Like many, during the pandemic we came to rely on the ease of Amazon ordering to help make it through. (I know, the good workers of Amazon have had a tough time of it, and a lot of us didn’t help, but that’s a story for another day.) We ordered a fair amount, and definitely got our money’s worth from our Prime membership. When a charge for $13.92 showed up one month, I honestly didn’t think about it, because after all, it was just another Amazon charge, right? 

Then the other day I was looking at Quicken and our transactions and happened to notice that we were charged that amount on May 22 AND May 27. I thought, hmm that’s odd. I scrolled back a bit and noticed that I was also charged that on April 22 and 27. When I looked back, I noticed this: 

Feb 22 $13.92 AMAZON PRIME AMAZON 

March 22 $13.92 AMAZON PRIME AMAZON 

April 22 $13.92 AMAZON PRIME AMAZON 

April 27 $13.92 AMAZON PRIME AMAZON 

May 22 $13.92 AMAZON PRIME AMAZON 

May 27 $13.92 AMAZON PRIME AMAZON 

June 8 $13.92 AMAZON PRIME AMAZON 

What the heck? It really hadn’t caught my eye at first, I guess I was thinking that it was a monthly Prime charge instead of annual, however I looked back and realized we paid our Prime membership back in December. The transaction showed the same, AMAZON PRIME AMAZON. (Note: If you make a purchase from Amazon, it probably is going to show up on a credit card as either from AMAZON MARKETPLACE or AMAZON.COM*G7XXXXXX or something with a similar syntax. So, it’s easy to differentiate the transactions.)  

I tried to talk to someone at Amazon about it and all they could tell me was it appeared that I have two accounts, one of which ends in a phone number with 2 digits that I’ve never had. Because of that, they couldn’t send me a confirmation code and asked if I had a transaction number. I didn’t as AMEX doesn’t have them in the statements, so they refused to do anything else for me. I let them know I would take the next step, which was to open a dispute with my credit card company since I wasn’t going to allow them to continue to charge me for something they couldn’t explain, and I didn’t purchase or authorize. Oddly enough, that didn’t seem to faze the agent at all. I would think companies wouldn’t like having fraud cases against them but maybe Amazon is so big now that Jeff Bezos doesn’t care about those kinds of things. After all, what’s one more fraud case more or less in the grand scheme of things…will it stop him from going into the stratosphere? Probably not. 

So that’s exactly what I did. I called Amex, and they were wonderful, setting up the fraud case, closing the card down and issuing me a new card, and starting the process to refund my money. It will take about a month for it to be investigated and resolved although I actually had the money back within a week and the new card in under 10 days. I also was able to keep using my Apple Pay, plus all recurring transactions that had been set up for payments will be automatically paid as well, I don’t need to do anything with them. I only need to update payments on one-time purchases as I make them. 

The weird thing is, as I think about it…so did someone get ahold of my card, and open a second account in my name? It sure sounds like that’s what happened. I can’t close it down, since I can’t get into it, and don’t have the username associated with the account, but at least I can feel better about having the card replaced. I just wish I had more recourse with Amazon. I did set up an account years ago as a business account when I was thinking about doing some selling there, but then decided that it was easier to work with eBay and I never completed all the steps needed to make the business account live. I checked it and that was inactive, with no phone number, email or anything attached to it, so that couldn’t be it but did close it down just to be sure. 

There’s a good lesson here, however, to keep a close eye on your electronic transactions, and make sure you know what everything is for. Credit card companies will stand behind you and help you, as long as you have done your due diligence and can provide them with some facts. 

Quick update: I wrote this post a while ago and it sat in my drafts unpublished. I just did a quick search to see if there were any additional charges for “Amazon Prime Amazon”, and there weren’t, thank goodness.