[HN Gopher] Amazon Warehouse scam: 16TB HDD swapped for 8TB, ret...
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon Warehouse scam: 16TB HDD swapped for 8TB, returned for full
refund
Author : ilamont
Score : 274 points
Date : 2020-07-24 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| linkmotif wrote:
| If you're going to swap the drive, why not swap in a 4tb, or a
| 2tb, or a 500mb?
| neuralRiot wrote:
| The real scam is from Amazon, selling store return items as brand
| new.
| killion wrote:
| I've had this happen to me multiple times with Apple keyboards
| and mice for the office. They are listed as brand new and sold by
| Amazon. But they are clearly used when you open the box.
| Schnitz wrote:
| This is standard practice at Amazon and it's very annoying. Even
| defective items just get sent out until someone doesn't return
| them and items that were clearly used get sold again as new
| without even being cleaned.
| lobo_tuerto wrote:
| In Mexico most of the times you'll get a previously opened and
| returned package. Which in turn would usually return myself and
| ask for a new package (happened with an AIO cooler unit which
| even had the thermal paste applied on it...
|
| Or the items won't work as expected which has happened to me with
| laptops and tablets. The only good thing is there is no problem
| returning the used / bad stuff. But you lose time and the
| discount price.
| jasonv wrote:
| I have a new Lenovo laptop, purchased on Amazon directly from
| Lenovo, arriving on Tuesday.
|
| I intend to unbox the laptop and record it on my GoPro.
|
| Seems silly, but...
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| If you're going to buy a Lenovo laptop from Lenovo, why not buy
| it directly from Lenovo? You'll get free shipping either way.
| Shipping speed, or something else?
| kingnothing wrote:
| 5% cash back by using an Amazon store card is one reason.
| jasonv wrote:
| This, yes.
| tomcatfish wrote:
| I always record when I'm opening stuff, and I pretend I run one
| of those unboxing channels while I do it. It beats the boredom
| and makes it less fishy that I have a recording of me opening
| an item I have to return (since it might look like a set-up).
| Zancarius wrote:
| I don't see why anyone would think that's silly[1]. TBH, I'm
| tempted to record all of my unboxings at this point, at least
| for more valuable items...
|
| ...especially after reading some of the experiences here.
|
| [1] Okay, so someone could argue it was staged, but there's a
| point in time where you can't "prove" something any further
| without disproportionate costs to your time or finances.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| After this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23941572) I
| always record. I had no problem to return and didn't need to
| prove that it arrived cracked but... better safe than sorry
| somehnguy wrote:
| I learned my lesson with TVs on Amazon a few years ago too.
| There were a couple reviews noting cracked screens, thought
| it was probably just rare bad luck. Bought the TV, it arrived
| cracked.
|
| Had Amazon schedule a UPS pickup for return and bought the TV
| locally. Poor packaging for TVs on Amazon just seems to be
| normal.
| Orphis wrote:
| A long time ago, I bought Half-Life 1 in a regular store. I tried
| to play with a friend online but it said my CD-key was already
| being used. Turned out my friend had bought the game, came
| without a CD-key printed on the box, so the store opened a random
| box and gave him that CD-key. I bought that exact same box.
|
| In the end, my friend sent a picture of the box to Valve and got
| a fresh CD-key, and we could finally play together.
| Havoc wrote:
| I've had this happen with a graphics card.
|
| Bought a 2070. Got a 2060 in scruffy packaging.
|
| To add insult to injury I sent it back and doesn't seem to have
| arrived yet and/or covid ate it. 5 fuckin months later it's
| still:
|
| >Your refund will be processed when we receive your item.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Curiously enough I encountered the inverse problem the other
| day.
|
| I received a refund for an item sitting on my desk. I purchased
| it, received it, and did not request any refund at all.
|
| I called Amazon about it and they said to let the refund go
| through and they sent me an email I could reply to when I was
| ready to be re-charged.
|
| Extremely odd, and I was worried there was some scam I was
| missing. Amazon rep said the returns department made a mistake
| somehow.
|
| I imagine there's probably someone that returned the same item
| I bought and they're still waiting for their refund. :-/
| dhosek wrote:
| This is a consequence of amazon being too big to care. They
| aren't doing the most basic check to verify that what's in the
| box is what the outside of the box claims it is. Some years ago,
| I bought two identical routers from Best Buy and then decided I
| didn't need the second so I went to return it. I put it in the
| wrong box. Best Buy refused the return because the serial number
| on the router didn't match the serial number on the box.
|
| The whole concept of Amazon is fundamentally flawed. I've gotten
| too much counterfeit stuff and junk to ever trust them again.
| libertine wrote:
| Oh and it's even easier when they make the seller pay for their
| fuck ups and for fraud - it's peanuts for Amazon :)
| sukilot wrote:
| It's a consequence of consumers being so voraciously
| consumerist that they buy things they don't need so it doesn't
| matter if they get what they ordered.
| gempir wrote:
| It's cheaper to just accept returns instead of checking every
| product for complete function.
|
| And I think it's acceptable considering how easy returns are with
| Amazon.
| somehnguy wrote:
| I don't think its acceptable at all. An easy return doesn't fix
| having to wait an additional at least a few days before you
| actually get what you paid for.
|
| That is just basically accepting that Amazon is completely
| unreliable for anything even remotely time sensitive, despite
| what made them huge in the first place - extremely fast
| delivery.
