Amazon refunds customer $1,800 for return made seven years ago

Amazon has suddenly started issuing refunds for returns going months and even years back, with some customers saying they were refunded for items they never returned.

Amazon customer Steven Pope said in a post on LinkedIn that he received a nearly $1,800 refund for a 55-inch smart TV he bought in 2018. While he returned the item seven years ago, Amazon issued the refund only last week, he shared.

“I’m probably not the only customer who has experienced this, but isn’t that crazy? Seven years to pay out a return?” Pope said.

Amazon also contacted customers who were being refunded, saying in an email that the decision had been made after reviewing the “unresolved” product returns.

“Following a recent internal review, we identified a very small subset of returns that were unresolved because we could not verify that the correct item had been sent back to us,” Amazon said in the email.

“We could have notified these customers more clearly (and earlier) to better understand the status and help us resolve the return. Given the time elapsed, we’ve decided to err on the side of customers and just complete refunds for these returns,” it added.

Other customers shared on social media about receiving refunds for items they returned months and years ago. Some said they were refunded for items they never returned, with one Reddit user claiming Amazon paid them $1,250 for multiple purchases.

“Most of these refunds are from around 2019-2023 and I 100% kept every single item… There is no doubt I never initiated a return,” they said.

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Another customer claimed they received a “random” refund of $200 even though they had “nothing in my transaction history at all.”

Why is Amazon issuing refunds after all these years?

In a statement to Bloomberg, Amazon declined to say whether the refunds are related to a lawsuit alleging the e-commerce company systematically failed to issue refunds to customers or reversed refunds that were already issued.

In April, a federal judge rejected Amazon’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed in 2023.

Amazon hinted at refunds earlier this May, when the company’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, said during an earnings call that it took a one-off charge of $1.1 billion in the first quarter, some of which would go to address “some historical customer returns.”

Amazon is the world’s second-largest retailer after Walmart, generating $638 billion in revenue in 2024.