When the world’s largest online retailer asks an unpaid customer to debug its own systems, you know something has gone very wrong.
Amazon’s Executive Customer Relations—those mysterious figures known only as “Ethan R.” and “Angelique”—have now admitted they cannot resolve a simple phone verification glitch without asking me to supply yet another video walkthrough, complete with timestamps, showing their own system fail in real time.
This after weeks of “escalations,” apologies, and platitudes about how much they “understand my frustration.”
Let’s pause on that for a moment. I’m a psychologist and writer, not a systems engineer. Yet somehow, I’ve been asked to film myself attempting to log in, as though this problem originates with my thumbs rather than Amazon’s backend validation layer.
Here’s the truth I spelled out to them in my latest email (screenshots below):
“The issue occurs before the One Time Password process even begins, which means the fault lies inside Amazon’s own validation layer, not at the point of user input.”
In other words, their code—not my behaviour—is broken.
Their own engineers could reproduce this error in under a minute simply by trying to sign in to a Kindle Direct Publishing account using any valid non-US phone number formatted correctly (for example, +84 for Vietnam or +61 for Australia).
The error “The phone number you’ve entered is not valid” would appear instantly.
I even cited known patterns from KDP, AWS, and Seller Central forums, where developers have already confirmed that the issue stems from Amazon’s authentication microservice failing to pass the phone number correctly to its One Time Password provider—usually Amazon Connect or Twilio.
That’s not a customer problem. That’s a system-architecture problem.
So, in my reply, I laid it out plainly:
“If Amazon wishes me to continue supplying data and video evidence to help its engineers debug internal code, I’ll be pleased to issue a formal invoice. My consulting rate is USD $1,000 per hour.”
Because at this point, that’s what I’m doing: unpaid consulting for one of the richest companies on Earth.
To make matters more absurd, when I cc’d legal@amazon.com, the email bounced.
The mailbox is full.
The legal inbox of Amazon—the trillion-dollar company building “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric” empire—is full.
I have now forwarded the entire exchange to Doug Harrington, Dharmesh Mehta, Steve Downer, and the Washington State Attorney General’s consumer protection unit with a single line:
“This case has now crossed the threshold from technical failure to consumer rights issue.”
If Amazon wants to fix its systems, it can do so in-house.
If it wants to outsource that work to me, it can pay my invoice.
Until then, the silence continues to speak volumes.
Lesson for Amazon
When organisations stop listening, they stop learning.
Ethan and Angelique are likely good people trapped in a bad system—one that values protocol over problem-solving, and “case numbers” over accountability.
Leaders, here’s the truth: your customers don’t expect perfection.
They expect proportionality—an appropriate, human response to a solvable issue.
When the fix is simple and the system insists on delay, what fails isn’t technology. It’s leadership.
Screenshots
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