| Rudism wrote:
| Way back when I was in high school, it became a fad among the
| tech-geeks to have our TI-85 graphing calculators modded with a
| "turbo" switch that would let you run some games like Wolfenstein
| and Tetris at better speeds. It involved cutting a hole in the
| back plastic casing inside the battery compartment to make room
| for the switch, and then soldering a few connections on the board
| underneath.
|
| There was one kid who was doing it for everyone at $20 a pop, but
| he made no guarantees about not accidentally bricking the
| calculator in the process. I was a little apprehensive about
| having him do it since TI calculators were (and still are)
| ridiculously expensive, and asked him what his success rate was.
| He told me it didn't really matter because even if he
| accidentally screwed up, all you had to do was go buy a new TI-85
| from Future Shop (which was like a Canadian version of Best Buy
| before they were actually bought by Best Buy), put the broken
| calculator in the box, and then return it the next day for a full
| refund. He would then mod the new one for no additional charge.
|
| My turbo switch was installed fine so I didn't have to pull the
| scam, but I knew a few kids who did.
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| I am glad to have read this thread. A few of the issues mentioned
| in comments have happened to me in the last year, but I just
| wrote it off as one-off scamming, did not realize it's systemic
| and sophisticated.
| vincenzow wrote:
| I recently bought a Nintendo Switch from Amazon (not a third
| party seller) only to open the box and find the switch itself
| missing. Baffled at how this slipped through.
| AnssiH wrote:
| I guess the box looked unopened so the returns worker didn't
| look inside.
| nvahalik wrote:
| Obviously, you stole the switch and are trying to game the
| system.
|
| /s
| bredren wrote:
| This happened to me buying a Yamaha MG06 Compact Stereo Mixer
| from Amazon Warehouse.
|
| The one I received had clear indications that it had been in use
| for a long time, dust grime and wear---it was gross.
|
| In this case it appeared the person returned the same model for a
| new one. It was a good trick that Amazon resolved without
| feedback on my pointing this out when I returned it.
|
| I bought it brand new after that.
|
| Previous to this, I had ordered something else from amazon
| warehouse, again a "like new" item for a steep discount and it
| was as described. A great deal.
| hknapp wrote:
| Probably more expensive to train some warehouse workers to
| analyze returns to the extent of plugging it into a computer and
| seeing the size than to just deal with this happening some time.
| topspin wrote:
| Here is my most recent Amazon returns story.
|
| I bought a $1200 commercial generator through Amazon. Delivered
| by truck about in about 10 days. It had several problems. Took
| it to the local authorized service center myself. They
| struggled with it for about a month.
|
| Ultimately they had me call the manufacturer for a replacement.
| I tried but the manufacturer sent me to Amazon for a refund. I
| did so and Amazon refunded the full purchase price immediately.
|
| The service center didn't care; they still had a defective
| generator on their hands and kept working on it with the
| manufacturer on my behalf despite the fact that I had gotten a
| full refund, which I made clear to them. Ultimately the
| manufacturer decided they wanted the unit returned for analysis
| by their engineers and drop shipped a replacement to me knowing
| perfectly well that I'd already received a refund.
|
| The replacement works perfectly. I got a $1200 commercial
| generator for 'free.' I'd have rather just had the working
| product in the first place, and I still feel like I've cheated
| somehow despite the fact that I was entirely above board with
| everyone.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem is that cases where you get lucky like this are
| in the minority. In the majority of cases, the inconvenience
| caused by a defective/counterfeit/missing product thwarts
| whatever compensation they give you after the fact.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised they'll even take open-box returns of
| hard drives that aren't defective. How do you know the drive is
| safe to use?
|
| It seems to me kind of like underwear: once you buy it, you
| keep it and in the unlikely event you need to return the item
| it goes right in the trash.
| noja wrote:
| Because the dirty secret is that "new" does not mean you are
| the first customer to open the item.
| elliekelly wrote:
| And for most items that's not too big of a deal. A returned
| textbook or toaster can be re-sold after it's been opened
| without much fear that it's been tampered with but I'm not
| sure the same can be said for a hard drive.
|
| Or maybe it's more like a bottle of medicine. Even if it's
| exceedingly unlikely that it's been tampered with I'm not
| going to risk it if the manufacturer's seal is broken. It's
| just not worth it.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Textbooks are actually a bad example, now that an awful
| lot of them have one-time codes linked to online
| materials (homework, etc.). Sure, the contents of the
| book may not be "used up", but that doesn't mean it's
| necessarily "good-as-new".
| RandomBacon wrote:
| When you return an item to Amazon, one of the reasons you
| can select in the dropdown menu is "received used item" (or
| something similar).
| bentcorner wrote:
| It's disappointing that this scam is so pervasive they
| added UI to handle it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I bought an alternator for my wife's car. While replacing it, I
| discovered this:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/E53NxjE
|
| Prior customer bought, discovered the holes were machined
| incorrectly (part would not bolt up), clearly marked the part,
| returned it, and Amazon put it back on the shelf to send to the
| next buyer. With the car half torn apart, Amazon offered they
| could get me a replacement item in 8 calendar days. Yeah,
| that's not going to work, so I took it over to a milling
| machine and had it milled out to fit (first photo shows
| immediately after milling, second and third photo are before,
| third photo has the new part doweled to the old part to align
| one of the holes and show how far off the second hole is). Just
| like this case, Amazon A2Z was willing to accept the return and
| ship another one, but the real customer failure was during the
| previous return, not when I had the complaint.
