Amazon kept on telling me: Buy books on death
AN Amazon customer says he was sent ‘coded death threats’ by a call centre worker after he complained about a delivery issue.
Former special constable Michael Jacobson received sinister book recommendations from the online retailer later that day.
The macabre titles included Death, Suicide’s An Option and Follow You Home, he told BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours.
Yesterday, Amazon apologised to Mr Jacobson and said the employee, working in India, no longer works for the company.
Mr Jacobson told the radio programme that he had contacted Amazon’s help centre after having problems with a delivery in October.
He said: ‘Later that afternoon I checked my emails, and I’d received five, all from Amazon.
‘They were all ostensibly book recommendations but the titles were pretty ominous and threatening, and I was pretty taken aback and I joked with my girlfriend, who I was with at the time, about it being a death threat. The more I looked into it, I realised that they had actually been sent manually by an employee at Amazon rather than via an algorithm.’
Mr Jacobson said he felt intimidated by the emails as he had no idea who was behind them.
‘At no point did (Amazon) say, we’re confident you’re not in any danger, this individual is thousands of miles away,’ he told the programme.
Amazon carried out an investigation and discovered they had been sent by their employee in India, using the ‘share’ page function. They offered Mr Jacobson £50 as a ‘goodwill gesture’.
An Amazon spokesman said: ‘We have zero tolerance for any misuse of customer data and have apologised to the customer. The individual involved no longer works for Amazon’.
It is the latest in a series of embarrassing complaints about Amazon’s delivery service, with Prime subscribers paying £79 a year for guaranteed next-day delivery. The Advertising Standards Authority is now investigating the online giant after claims it has failed to deliver on its promise ahead of Christmas. Meanwhile a survey by Which? also found that more than half of all web customers complained their orders had not been delivered when expected in the run- up to Christmas.
‘Pretty ominous and threatening’