Hi all, I just started turking this week. I think it's fun, I love data entry, been doing it in one form another for years. Anyhow, I was just working along and BAM! Account suspended. I've emailed Amazon, no reply (except the auto reply). Is there any hope? I LOVE Amazon. Been a customer for YEARS. I'm honest, not a robot, live in the USA, etc. I know, you've all heard that before. I've earned around $47 so far (still in my account, not able to transfer it). Not a fortune, but yes, a lot of time put into it. All of my stats looked fine. I did get blocked by one requester (elki media I think it was) because it was my second day and I put my answer in the comments section and not the text area by the photo. I really enjoy this type of work. I'm so sad and disappointed I got suspended! Is there hope to get unblocked? So sad they would do this, you'd think they could easily check my Amazon account to see I'm a real person who's been a good customer for years. Happiness is receiving an Amazon box in the mail!
Really sad that your account has also been suspended. My account was also suspended earlier this month , actually August 3, 2010 and at that time they did allow me to with draw my money. This new rule of not letting you withdraw your hard earned money is very unfair. I know of some people who had more than $600.00 in their account and their account was suspended yesterday and they too are not able to withdraw their money. I feel we must get together and do something to make them 'un-suspend' our accounts and ofcourse get Amazon to allow us to withdraw our money. Anyone with ideas???
I am thinking a class action law suit against them. We have been dealing long enough with requesters who pay for the HITS to be posted and then what Happens is that we do the work and then they just let it get rejected and never fight for our rights to be paid as contractors. We all should file with the BB in our areas against them and let them get where we get some resolves.
update I can now access my account, but it says (when I log into mturk) that my Amazon payments account has been suspended and I can't be paid until that is resolved. But I can log into my Amazon payments account just fine. I don't want to work on any hits in case I get paid right away and there IS a problem w/the payments account and it suspends me for it....so I'll wait to hear from Amazon payments. I had never verified my Amazon account because I always got paid (Amazon associate links) through Amazon gift cards.
It must have been a temporary suspension. I am pasting the reply from Mturk regarding my query on a cap on no of hits a worker can do in a day.
an update Hi all, here is an update. mTurk un-suspended me w/a note that says they suggest I reread their rules. Which I did. (more below) However, when my mTurk account was suspended, my Amazon payments account was suspended. I only knew this because when I logged into mTurk it told me so. I could log into my payments account with no problems and saw no errors or reasons why it was suspended. It took payments 1-2 days to unsuspended that account. Amazon payments did not tell me why my account was suspended. Neither mTurk or payments informed me via email that my accounts were suspended. I only learned this by the sudden suspended screen as I was doing hits. I did reread the mturk rules to see if I had violated them in any way. I couldn't see anything obvious, but here is a possibility. I have both a laptop and a desktop. I move back and forth between them on a regular basis. Could it possibly be that Amazon thought I was two people working on hits at the same time on the same account? I'll be logging out on the computers when I leave mTurk and use a different computer from now on. Although one could see that no hits were submitted at the same time, simultaneously, or within seconds, of each other. That was all I could think of. I'm happy to be turking again and hopefully there won't be any problems in the future.
I think, yes, that could be the reason. Maybe the activity was automatically detected and flagged, but when a human actually had a closer look it became apparent to them that (as you say) "one could see that no hits were submitted at the same time". I would write to them again, explaining the situation and ask if that had been the trigger.
You don't get any intimation about your suspension, it's like an unpleasant surprise waiting there when you log-in to Mturk.