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Unexpected $2.99 or $6.99+tax charge from Amazon Digital Services?

Amazon Fire Kids EditionWhilst perusing my credit card statement I noticed an unexpected charge for $7.65 (or $6.99 plus my city/state’s tax,) from Amazon Digital Svcs. Having been a multiple victim of credit card fraud in the past couple of months I watch that thing like a hawk.

If you bought a Fire Tablet or Kindle or any Amazon product with Freetime a year ago, cease panicking and read on.

I checked on Amazon and nothing was $6.99. I checked my digital subscriptions and nothing was $6.99 (or reasonably close.) No split orders, no movie rentals, no purchases.

Roughly six months after I started ranking first page for “Amazon unexpected charge” they finally renamed the charge from “Amazon Digital SVC” to “Amazon FreeTime Unld” in the US. Is the service easy to find yet? Nope. But here’s a start.

I got on with Amazon support and discovered that it was the FreeTime Unlimited that came with Maggie’s Amazon Fire Kids Edition tablet. Evidently it was a year of it and then they started charging.

That still didn’t explain why I was being charged $6.99 (plus tax,) for it as opposed to $2.99 (plus tax.) The rep said that I had two children’s profiles on there so that’s what it was.

He sent me to www.amazon.com/myh/manage to look at it, yup, I’d put the grub in there as well and it auto charged me the 2-4 kids rate as opposed to the one child rate. The grub at the moment just learned to walk and doesn’t show a huge interest in tablets, so I removed her from Maggie’s Fire Kids Edition.

Both reps seemed to know what they were doing (I was in the wrong rep pool as I didn’t know what the charge was for.) I was refunded, removed the grub from the profile, and other than that there’s nothing to indicate there’s a recurring charge for this I’m pretty satisfied.

Hardest part I had was finding the contact us link.

Paul King

Paul King lives in Nashville Tennessee with his wife, two daughters and cats. He writes for Pocketables, theITBaby, and is an IT consultant along with doing tech support for a film production company.