Amazon.com and its "partners" - SPAM email - charged for cancelled book

Complaints.com received the following consumer message on June 5, 2002:

From:

RE: Amazon.com and its "partners" - SPAM email - charged for cancelled book

1. One of Amazon.com's "partners" sent me a spam email after I placed an order on the Amazon.com site. It was not malicious, but I feel my address was made available to strangers on the internet, making me vulnerable to malicious emails.

2. Another of Amazon.com's "partners" accepted an order for books they did not have in inventory, immediately charged my mastercard, and did not even notify me that the order had "cancelled out" until I began emailing them. Despite many email exchanges with both alphacraze.com and Amazon.com, the charge remains on my card as of this date.

I believe this is a deliberate scam that inflates the company's sales and uses consumers' credit for at least a full thirty days without any exchange of merchandise whatsoever. I believe that consumers should be alerted about the dangers of dealing with a site that creates these phantom sub-companies in order to do "creative bookkeeping."

3. At the same time I made the orders described above, Amazon.com shipped me two wrong titles, claiming these were the ones I had ordered. One of those titles was a pamphlet that my elderly sister found extremely offensive. It is too much hassle for her to repackage and return books, so we have just swallowed those mistakes.

I have been ordering online for two or three years now, and have told others about my satisfaction in doing so. I have previously ordered quite a number of things from Amazon.com, and have never before had a problem. Has there been some recent change in the company's organization?