Amazon Spain applied a customer's years-old VAT number to a kitchen knife, and no support channel could remove it

Paying less than the sticker price is usually good news. Kris didn’t think so. “I recently bought a €9.61 kitchen knife on Amazon Spain. My card was charged €7.94 instead.” Amazon “had applied an old VAT registration number I’d added to my personal account years ago, and had classified my purchase as a VAT-exempt intra-EU business transaction.” The invoice even carried “my business address from 2022, which no longer appeared anywhere in my account settings.”

A VAT-exempt business invoice makes a tax claim in your name, which is the kind of thing you want gone from a personal account. The trouble was that “Amazon no longer provided any visible way to manage that VAT number.”

So he asked. The chatbot “insisted I provide the order number from which I wanted the VAT number removed.” A human agent decided he “must have entered it into a secondary address field” and told him to delete and recreate his shipping address. Another rep asked for paperwork, “including my passport, airline boarding passes, proof of export outside the EU, or my NATO identification card.”

Amazon’s own help page, he says, “explicitly stated that VAT numbers could be removed either by contacting Customer Service or by creating an Amazon Business account to use the self-service option.” Customer Service told him they were “not allowed to remove VAT numbers.” That left door number two.

This is one customer’s story, told by him and published by The Daily WTF, and Amazon’s side isn’t in it. But the shape will be familiar to anybody who’s tried to undo a setting a company stopped showing. The data still drives the invoice, and the screen that edited it is gone.

Prediction, medium confidence: Kris isn’t the only one, since any EU shopper who once typed a VAT number into a personal account would hit the same hidden field. What nobody has answered is how many other customers are buying VAT-exempt today without knowing it.