Struggling with bogus Amazon charges

Dear John: When checking my AmEx statements for January and February, I discovered more than $4,000 in Amazon charges made to my card but not purchased through my Amazon account.

Please look at the attached police report info with the name of the detective in charge, as well as the rest of the info provided by AmEx.

March also saw some more charges. Since January, I have been shut off from my Amazon account and just this morning I was told that there are pending charges worth over $1,000 that I have to pay to restore my account.

I am 77 years old, and mostly order books, food and garden supplies. These charges were for electronic equipment and games. The items were delivered to Amazon pickup sites and sent to other states.

I’m in the process of trying to unravel this mess. I have been told by reputable sources that Amazon has a policy of shutting people off it they deny a charge.

Is this a case for the courts or what? I sincerely hope you can make this right. V.H.

Dear V.H.: I have never, ever had trouble with anything bought through Amazon. And I use Amazon a lot.

And lucky for you, that proved true this time as well.

I contacted Amazon on your behalf and within four hours the company had fixed all your problems.

Amazon wouldn’t share the details with me because of privacy issues. But you did.

“All of a sudden they have absolved me from my crimes,” you wrote to me. You say that you believed this has been fixed before. But now — I think — it is fixed for good. “Let’s hope your intervention fixed it,” you wrote.

“Gracias, merci, grazie, thanks,” you wrote.

Qay’be’ — that’s Klingon if you want to look it up.

Dear John: I took your advice and went with a Capital One 360 Money Market Account. I have a credit card with it and I like its commercials. Got 1.5 percent on my savings — much better than 0.08 percent at Chase. J.B.

Dear J.B.: Glad to help.

Dear John: Automation and robots is a subject much in the news. And my concern is that, as far as I know, automatons and their kin are not in the business of shopping or paying income taxes, thereby adding that burden to those who have to do that.

So what about this suggestion? For every individual job lost through robotic takeovers, the owners or whoever is responsible for the decision to introduce them should be charged the same amount of income tax that has been lost, in addition to some percentage to represent loss of sales taxes. W.I.P.

Dear W.I.P.: I’m sorry, but John Crudele’s column is now written by a robot.

And because of that, we are not permitted to comment on anything related to our kin.