Account hacked and deactivated

Hi There

Not sure if this is the correct place to post this but I wondered if anyone can help with this. We received the following notification from Amazon on the 24th June

“Your Amazon Seller account has been deactivated in accordance with section 3 of Amazon’s Business Solutions Agreement. Your listings have been disabled.

You have a separate account THE *********** which was enforced for violating one of our policies.”

Within an hour of receiving this email from Amazon we received another 17 emails linking our account to various other accounts we had never heard of. Initially we thought it was a scam but we checked our account and saw it was deactivated. We only have one amazon seller account for our business. We responded to Amazon via the appeals page explaining we had no contact or link or even knowledge of the 17 accounts we are supposedly linked with.

We heard nothing back so after a week we contacted Amazon by phone. We spoke to a guy who said we are linked with 2 accounts. One was a german account that doesn’t seem to exist on Amazon when I searched it and another UK based company that is also deactivated.

We contacted the UK based company who we were linked with to see if we could establish a link. They said that in September last year their account was hacked and taken over to sell various products in Amazon Germany – it took Amazon about 3 weeks to resolve this and remove the hacker from their account. This had also happened to us in June of last year. A very similar situation where someone hacked our account, changed our password so we could not access the account and started selling various high price point products. During this period we were sent lots of queries from German customers so presume this was a German based hacker. We reported it to Amazon and it took around 3 weeks to remove the hacker and restore our account.

This is the only possible link between our account and the other UK based company (they are also currently deactivated). Amazon are aware both our accounts were hacked as they eventually restored both accounts. Problem is both our accounts are deactivated now and it is nearly a month now that we have been unable to sell.

Any thoughts on how we should proceed to firstly get our account reactivated but also ensure the link doesn’t remain between us and the other hacked account? We mentioned we were hacked in the appeals letter but have not heard anything at all.

Many thanks in advance
Jennifer