How do I set up an account when automated systems keep canceling right afterward?

Hi!

I'm frustrated, but I know it's not your fault. I humbly ask you to please
bear with this long message.

My small team has been deploying to AWS for 6 or 7 years now, with multiple
systems currently running in both the US and Japan.

For some reason, we just recently heard about Linode, and, as a life-long
bootstrapper myself, I absolutely love your story. Also read and heard great
feedback from your customers!

This year, we are launching a couple of big-bet products here in Japan. We are
also engaging the local developer community to help encourage and support more
startup activity in Tokyo, which is sadly underwhelming given the talent here.
As a part of this effort, I spent a good portion of last month working on
tooling, which we plan to open source soon, to help newer developers get their
ideas into working web apps quicker and easier. Since this aligns so well with
your mission, I was hoping to deploy an MVP or two on Linode this month to see
if we can make Linode the core of our deployment story.

Unfortunately, as I tried to set up an account twice this evening, both times,
I received this email:

A recently created account with this email address was canceled by our
automated systems. This was due to activity or patterns associated with
fraudulent behavior. Additional attempts to sign up may also be rejected.

Since this message provides no corrective measures, I was left to guessing
that the form input was being used for AVS, and AVS may have failed. So I
tried setting up an account for a second time, using exact cardholder data
for hopefully successful AVS.

While waiting, I found that I could access the UI for submitting a support
ticket. So I began typing, and a few minutes into the typing session, I got
redirected to a login screen, right as my second rejection email came through.

I had no way to go back and copy what I had written so far. It was just gone.
So now I'm here, typing in Vim, with a slightly elevated heart rate. I don't
want my impression of Linode to end here. I really don't.

I do want to give Linode money to spin up a VPS and run an MVP. And if that
turns out as great as I hear, I want to launch with you, champion you to other
devs in Tokyo, even migrate (ugh) systems off of AWS to Linode!

But I need an account first. So I'm just about to try setting up an account
for a third time, but this time I'm going to quickly copy and paste this
into your support form before I get rejected again.

Please help.

Many thanks!

EDIT: this an edit of the text I submitted with the support ticket, along with an email address for contact. I copied and pasted it here in case the support ticket (16885593) vaporized, just in case my account got canceled again (Narrator: It did.).

2 Replies

Hi there,

Linode are one of the few cloud providers that offer telephone support.

Being an international call, it could work out expensive. Ordinarily Linode say you can just give them a ticket number over the phone, but you haven’t been able to get that far!

I would probably recommend calling them to refer to this post on the community Q&A site and provide them your email address over the phone.

Or you could also try dropping them a direct email.

All the details at linode.com/support

Hope you get it sorted!

Fortunately, I did manage to get a ticket number, 16885593, but I'm not sure if the ticket was deleted when my account was again canceled.

Since I'm definitely guilty of bad timing having this issue right at the start of the weekend, I was thinking that I should wait til Monday (Mountain Standard Time) to follow up by phone. But thanks to your link, I re-read the support page and found the direct email address to support, which I somehow missed last night.

Thanks for your quick reply! I'll follow up by email today.

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