|
| There's a customer satisfaction angle that "Earth's most
| customer centric company" should probably be considering here.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Amazon hasn't actually been a customer-centric company since
| they got big enough to run their own in-house delivery
| service.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| If a customer has to physically punch a new hole in a
| product, I consider that a full refund without return :)
| jld wrote:
| I have had luck having Amazon credit me back part of the
| purchase price when I need to repair what they sent me. Their
| chat agents have refunded me 20-30% of purchase price for
| keeping defective items like yours.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I got a hard-anodised aluminium oven tray which was bent at
| the corner. These things are solid, no way it was bent in
| transit unless it was by heavy machinery - if you slammed
| it in a van door I think you'd just break the door.
| Contacted seller and arranged a discount but it was a pain
| to do and going through the Amazon systems seemed janky. It
| was a case where the product worked, it was really just
| aesthetics, but I wasn't paying full price for a [factory]
| damaged item. Saved some product miles at least.
| pwg wrote:
| Why the surprise here. This "scam" (or theft) is as old as stores
| taking "no questions asked" returns. I knew someone who did this
| a time or two back in the mid-90's to Circuit City and/or
| CompUSA. I warned them that this could be traced back to them if
| the stores became interested enough to do so, that did not deter
| them much.
| diehunde wrote:
| I wonder what the consequences can be for doing this. Just pay
| full price or also face legal actions.
| sukilot wrote:
| It depends on how much the local DA wants to nail you.
|
| It's definitely criminal behavior, some kind of theft or
| fraud
| nvahalik wrote:
| Yeah, back in the days when tech didn't move so fast, it wasn't
| uncommon for some of the circle I moved in to go grab a 160G
| drive from Best Buy and swap out a 20/40G drive that had died
| and claim it didn't work out of the box. Free upgrade!
|
| Same scam, different day.
| unexaminedlife wrote:
| I learned many years ago that auto theft is almost 100% committed
| by a very tiny fraction of the overall population.
|
| Probably same phenomenon here. Small # of people doing this. I'm
| hopeful Amazon does not go easy on these people. The numbers are
| likely in their favor even if they decided to take every single
| one of those cases to court.
| kveykva wrote:
| I had assumed this was common knowledge that this occurred. We
| used to experience returns like this all of the time that Amazon
| would accept up-front before acceptance by our warehouse. >$200
| chargers returned in original boxes containing $10 chargers.
| There have been other stories of iphone boxes full of playdough
| or just anything that would weight roughly the same.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if there are other 3rd party fulfillment
| providers that rather than dealing with having had this pushed on
| them by Amazon, they just put that return back on the shelf and
| they get shipped out to other customers.
| rotterdamdev wrote:
| Stop buying from amazon.
| 5bolts wrote:
| have a former friend that would do a brick and mortar version of
| this... even went so far as to buy a shrink wrap machine.
|
| buy an external drive, take it home and remove the drive.. fill
| case with rocks or wood or something to add mass.. put it back in
| the box, shrink wrap it and have his wife return it.. doing a
| slight upgrade to the next size up. repeat a couple of times..
| then get full refund.
|
| he'd even end up with his own crap filled drives once in a
| while..
| acwan93 wrote:
| Reminds me of how someone went to Target to buy an iPod for her
| daughter, found it full of rocks and exchanged it after getting
| her refund rejected, only for a replacement iPod from another
| Target to also be filled with rocks.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2007-10-09-birthday-girl-gets-two-r...
| sixhobbits wrote:
| The reply from Amazon's support Twitter is the indication of a
| far larger problem in most business. Namely, it's easier to deal
| with the consequences of "mistakes" than it is to not make them.
|
| e.g.
|
| - the "fines" Google and Facebook keep getting for breaking
| privacy and other laws which are laughably small.
|
| - customer support teams not dealing with serious customer issues
| until they get attention (viral tweet, front page HN etc)
|
| - monopolies in most forms: e.g. the big-tech anti-poaching
| agreements
|
| Generally I'm all for "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than
| permission" but that assumes that you are acting in good faith
| but still sometimes screw up. It seems like "screwing up" has
| become a good way to ensure short-term profits and as everyone is
| obsessed with KPIs and OKRs at a 1-week to 3-month time frame,
| the incentives are all wrong.
|
| And "mission statements" and "cultural values" are too synthetic
| to come close to fixing this.
| aboringusername wrote:
| I honestly don't think any country in the world actually
| _cares_ about monopolies or the abuses by these companies.
| Apple no longer has to pay a fine the EU gave them. The same
| will likely happen to the 2 billion+ fines they gave Google.
|
| So far, no amount of fines, or laws, has actually changed
| _anything_ as far as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google or
| Microsoft are concerned. They 're still in dominant positions,
| where AI or computer made decisions can devastate the "little
| guys" like being wiped off Google (or the play store removing
| your app), or the horror stories of businesses on Amazon.
|
| Truth is, they're too big, and at this point, can't be stopped.
| Laws won't work, fines won't work. They haven't so far, and I
| doubt they will in the future.
| AnssiH wrote:
| > So far, no amount of fines, or laws, has actually changed
| _anything_ as far as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google or
| Microsoft are concerned.
|
| That seems like hyperbole. E.g. all the three big EU-Google
| anti-trust cases (Shopping, AdSense, Android) resulted in
| Google changing their practices on the issues in question.
|
| (Shopping, Android:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google,
| AdSense: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/e
| n/IP_19_...)
