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Suppose I add my credit card to Amazon AWS service billing.

Suppose that some hacker interacts with my domain at Amazon in such a way to make me owed $1000 or $10000 to Amazon (deliberately to harm my finances).

Suppose Amazon exceeds my CC limit and I remove the card from Amazon and tell my bank to close the card.

Will Amazon be able to sue me and make me I pay the rest of the sum, even despite my credit card cannot be charged anymore?

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  • Since you mention a credit card, note that you have a mechanism for disputing charges. Also, do you have / would you have in this hypothetical scenario, any evidence that a hacker maliciously charged your account? Or is that out of scope of this question? – sharur Jul 6 '18 at 18:36
  • You should be able to set spending limits on your computing time, do you know what type of attack this would be? If it were true "hacking" this would be a security issue on Amazon's side. If it just looks like valid use then that would be an issue on your website's side, and may affect liability. – Ron Beyer Jul 6 '18 at 18:48
  • As a matter of good business practice, Amazon is not going to complete a transaction unless a credit card payment is authorized by the credit card company. It is not in the direct extension of credit business and isn't even set up to do that without payment in full at the time of the transaction with some payment instrument. – ohwilleke Jul 6 '18 at 19:03
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    @ohwilleke These are billings "after the fact", not like purchasing a book through the store. Amazon AWS is a cloud computing service that Amazon sells (like web hosting) and you pay for it after you use it based on how much computing you used over your billing period, so it is possible to rack up significant charges and then bill the credit card agency. The card has to be on file, but isn't "pre-authorized". – Ron Beyer Jul 6 '18 at 19:15
  • @RonBeyer The issue is that Amazon provides no mean to set spending limits. Shame on them, but they are such – porton Jul 7 '18 at 19:46
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The customer agreement requires you to have a valid form of payment, so deleting the card and closing the CC account would actually put you afoul of the agreement: it does not eliminate what you owe them. Unless you provide an alternative method of payment, or persuade them to waive the charges, their recourse for getting paid will be to sue you.

Disputing the charge with the credit card company is not likely to help in this case, since you did authorize use of the card, that is, Amazon is not fraudulently charging you. You might be able to shift the blame to Amazon, if they were negligent with respect to their security (this happens, and they are pretty good about owning up to their errors in my experience). Otherwise, they will presumably argue that you assumed a risk in setting up your account so that others could rack up large charges that you would be responsible for.

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