State:
Subject: Formal escalation: Withheld royalties and unresolved KDP access failure
To: jeff@amazon.com; executive.relations@amazon.com; ecr@amazon.com
Cc: Washington State Attorney General Consumer Protection Division
Hello Amazon Executive Relations team,
This message serves as a formal escalation regarding an ongoing Kindle Direct Publishing account access failure that has left my royalties inaccessible for several weeks, despite exhaustive correspondence with Executive Customer Relations.
The issue is well-documented and easily reproducible internally. It involves a phone-number validation failure during the two-step verification process, occurring before the OTP handoff to Amazon’s authentication microservice. The error message “The phone number you’ve entered is not valid” appears consistently when using any valid international format (+84, +61, etc.).
Amazon’s own internal technical team could reproduce this within one minute using any non-US number formatted in E.164. Despite multiple explanations and evidence provided, I have now received a final notice from Executive Customer Relations stating that no further insight or action will be provided.
To be clear:
- This is a systemic backend validation fault, not a user-side error.
- The failure has resulted in blocked access to my account and withheld royalty funds, a clear violation of Amazon’s payment obligations under the KDP Terms of Service.
- The request that I, as a customer, perform unpaid diagnostic work and produce new evidence each time the issue is escalated is not a reasonable resolution process for a company of Amazon’s scale.
Given that this matter now extends beyond technical troubleshooting and into contractual and consumer rights territory, I am requesting immediate review by a member of Amazon’s Legal and Compliance leadership team.
Specifically, I request:
- Confirmation that my account access will be reinstated, or that royalties will be released by alternative means.
- The name and contact details of the Executive Customer Relations Director overseeing these escalations.
- Written acknowledgment that Amazon, not its customers, bears responsibility for reproducing and resolving authentication failures within its own systems.
This correspondence is being shared with the Washington State Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division and, if necessary, with media representatives tracking systemic failures in multinational customer-relations practices.
I remain ready to cooperate professionally, but I require a clear and accountable path to resolution, not repetition.
Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your prompt acknowledgment.
Best regards,
Lee Hopkins,
B.Sc. (Hons.) AppliedPsych&Soc, Dip.MgtStudies, M.CounsPsych
Counselling Psychologist | Author | Lecturer
Co-author of research on the Psychological Contract (cited internationally)
Author of ‘Understanding AuDHD (3rd edition)’ & ‘Embracing Neurodiversity’ and many other books on Amazon.
Đà Lạt, Vietnam
mindblownpsychology.com | vietleadershipcoach.com
