Some nefarious, unauthorized person “may have” accessed Joseph’s Amazon account. If you’re thinking, “So what? it’s just an e-commerce account,” note that he not only owns a Kindle and many annotated books for it, but has also now lost his purchase history and his wish list. Sure, Amazon has offered him a gift card to re-purchase the books he lost, but he’s not really keen to trust the company again.

I received an e-mail from Amazon last week stating that someone “may” have accessed my account unlawfully and consequently they have decided to permanently close my account.

I have been a Amazon customer for the last 8 years, was an amazon prime member and have spent thousand of dollars with the company in the last couple years alone, (I have also never returned any item purchased from them or had any sort of other dispute or complaint to their customer service) yet when I asked them to do me the courtesy of explaining why they shut down my account since I am convinced it’s a mistake on their part not actual fraud they have refused to speak to me and keep sending me the same form e-mail asking me to simply open a new account with them and keep shopping….

The only problem, is that losing your amazon account after 8 years of purchases is not that simple, not only I have I permanently lost all my order history, shipping address for tons of friends and family and my 5 page wish list neither of which I have a record of anywhere else, but I soon discovered that it also meant losing hundreds of dollars of Kindle books I have purchased from them. Amazon’s solution to that is just to offer me a gift card for the amount I spent on Kindle books so I can repurchase them all individually on the new account I’m supposed to open with them.

But as I have the nasty habit of heavily highlighting, bookmarking and annotating all the books I read, it means that they just trashed the countless hours I spent reading and taking notes in my books!

As a service provider, I find it ludicrous that a company would be allowed to erase the content of a product they have sold you without ever checking in with you first, or even making an attempt to an apology and rectification.

So before you start replacing the hard copy of all your favorite books with Kindle versions like I foolishly did, keep in mind that Amazon apparently has the right to delete them all without as much as a warning or an apology.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.