Update: COMPLICATIONS!
Four of my bots had an easy time of making Amazon accounts however when I tried to add a fifth... Amazon got angry. Rather than push forward and continue adding accounts, I took a step back and set out to learn what, exactly, amazon had an issue with.
From the front page to 'account creation', everything went as expected right up until the email verification process. After submitting all data, it drops out into an OTP page (one time password) and it expects you to tab over to your email, get the password and bring it back. My bot had no issue with this and input the correct password.
CAPTCHA
My current setup is designed to pause and alert me at the first sign of a captcha because, at least for me, it implies that I am not 100% invisible. I manually completed the captcha and it let me out to a "Give us your mobile phone number" verification page, which is something it has never done before. In all other instances Amazon had allowed my bots to sneak past without a mobile number but this time there was no "Maybe Later" button.
So I did not want to jump to conclusions. It was obvious that Amazon had become suspicious and so far as websites go, this was the one I expected the most resistance from. I checked the page source and started inspecting the elements and there... after several hours of searching... there it was.
A script title called "Robots".
That is the thing about developers of all shapes and sizes: you can typically tell what they are thinking just from staring at their code long enough. Something I had done set them off. But what? All my other accounts had no issue whatsoever. I went over everything I had recently changed and double checked my browser profile settings. Everything was in order, there should have been no possible way for them to detect me. But here it was.
Of course, my friends, who are web developers, recommended I just forget about it and get back to making accounts. But I could not let something like this go. Amazon had become suspicious and if I did not figure out the 'why and how' then this would turn into a much larger problem down the road. My code was solid, my fingerprint was not exceptional, IP was fine, everything was in order. And still, Amazon felt that there was something different about this particular profile and not the others. Maybe I am a bit OCD but I couldn't let it go. I spent the whole weekend sifting through their code and hunting down this issue.
(Amazon network security)
So I had to take a step back and take this at its most obvious. What was the point of suspicion? When exactly did this weight come crashing down on my bot? Email verification. There was absolutely no problem until the OTP hit, after that it started feeding me an entirely new selection of scripts. After a long conversation with chatgpt, I stumbled into the topic of ERI (email reputation index). You see, mail.com has a selection of 'novelty domains' that they can set up your account on. Instead of
[email protected], they can set your email to be something a little more imaginative like
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected]. By selecting one of these other domains, I thought (keyword here is thought) that this would add variety to my email accounts.
"This is incorrect" says chatgpt, because these automated systems Amazon uses are looking for trust-ability and not randomness (or lack of randomness). In fact, mail.com itself is not the most trustworthy site and it is PRECISELY because they make it so easy to set up accounts. I took a deep breath and leaned back in my chair... the one thing I had thought was my greatest strength was now my greatest weakness. My love of randomness, was in fact, a little too random. Over the next 12 hours I started educating myself on ERI scores and quickly learned that there are four ranges.
"Most trusted"
"Suspicious"
"Least trusted"
"Avoid like the plague"
And depending on your email's domain, you were going to end up in one of those four categories. Mail.com was seen as "Suspicious" by most platforms. If I was going to be 100% undetectable, then I was going to have to have a better line up of emails.
I converted all of my bots to gmail. Went back to amazon with the same bot, same browser, same IP address and OTP the email verification step... no issue. It didn't bother me about anything, it simply created the account. I don't know why this surprised me.
