Amazon restricted my account and will not refund gift card balance of £200. Totally blindsided. Any advice??

Have you tried Martin Lewis, money saving expert, or the Daily mails’s money expert- they have sold many complicated issues.?

It’s not, it’s to avoid money laundering.

op, if you changed to lockers why didn’t you have that as the default. ?

I don’t understand continuing to order parcels with this known issue. Of course they were going to block you.

Them not refunding a gift card is just odd though.

@Longtimelurkerfinallyposts because it's irrelevant that she picked the wrong address and wrong payment method - both of those are her fault, not Amazon's and they are under no obligation to support her by refunding a penny.

I don't understand why people keep commenting that Amazon won't/ don't have to release the gift card funds to the OP, whether because she didn't but them herself or any other reason.
What the OP actually wants is for them to refund her credit card for the £170 taken from it to pay for her latest order - as this was not the method of payment she intended to use for it - and apply this purchase cost to her Amazon gift card account instead. Presumably this would leave her with about £30 in that account to make "digital purchases" in future.
And having suffered from this disastrous level of 'customer service' hopefully she'll find alternative retailers for future purchases/ deliveries (which has the bonus effect of not propping up Amazon's business model/ bad treatment of workers).

There was a case on Rip Off Britain this morning about another issue with Amay.

You have to keep trying.

Ah Op, I hope the amazon person you deal with can sort things out. I would mention that you will be contacting Rip Off Britain television programme as firms hate the adverse publicity. If not then contact the consumer editor of The Guardian. Again adverse publicity is not liked and usually they offer an amount of compensation. I hope you let us know how you got on. I sometimes contact companies saying I will start a campaign by asking 10 people I know to boycott them and for those 10 people to add another 10. I then say I am only an OAP who wondered what could be done. In fairness my DH once sent an email as Farm Foods were not stocking raspberry ripple ice cream after Covid and he got sent a voucher so he could buy another flavour. Recently we gained one pound from Lidl as we got home and found we hadn't been given the discounted price. Asda give good rewards if anything goes wrong so some places are better than others. Raspberry ripple is now available .

I've not used Amazon since they delivered an empty box then said we had to call the police and get an investigation as to why there was nothing in the box and they couldn't consider a refund because it was somehow our fault 🤔

The police were helpful and I must say patient, but unimpressed. I found it unnecessarily stressful.

You can phone Amazon and eventually speak to a human. It's very difficult to do but possible. Or it was at the time pre AI that we did it

Since this fiasco, I have not used Amazon. It's about four years now. There is life beyond, and I feel very good about it but you've gotta do what's right for you.

Why did you continue placing so many orders with a company that kept fucking up delivery?

I always complain if this happens and point out the stupidity of the driver. It is sheer laziness and being a bit thick to dump a parcel on a doorstep and not try the (always unlocked) porch door or door bell.

Ive had one parcel ruined due to the rain, and one was potentially stolen as it had gone when i got home although there was a photo of it on my doorstep.

the cheeky bastards tried to make me wait a period of time (I think a week) before getting a refund to see “whether it turned up at a neighbours house” or “another resident had taken it in the house and I hadn’t seen it”.

if their dozy cunt of a driver did their job properly I wouldn’t have been in that position. I wasn’t out of pocket for long 😉

As an FYI its in the T&C of ordering that drivers may not always be able to follow safe place instructions. They cannot usually call a number that is listed in the notes, especially if not connected to customer account. They cant leave specific items in safe places. And photos may not always be possible, restricted items, confidential addresses would usually mean no photos.

Also Trading Standards doesn't do as much as you think, it just gets your contact booted to the above email aliases for a slightly more specialised team to handle. Cut out the middle man and handle direct through the email is better, cos every time you call, it will say you are involved with TS and the agent cannot discuss the case, they have to arrange a call back from that team.

If they suspect fraudulent activity on the account, which they clearly do, they CANNNOT refund the value of the gift cards to the OP because money laundering regulations require them solely to refund to the origin.

Of course Amazon are going to be "sticklers" about complying with anti-money laundering regulations. Can you imagine headlines if they didn't?

Their returns policy is that they don't refund gift cards once applied to an account. They apparently may consider it if it hadn't been redeemed.

That is perfectly in accordance with UK law. You'll also have the same thing with the likes of Tesco, IKEA etc

This is about fraud prevention. OP hasn't even asked to have their account reviewed and reinstated yet.

OP- have you contacted Trading Standards?

You abused their returns simples. Same happened to me last year on ebay 20 yrs account. I abused however after 3 months restriction lifted.

Stop acting as if its amazon fault. You should also clearly give address next to flat etc etc. I do as we have b c d properties