| dbliss wrote:
| I can't speak for all the companies listed, but I know we've
| spent a lot of SDE time ensuring we're compliant with GDPR
| and various privacy laws. Building new systems and changing
| existing systems (on the scale of dozens, probably 100+, of
| individual teams). It's more likely that it's hard to quickly
| change the direction of large ships. I've certainly seen my
| leadership (and engineers) take things like GDPR compliance
| extremely seriously, to the point that I've seen it as a
| cultural shift over the last couple of years.
| valuearb wrote:
| Apples fines were because EU commissioners demanded Ireland
| charge them higher tax rates. The courts ruled they were
| wrong in doing so. Not an anti trust issue at all.
|
| Do you really want to live in a world where bureaucrats can
| issue fines without recourse?
| product50 wrote:
| As a user I am totally happy with Amazon's service. They
| shouldn't change their entire setup and make things a lot more
| expensive for everyone based on these infrequent use cases.
|
| And Amazon customer support is awesome. Your bullet 2 is false.
| doublesCs wrote:
| Amazon's example is completely different from that of Google or
| Facebook.
|
| - In Amazon's case, it is only Amazon that is that victim of
| its mistakes: if they decide it's more efficient to give money
| to scammers than to avoid getting scammed, I couldn't care
| less.
|
| - In the case of Google and Facebook, they're not the victims
| for disrespecting their user's privacy, their users are. So,
| regulators should keep making the fines larger until it really
| really hurts them.
| teachrdan wrote:
| The victim isn't Amazon, it's the next customer who buys the
| returned product--which wasn't even necessarily labeled as
| such.
|
| Now if Amazon included a guide with returned products,
| instructing customers what to evidence of fraud or tampering
| to look for? That would be a different story.
| doublesCs wrote:
| No, the next customer will just return it as well.
|
| It's a mild inconvenience, the customer is hardly the
| victim. I'm for regulation of bad corporate actors, but
| punishing for mediocre customer service is going too far.
| teachrdan wrote:
| They might not. Less technically savvy users may not
| realize that the performance on their "new" video card is
| less than it should be. Or they might realize too late
| and miss the window on their return. Or they might just
| give up because uninstalling the device, packaging and
| returning it is too much of a pain in the ass.
|
| If this is a "mild inconvenience" to the individual who
| has to deal with identifying that their product is not
| what they ordered and returning it, are you suggesting
| that Amazon--a company with a $1.4 TRILLION market cap--
| is somehow the real victim?
| treis wrote:
| If they're buying something as "new" and getting
| something that has been returned and is not factory
| sealed then they're getting ripped off. This time the
| buyer caught it, but what if it had been swapped for the
| same item with 80% of it's expected life used?
| jowsie wrote:
| In this case it was a known return. That's what amazon
| warehouse deals is.
| treis wrote:
| Ah, I missed that. Good point and you're right this is
| the risk you take buying returned goods.
| armada651 wrote:
| Even though the HDD was a warehouse deal, Amazon is
| getting scammed in the "new and sealed" department as
| well.
|
| When I bought a new NZXT AOI cooler Amazon sent me the
| original box with a fake seal sticker on it. The original
| contents were taken out and the box was filled with an
| old used Corsair cooler and some random electronics. Even
| the manual was replaced with one for a pull up bar.
|
| Amazon could have known the sticker was fake because it
| was just a blank sticker without a logo and the box
| should be completely sealed in plastic when new.
| obmelvin wrote:
| >The victim isn't Amazon, it's the next customer who buys
| the returned product--which wasn't even necessarily labeled
| as such.
|
| Not saying that I'd want this to happen to me, but assuming
| Amazon made it right I'd say that I was just inconvenienced
| and they were the victim.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| You're the victim if you didn't realize it was the wrong
| item within the return period, which is a lot more common
| especially among people who aren't as intimately familiar
| with the technical details
|
| Plenty of people have been scammed on microSD cards, a
| common target for this fraud, because they didn't know
| how to properly test them and never pushed the capacity
| until after the return period.
| Klinky wrote:
| Amazon Warehouse Deals are discounted customer returns.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Pure players are getting EAFP on us rather than LBYL, I wonder
| where they learned that frop...
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Being an asshole apparently works out great, at scale.
|
| A mom and pop shop would be hit much harder by a scam like
| this, I think.
| bredren wrote:
| From what I can tell tricks are being pulled directly by brands
| in all online sales.
|
| Repackaging, or even directly steering imperfect merchandise to
| online orders is happening all of the time.
|
| "Model" or perfect versions are sent to retailers where
| consumers will interact with the product is purchased.
|
| Online, photos and videos show the same "perfect" products.
|
| I've seen clear examples of this by Fossil and Pendleton. I
| believe Apple does this in some cases, at least in repackaging.
|
| There are rational reasons to do this as a business but it can
| be a bad thing for consumers.
|
| Fwiw, Amazon has among the best return policies and the least
| friction in completing a return.
|
| Return friction is where a company's selective inventory
| quality steering borders on anti-customer.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Thule did this to me as well (open box product).
| bredren wrote:
| An even sneakier trick is changes to product models without
| changing the model name.
|
| I've seen Camelbak use cheaper parts on the "same"
| backpack, for example.
|
| This happens on Amazon a lot, you see reviews saying "I
| bought this three years ago it was great, new one uses
| cheap xyz."
|
| I think you largely are going to see every business, Amazon
| merchants, brands, etc get away with whatever they can to
| cut costs, so long as it doesn't have widespread effect on
| brand perception.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I've seen this a lot with clothing/footwear. Things like
| logos that used to be stiched on are now printed,
| material type will change, etc. Some of these don't
| really matter (like logos) but are easily noticed and
| indicative of design changes you don't see.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| This practice predates internet shopping; before Amazon, it
| was the discount retailers like Walmart that were getting
| seconds.
