Hello r/heroesofthestorm ! You are my favorite subreddit!

I am banned from Twitch, but I am not here to whine. The silver lining of my negative experience is that I can help others with what I've learned. I've decided to do this in an FAQ format:

What is Twitch Prime Loot?

Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Hearthstone rewards are available to players who subscribe to Twitch Prime. Each piece of loot is released on a schedule and available only for a limited time. The Heroes rewards include a legendary loot chest (back in August), 5 regular loot chests (coming in October), and 5 more regular loot chests (coming in December).

How Do Amazon Prime Free Trials Factor In?

Access to Twitch Prime Loot is automatically included to subscribers of Amazon Prime - even just by using an Amazon Prime Free Trial. Furthermore, Amazon permits customers to repteatedly create new accounts to get unlimited free trials. So it seems that every time a piece of Twitch Prime Loot is released, you merely have to start up a new free trial to claim it, right? That's what I thought...

How Is Twitch Detecting And Banning Accounts?

When you set up an Amazon Prime Free Trial, Amazon requires you to provide a credit card. Twitch appears to be looking for cases where the same card has been used more than once. That credit card is eventually "flagged" in the Twitch system, causing 2 results:

• Any Twitch account that has ever used the "flagged" credit card is permanently banned. Any such accounts are marked as having been banned due to "Payment Fraud". Twitch has a policy to never lift permanent bans (or "indefinite suspensions") for matters related to Payment Fraud.

• Any future attempt to link a Twitch account to an Amazon Prime Free Trial that is utilizing the "flagged" card will fail to link, giving a generic error message.

Twitch might not flag the offending credit card right away. I got banned out of the blue over a month later, so they are probably using delayed ban-waves.

Doesn't Twitch have a "3 Strikes" policy with regards to suspensions and bans?

Normally yes, with the first 2 strikes resulting in 24-hour bans and the 3rd strike being permanent. However, reusing Amazon Free Trials (or at least, reusing the same credit card) is considered a severe violation of Twitch policy and results in a permanent ban even if you have no prior strikes.

"Payment Fraud" sounds serious, are there any legal ramifications to this?

I'm terrified that there could be. I have a feeling I'll be losing sleep over this for months. I don't want anybody else to end up in this situation.

On one hand, I hope it's not serious enough to warrant any legal or law enforcement attention. On the other hand, they already know exactly who I am and where I live (Amazon Prime Free Trial requires the correct billing address info that matches your credit card). This is not a good feeling.

If I don't care about Twitch, is it still worth it to just get the free loot and then get banned?

Legal concerns aside, Heroes of the Storm also has the ongoing HGC Cheer promotion. If you've got any unused bits or unclaimed rewards, you'll lose access to the HGC page. (Any claimed in-game rewards, such as banners, sprays, mounts, portraits, and loot chests, remain in game. Twitch doesn't have the power to remove them.) At the very least, you might want to make a separate Twitch account (although this is probably also a violation of their rules, proceed at your own risk).

By the way, the prime loot just isn't that great. A single random legendary item here, a couple of Hearthstone packs there. It's not worth it. If I could go back, I wouldn't have done any of this.

I have multiple credit cards, can I at least do multiple free trials until I run out of credit cards?

I definitely don't want to advise people to do anything that might get them into any trouble. My understanding is that this could work right now, but I make ZERO promises that you won't eventually regret it later. My understanding could be wrong, or Twitch could enhance their algorithms to detect these types of cases, even retroactively.

Twitch Prime is a fairly new system and is likely subject to major changes over time.

You are an idiot for getting banned, and you deserve it.

Yes and yes. But I hope this post can help some other fellow idiots avoid the headaches I am going through.