Author Imy Santiago rcently wrote a blog post about her experiences with Amazon deleting reviews and blocking her from posting more reviews.

She included a screenshot of her conversation with Amazon’s technical support, and I have copied and annotated it below:

The portion that I have outlined in red seems to be upsetting people, and I can feel a certain degree of sympathy.  The question that people are asking is, “How are we supposed to follow the rules when Amazon won’t tell us what they are?”

That’s a good question, granted.  But Amazon can’t tell you the rules.

The algorithms used to flag and remove suspect reviews are a fraud countermeasure and the first rule of fraud countermeasures is that you don’t talk about fraud countermeasures.

There are two approaches to loss prevention in a business–the first is to make it hard to steal from you and the second is to…