| cosmie wrote:
| While your premise is true, any supplier giving _Walmart_
| seconds has their days numbered. Walmart runs such a tight
| ship around their supply chain that it 'd neither go
| unnoticed nor unpunished.
|
| What appears to be Walmart getting factory seconds is
| usually Walmart demanding a custom variant of a product.
| Walmart uses their own consumer research and sales (and
| just as importantly, returns) data to form strong opinions
| on optimal price points, margins, feature requirements,
| warranty periods, materials, etc for a given
| product/category, and they'll use their volume to get a
| manufacturer to create a custom variant of a product with
| what Walmart considers an optimized design/bill of
| materials.
|
| It's true the "Walmart version" of a product is likely less
| robust than the non-Walmart version, but that is the result
| of explicit and precise demands formed from actual consumer
| behavior. Manufacturers then have to consistently and
| reliably fulfill Walmart's orders to those exacting
| demands; that's rarely achievable by binning seconds to
| Walmart. Especially so for product variants that require
| actual BOM changes. Rather, it usually entails dedicated
| production runs, with all of the level of care and QC as
| the original product's manufacturing.
| bredren wrote:
| While this worked before, I think this is going to get
| wrecked by the efficiency of Amazon's process.
|
| Where a generic product like a selfie light ring
| smartphone holder is improved by various merchants until
| a winning design and price point is clear.
|
| THEN Amazon selectively considers making their own
| version and pricing it. Or Amazon just keeps pulling
| their fees.
|
| If IP protection prevents an Amazon Basics version,
| Amazon doesn't have to create a version in cooperation
| with the brand---it just promotes it to compete with the
| brand's own e-commerce.
|
| With Nike, it is only recently the checkout and delivery
| came anywhere near what Amazon would do for the same
| shoes, same price.
| sukilot wrote:
| That's a long way of saying that Walmart is complicit in
| the brand scam.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Is this still true? I recently went to a Walmart for the
| first time in a decade+, and it was obvious most of the
| items weren't seconds, they were just cheaply made. Even
| higher-end retailers with outlet stores have just started
| making lower-end merchandise specifically for outlet
| stores.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| I meant seconds in the sense of second-quality items:
| ones that wouldn't pass QA for their primary distribution
| channels, whether that's high-end department stores or
| their own storefronts.
|
| That's different from secondhand items, which are items
| that had been previously sold, used, and then refurbished
| to be sold again.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Walmart doesn't sell 'seconds' as you might normally
| consider. They do often receive inferior quality
| merchandise from their suppliers, often under the same
| SKU. This is how they compete on price. It's like the
| mattress business, at scale.
| bdowling wrote:
| > often under the same SKU.
|
| If the SKU is the same, wouldn't this open everyone up to
| the problem in which a buyer buys one item from the
| expensive retailer (better product) and one from the
| cheap retailer (inferior product), then returns the
| inferior product to the more expensive retailer (keeping
| the better product at the cheaper price)?
| linuxftw wrote:
| This can and does happen. Though, for most items, the net
| gain you'll realize probably isn't worth the effort.
|
| Consider this from Walmart [1]. Mobile 1 5W-30. Something
| I buy frequently, but not from walmart. Walmart's site
| doesn't list a SKU, but you can see the UPC code from one
| of the pictures.
|
| Same exact SKU as Advance Auto [2]. The problem? I know
| for absolute fact that the containers that hold the oil
| look totally different (and Walmart's online photo does
| not reflect reality). I don't buy motor oil from Walmart
| because this is the crap they pull. And it's not like
| this just recently happened or the manufacturer recently
| switched. I've compared the containers across years and
| several states now.
|
| Maybe the packaging is just different but it really is
| the same oil on the inside. I don't trust Walmart enough
| to find out.
|
| 1: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mobil-1-Advanced-Full-
| Synthetic-M...
|
| 2: https://shop.advanceautoparts.com/p/mobil1-advanced-5w
| -30-fu...
| sukilot wrote:
| It's a different SKU, but same product name.
| reaperducer wrote:
| When it comes to some products, especially the more
| expensive ones like televisions, certain retailers will
| get custom SKUs. The products will have a feature added
| or removed or be in a slightly different color.
|
| The idea is to short circuit the price match guarantees
| that they heavily promote.
| danilocesar wrote:
| But from a business POV, it makes sense. Assuming that they
| have a million returns monthly, and from those only a dozen are
| scams (I have no idea about the real numbers, just guessing),
| it would be way more expensive to them to do a deep inspection
| on every returned item than do a soft/cheap check on the
| returns. When something falls throught the cracks (and the user
| find out), customer care will just send a new one (usually it's
| hassle free) and the company absorb the damage from that one
| scam, which it's usually cheap.
|
| I know it hurts when amazon relies on real customers to do
| their deep inspection, but it's all about costs. I don't expect
| this to change.
|
| I would love to stop using amazon for a million reasons, but
| this is not one of them.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| The HDD swap isn't unique to Amazon either, this is something
| that has plagued retail since birth. There was always jokes
| about "rocks in the box" in the 90's when I worked at an
| electronics store.
|
| You hit the head of the nail though, it's a calculated loss /
| cost. With retail they dealt with physical theft way more
| than this and anticipated up to 10% of inventory loss for a
| plethora of reasons. It's not surprising the thieves have
| transitioned here. I would expect that between this and mixed
| inventory, these issues are far more common that people would
| think.
