After placing an order on your Amazon account, you visit the website again and – much to your shock – find out that the account has been locked and you can’t log in by any means. If this is happening to you and you don’t know what to do, keep reading to learn how to solve this unpleasant situation.

Amazon is a company worth billions, so it’s natural that it would have money to spare on safety measures to protect its customers and their personal info. Therefore, if you happen to be locked out of your Amazon account, know that Amazon usually has good reasons for blocking your profile and the measure was necessary to safeguard your data.

Why is my Amazon account locked?

Why would Amazon lock your account? Amazon proceeds by doing so whenever it detects suspicious activity on your account, including:

• account created using fake information
• entering wrong password many times
• multiple IP addresses in different locations
• unusually high number of orders placed
• high volume of returned items
• overuse of Gift Cards

Let’s consider the first, most important case, the one in which your account becomes locked if you enter inaccurate information. Dropshipping is the main reason for which people use fake info on their Amazon accounts. What is dropshipping, you might ask? It’s a business model that allows online businesses to sell their products to their buyers without having to stock the items themselves. And when a dropshipping store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer.

Many people believe that dropshipping is not allowed by Amazon (it actually is), so they resort to creating accounts with fake info (name, shipping address, billing address) to get their business going. But here’s the problem: once you place an order from your second fake profile, Amazon will notice that some of the info you entered to sign in is bogus, and will eventually lock your account. That happens because Amazon matches your billing address associated with your credit/debit card and your default Amazon address. Your account will most likely be locked if these two don’t match, since the system will consider it as attempted fraud.

What to do to unlock your account

If you didn’t enter fake info into your Amazon account and you’re not scamming people, but your account got locked anyway, rest assured, because unlocking it will be easier. You’ll most likely get an email from Amazon telling you how to unlock your account. In the email, Amazon usually asks you to send your credit card statement with your billing address on it, which shows the transactions made on the website, and also sometimes a copy of your ID, bill or credit card details via Amazon’s fax line.

In the case that you don’t receive any email after being locked out of your account, try to contact Amazon’s Customer Service via email, phone (US only) or chat (US only) and get help to solve the issue. Regular customer service representatives can’t unlock your Amazon account, instead it can only be unlocked by:

• an Account Specialist
• a Supervisor

You’ll be able to get in touch with one of these two professionals at your request.