Amazon Payments has been one of the longest running Manufactured Spending vehicles available, allowing a person to send $1,000 each month to another person. The funding is made by Credit Card, and then withdrawn to a bank. This is a great way to help meet minimum spends as you can put $3,000 in 3 months which knocks out most requirements.
A friend asked me recently for ideas to meet his minimum spend, and since he is living overseas I thought that Amazon Payments would be a great solution, but he got back to me to say it would only allow funding by Bank Account, with the note:
NoteYou cannot add funds to your Amazon Payments account by using a credit card.
When I find exact quotes from people my solution to dig further is to google the entire phrase, as it often brings up other peoples quotes and discussion on it – high end investigative work there! In doing so I found no immediate discussion on this, but I did get the link to Amazon Payments screen here:
That does not look good.
Next step, lets try to send a payment through from my existing account. Whilst you can do $1,000 per month I tend to split it into 2 payments of random amounts, since there is no fee to transfer you could do as many as you like. Sending a flat $1,000 is a flag in my opinion.
The transaction allowed me to select a Credit Card
And the confirmation page shows that the transaction was completed in full.
So, it looks like things are OK for existing Amazon Payment holders for now, however, over the past 6 months they have increasingly tightened the rules for Amazon Payments, demanding SSN and asked me to fax a proof of ID to them. On top of this the verbiage here on the site looks like things might be winding down, but like every Golden Goose out there, they end up getting cooked. And yes, it is perfectly fine to set up Anonymous internet profiles to comment “the Bloggers Killed it!”
Alright mate stop trying to give me a bleeding heart attack will you?
I’m here to entertain!
Heart attack here too. Whew!
I think it is because of the overseas issue, and works like that to prevent fraud out notorious crime driven countries.
Might be the case there, but when I searched for that phrase I was in NYC and it popped up on the AP page. My friend is in Japan, but has US credentials (Address, Banks, Cards)
Wait, are you speaking of America ?
This has been there since the beginning. You could never “Add Funds” to your account through a credit card, it has nothing to do with being able to send a payment to another person with a credit card.
Great to know, thanks Ed. I’ll let them know, as you can see the first thing I did was send money and it worked for me. I am surprised it has been going on as long as it has though.
Agreed, it has been going on for so long didn’t even occur to me that they might take it away.
They have definitely been tightening the belt. I have attempted to “help friends/family” set up three accounts in the last 6-9 months and all three have failed. The first lasted for 2-3 months/payments, the second lasted for half of a payment, and the third never even made it through the entire process (I called multiple times to finish the process and they would always tell me to wait a few days. I eventually lost hope). I kind of doubt the whole thing will go away anytime soon, as Amazon is use to making extremely low margins, or even losses, as they are still trying to grow many aspects of their business. Maybe this is just me being partial/hopeful/desperate/frightened.
I feel that there is a change in the air… The forums talk more about people being shut down almost immediately on account two now, I’m still going slow with my 2+2 accounts, good enough for an easy 4000 per month.