|
| While amazon is at fault for passing it back on, I imagine
| they make it right. They have always fixed issues for me with
| no hesitation. It sucks, but I wouldn't get out a pitchfork
| unless they denied it. And like I mentioned above, Amazon
| isn't unique, any company has this happen.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Of course they always make it right.
|
| The question is where does the discount from my doing their
| inspection for them go? It doesn't go to the prices,
| they're the same everywhere. It doesn't go to the shipping,
| that's my Prime account.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I'm not sure i'm following. Your inspection is something
| you would do with any product purchased. If your request
| is a discount or price because you found something that
| was wrong, then that would be between you and Amazon.
| I've never received anything other than a new item when
| it's happened at other retailers like BestBuy (This exact
| scenario with wrong HDD in external chassis).
|
| I would argue that just like they bake in issues, you as
| a consumer have to account for that in your purchase
| decision.
|
| There's no perfect answer, but i'm not sure you would be
| entitled to anything beyond them fixing the issue in a
| responsible manner. If you want something beyond, it's
| within your right to request that from them and theirs if
| they accept it. I will say, often if you have issues on
| individual packages with delays, they extend your prime
| by X days.
| danilocesar wrote:
| well, Amazon prices are low. And I'm not ignoring the
| fact that they also can do that because they run a huge
| monopoly that crushes the mid-size business and destroys
| the competition, I'm just pointing that they are low.
| _Usually_ lower than the competition. That 's basically
| your reward.
|
| Imagine that mister Bezos start spending millions of
| dollars and employing an army to do deep-check into every
| item returned. Who's paying that bill? Amazon's
| stockholders won't. You will. I will.
|
| But, as I said in a previous post, I'm not defending
| Amazon's behavior. I'm just pointing out that it's all
| about cost and the vast majority of users benefit from
| this as well (with lower prices and no-question-asked-
| return-policy), while a tiny-tiny minority of them might
| face an inconvenience of returning an used item from time
| to time.
| danilocesar wrote:
| Oh, you mention that Amazon's prices are not low, and
| they are the same everywhere. I missed that part.
|
| I don't buy on amazon very much, and I'm in Canada. But I
| don't see prices lower than Amazon frequently. Usually on
| other huge companies like best-buy or walmart. But they
| usually offer the same return policy and I'm pretty sure
| they face the same kind of scams.
|
| But hey, that's my experience. You might have experienced
| something very different.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Yeah it's going to be the same all around. Ease of
| returns at the others won't likely be.
| novok wrote:
| TBH nowadays in the USA I'm seeing significantly cheaper
| prices on ebay vs amazon for many things. Ex: an HDMI
| capture card was $13 on ebay vs $20-25 on amazon.
| Shipping is a bit slower, but something has to give.
| stkdump wrote:
| > The reply from Amazon's support Twitter is the indication of
| a far larger problem in most business. Namely, it's easier to
| deal with the consequences of "mistakes" than it is to not make
| them.
|
| In general I agree that this is a problem. But I don't see how
| this is an instance of that. I mean, how are they supposed to
| respond? "We will find the customer that scammed us and sue
| him. We will find the employee that checked this item and fire
| him."
| lstamour wrote:
| You could start taking photos during the inspection of the
| returned item and before sending it, send a photo to the
| customer to confirm it's what they ordered? You could
| establish a policy where you offer posted discounts (and lose
| money) if items aren't as described? You could involve
| manufacturers in the re-certification process such that for
| high value items there's maybe an extra shipping expense and
| time delay to market but the item's quality could be verified
| before resale? You could strictly accept and sell only new
| items, putting returned or third-party FBA items in less
| efficient markets but completely isolated from the main
| market of trusted goods from known validated sources in your
| supply chain?
| [deleted]
| rmrfstar wrote:
| > Namely, it's easier to deal with the consequences of
| "mistakes" than it is to not make them
|
| What we're seeing is a widespread use of "fractional fraud".
|
| Transactions and business lines that are 1%-5% fraudulent are
| unlikely to be challenged, but have a huge effect on
| profitability.
|
| The best example I've seen is Bunnie Huang's deep dive on
| counterfeit SD cards [1]. Margins on SD cards are like 1%, so
| blending in defective cards at a 1% rate can double your
| profit. Another example is retail trade payment for order flow.
| A major broker-dealer was just sanctioned for front-running its
| clients.
|
| As long as your defect ("mistake") rate stays below your
| customer's response threshold, you can keep doing it. It is
| impossible to overstate how important social norms are for
| policing this kind of misconduct.
|
| [1] https://nostarch.com/hardwarehackerpaperback
| crawsome wrote:
| At Google, they say "It's easier to ask forgiveness than
| permission".
| reaperducer wrote:
| _At Google, they say "It's easier to ask forgiveness than
| permission"._
|
| I hope you're not under the impression that this is another
| SV "innovation," because it's been a saying since at least
| the 1600's.
