I graduated from college several years ago after using an AWS account with free student credits for a tiny class project. The project only supported a single demo with dummy data, and I believed I had shut down all resources when the course ended. I have not used the account in about two years, but I've recently noticed recurring charges of roughly $22 per month.
After investigating, I discovered the charges are tied to that old student account. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the college email address associated with it. I contacted AWS support twice and explained the situation, but the only response I received was that I needed to reset the account password and contact them from the email on the account—which I cannot do because I no longer have access to that inbox.
What is the best way to stop these recurring charges? Should I dispute or charge back the payments through my credit-card company, or is there another way to get AWS to investigate the charges without access to the old email account?
2 Answers
Present this primarily as an unauthorized recurring charge rather than as a request about an account you can’t access. Give support the transaction details, dates, and any identifying information from the credit-card statements, and explain that you have no access to the account or its resources. That may help them focus on tracing and stopping the billing instead of repeatedly telling you to reset the password.
If support still cannot resolve it, contact the card issuer and dispute the recurring charges. Explain that the service account is inaccessible, you cannot cancel the subscription or resources yourself, and you already attempted to resolve the issue with the merchant. Also ask the issuer whether they can block future charges from that billing account or merchant.
That makes sense. I’ll provide the transaction information and describe it as a recurring charge I can’t associate with any account I control.