I FOUND OUT MY ROOMMATE HAS BEEN CHARGING HER ONLINE SHOPPING TO MY AMAZON ACCOUNT
I first noticed the problem when I received an Amazon notification at work.
“Your order has shipped.”
I hadn’t ordered anything.
I opened the notification.
It was a set of expensive skincare products.
The delivery address was my apartment.
I immediately checked my Amazon account.
There were several recent orders I didn’t recognize.
I asked my roommate if she’d accidentally used my account.
She said no.
Then she added:
“Maybe your account got hacked.”
I changed my password that night.
The next morning, another order appeared.
That was impossible.
Unless someone inside the apartment had access.
I checked my account security.
There was a second device logged in.
I removed it.
Then I changed my email password too.
For several days, nothing happened.
I thought the problem was solved.
Then a package arrived.
My roommate grabbed it before I could.
She looked at the label and said:
“Oh, that’s mine.”
I looked at her.
She froze.
I asked why her package had my name on the account.
She claimed she’d used my Amazon account once because hers wasn’t working.
Once.
That wasn’t true.
I checked the order history again.
There were dozens of purchases.
Clothing.
Makeup.
Kitchen items.
Electronics.
Some were cheap.
Some were surprisingly expensive.
The total was over $2,000.
I confronted her.
She finally admitted she’d been using my account for months.
But then I noticed something worse.
Several orders had been placed using my saved credit card.
She had been charging purchases directly to my card.
She promised to pay everything back.
I asked why she’d never told me.
She said:
“Because you would have said no.”
That sentence told me everything.
I canceled the card.
Then I contacted Amazon.
They helped me dispute the unauthorized transactions.
I thought it was over.
Then I received an email from a seller about a returned laptop.
The seller said the laptop had been purchased through my account and returned damaged.
I had never even seen it.
My roommate had apparently been ordering expensive electronics, using them, and returning them.
But there was one final clue.
She hadn’t been doing it only for herself.
Several packages were being shipped to another address.
I recognized it.
It was her boyfriend’s apartment.
When I confronted her, she finally admitted she’d been using my account to buy things for both of them.
I moved out two weeks later.
She called me unreasonable.
I told her that if she wanted to shop with someone else’s money, she should at least have the courage to use her own name.