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/
| rement wrote:
| I'm reminded of an internet fable
|
| > A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey
| from an old farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the
| donkey the next day.
|
| > The next day the farmer drove up and said: "Sorry son, but
| I have some bad news. The donkey died."
|
| > Kenny replied, "Well then, just give me my money back."
|
| > The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it
| already."
|
| > Kenny said, "OK, then just unload the donkey."
|
| > The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"
|
| > Kenny: "I'm going to raffle him off."
|
| > Farmer: "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"
|
| > Kenny: "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he
| is dead."
|
| > A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What
| happened with that dead donkey?"
|
| > Kenny: "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at $2 a piece
| and made a profit of $998.00."
|
| > Farmer: "Didn't anyone complain?"
|
| > Kenny: "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his $2 back."
|
| > Kenny grew up and eventually became the chairman of
| [company you want to mock]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I think you forgot the last few lines, where the guy who
| won ended up telling a friend at the bar how he won the
| donkey but the donkey was dead all along. And then an irate
| mob descended upon Kenny's farm, burned down his house, put
| him against a tree and shot him, and then took his $998.00
| and bought rounds for everyone back at the bar.
| interestica wrote:
| I legit thought this was going to end up in a loop where
| there was never any donkey and it was the same scam the
| original farmer pulled. Dead non-existent donkeys all the
| way down.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Sorry, not a native speaker. What does it mean to "raffle
| somebody off"? (Edit: googling it says: "dispose of in a
| lottery", which makes me wonder: why is there such a
| specific verb in the English language? I have never even
| thought of "disposing of anything in a lottery")
| mattkrause wrote:
| The event itself is called "a raffle" and the verb comes
| from that.
|
| The technical difference, vs a lottery, is that a raffle
| always has exactly one winner, drawn from all of the
| entries. In most lotteries, it's possible for no one to
| win or several people to share the prize.
|
| Raffle also implies that the event is a smaller, one-off
| event, usually with non-cash prizes and often for
| charity. A church might have a raffle to raise money for
| a new roof, using prizes donated by the parishioners.
| This is in contrast to lotteries, which are usually run
| by the government, feature cash prizes, and occur on a
| fixed schedule.
| Raidion wrote:
| Usually raffles in the US are for charity or fundraising
| purposes. You can't run a lottery usually, as those run
| against gambling laws. You can run a raffle, where an
| item worth $X (and usually donated so X=0) will be given
| away to the owner of a random ticket which costs $Y. The
| runner of the raffle sells N tickets. Your
| profit/fundraising is $Y _N - $X.
|
| Often raffles are sold significantly below expected
| value. A popular raffle to support a charity is called a
| 50/50 raffle. This is where the winner of the raffle
| receives 50% of $Y_N, and the charity receives the other
| 50%. Buying a ticket isn't a good financial decision, but
| it's for a charity, and you can end up winning, so they
| are popular.
| yayitswei wrote:
| In response to your question in the edit: it's the word
| "off" at the end that gives the phrase a nuance that
| could be interpreted as "disposing of".
| rement wrote:
| A raffle is a game of chance. You "buy into" the raffle
| and get a ticket that goes into a hat or bowl. The person
| doing the raffle chooses a ticket at random and the
| person that owns that ticket is the winner.
|
| It's not really about "disposing" the donkey it is about
| giving other people the chance to win the donkey...that
| is dead
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Anyway, to the fellow confused people, here's the simple
| English version: Kenny made the donkey a prize of a
| lottery he organized, and didn't tell the participants
| the donkey was dead.
| slongfield wrote:
| A "raffle" as distinct from a "lottery" in American
| English differs in how the prize is decided, and what
| kinds of things are typically the prize.
|
| Typically a lottery runs in one of two ways: with pre-
| decided winning tickets, or a number that's drawn after
| the tickets are distributed to decide which ticket (if
| any) is the winner. In this way, the odds of winning are
| mostly independent of the number of tickets sold. The
| prize is usually money.
|
| A raffle works by selling tickets, and then picking
| exactly one of those tickets to be the winner, making the
| odds directly dependent on the number of tickets sold.
| The prize is usually a physical object, and not money
| (though there are exceptions, e.g., a 50/50 raffle).
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I'm familiar with the both
| forms of gambling, but for some reason, I've encountered
| "lottery" as a term a lot more; "raffle" I hardly knew,
| until now. Thanks!
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| Hang on a sec. Mixing in defective product is literally
| fraud.
|
| Payment for order flow is not only legal, but _good_ for
| retail investors. It, and practices like it, are the only
| reason joe schmoes can go buy 2 shares of TSLA in their
| robinhood account (actual traders deal in round lots - 100
| shares. Price levels featuring less than 100 shares aren 't
| even protected price levels!).
|
| There's also the technicality of the wholesalers technically
| providing a very small (<=1 cent) price improvement, but
| retail investors don't care about that.
|
| I really object to the frankly callous and irresponsible
| bandying about of financial stuff like this. It damages trust
| in what is potentially one of the best-regulated and most
| efficient systems in the world.
|
| I also want to note that, assuming you're referring to
| Citadel's 700k fine, 1) the SEC's description of what
| happened is too vague to really infer what's going on, 2) my
| guess based on their description is that they essentially had
| a bug that technically constituted trading ahead of a small,
| small % of client orders (though it does not seem like it was
| actually getting an advantage by doing so, since it was a
| bug) and 3) this is all corroborated by it being only a 700k
| USD fine, which is ___comically_ __small for a fine from both
| the SEC and for a firm as large as Citadel. This was the
| lightest of slaps on the wrist from a regulator who will
| absolutely destroy firms with fines when they have hard
| evidence.
|
| If anyone wants to look deeper into this, Matt Levine has
| written extensively at this point on the subject of the
| payment-for-order-flow boogieman.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Depending on the product, there is an expected and accepted
| defect rate. This can be very high in situations where
| detecting and removing the defects would cost more to the
| supplier than the customer would spend handling the
| defects. If you deal in dirt cheap electronic junk (think
| novelty holiday junk) the rate can be as high as 10%.
| Bottom of the market SD cards are getting close to that
| standard.
| PeterisP wrote:
| From the perspective of law, it matters very much how
| that defect rate is reached, because intent matters more
| than the outcome itself.
|
| If you have a 10% defect rate for unavoidable causes,
| that sucks. If you have a 10% defect rate because you
| chose to cut all corners and cheap out on every aspect of
| your manufacturing and testing, that sucks but it's
| legal. However, if you have a 5% defect rate and
| intentionally choose to mix in extra 5% of known
| defective units - that's fraud.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Depends on the industry. There are industries where high
| defect rates are an accepted norm. These are not
| necessarily codified. For example: if you order fresh
| fruit/vegetables in bulk, a certain percentage always
| arrive below acceptable quality. That is simply a norm in
| the industry. You are free to inspect/reject as much as
| you want, but nobody will want to sell to you if you make
| a lawsuit out of every bad apple.
| [deleted]
| sukilot wrote:
| OTOH, getting 99 cards and 1 bad card for the price of 50
| good cards is a good deal for the buyer.
| tangjurine wrote:
| What
| Natsu wrote:
| > Another example is retail trade payment for order flow. A
| major broker-dealer was just sanctioned for front-running its
| clients.
|
| You can say Robinhood. Their agreement says that they can't
| do anything to imply that it was incorrect, like threatening
| to sue people for talking about what got them sanctioned.
| dnissley wrote:
| Just had something similar happen to myself a couple months ago
| -- bought some good condition used Galaxy Buds Plus (released
| 2020) sold by Amazon, received Galaxy Buds (Non-Plus, released
| 2019) inside Galaxy Buds Plus packaging. I had zero problem
| returning the item and getting a full refund, but I do wonder if
| the person who did this got away with it.
| aimor wrote:
| I once bought a lawnmower where someone had swapped it out with a
| lower-end model. That was from Lowe's.
|
| I'd like to know what action companies take against this type of
| theft, it seems trivial to identify the culprit but maybe
| difficult to prove anything and probably expensive.
| remus wrote:
| Unless there's some sort of large scale, organised fraud
| occurring, or it is so hugely prevalent as to be affecting the
| bottom line then I'd be very surprised if any action was taken.
| If you think about the amount of time and effort involved
| (legal counsel is expensive) then it's not worth it.
| grishka wrote:
| Oh so _that 's_ why where I'm from most stores require an ID to
| return something.
| all_blue_chucks wrote:
| What does this have to do with Amazon? Return scams have been
| around for as long as returns.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I had this exact thing happen with the purchase of a Nest Protect
| from Amazon. Nest packaging complete with "Inspected" sticker on
| the box and a First Alert detector inside.
|
| I no longer shop at Amazon.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I need to buy 15 16GB SD cards for a high school robotics team
| for Raspberry Pis that are guaranteed to be shutdown improperly
| and bumped around a lot.
|
| I balked at Amazon. I just don't know how to trust their stuff
| anymore. Left having no idea where to get a sensible price.
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| Depending on what brand you want, they're as cheap as $5 on
| B&H:
| https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?q=sd%20card&filters=fc...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Wow $5. That's by far the best I've found for a brand name I
| recognize. Purchased. Thank you from me and the students.
|
| Even worth it with the import duty fees to Canada.
| yobert wrote:
| Newegg! Usually it's pretty close to competitive with Amazon
| for electronics.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I have no idea why newegg didn't cross my mind. I guess
| because I'm not buying desktop computer parts.
|
| Thank you.
| Log1x wrote:
| I semi-recently bought a Samsung 970 EVO from Amazon, except new
| (and not from a third-party seller). Instead I received a
| security blanket: https://i.imgur.com/DTPdhAn.jpg
|
| The SSD box was seemingly factory sealed.
|
| I also bought a Dyson fan recently and what came was an obviously
| used, yellow stained, disgustingly old model of a Dyson fan. I
| hopped on Live Chat, they apologized, initiated a return - few
| weeks later I get a semi-threatening email from Amazon telling me
| that the Dyson fan I sent back "wasn't sent back in its original
| condition" - I hopped on Live Chat and made sure everything was
| ok with my account (it was) - but still, ..wtf. this is a
| problem.
| [deleted]
| bartread wrote:
| For the most part I _do not_ buy anything other than media from
| Amazon any more - books, Kindle, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, games,
| and of course streaming. One notable exception is the Amazon
| Basics range of cables where I tend to go a little nuts. Again,
| for the most part, these are the things they were originally
| good for in the 90s and early noughties; these are the things
| they 're still good for now. Everything else is Russian
| roulette.
|
| In the late noughties/early onesies I went through this period
| where I realised I could just buy anything I wanted that wasn't
| food from Amazon, and it was briefly great. However, they have
| had a _huge_ problem with counterfeit, poor quality, seconds,
| and reconditioned goods for a number of years now. If you need
| thing X you 're much better buying it from a specialist
| retailer, direct from the manufacturer or - depending on what
| it is - even from eBay, Gumtree (or its US equivalent
| Craigslist), particularly for used items.
|
| Avoid Amazon like the plague for non-media items.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Honestly I'm not even sure Amazon is a particularly good
| place to get books anymore. Amazon made it possible for
| publishers to make out-of-print works widely "available" but
| when you order such a book you might get one from the
| original run (printed with offset printing to a generally
| high standard), or you might get a "print on demand" book
| with terrible quality with vague, feathered letter shapes and
| plates which look like they came out of an inkjet printer
| running low on ink.
|
| Apparently Amazon's own print on demand service produces high
| quality books but it is impossible to know what sort of book
| you are getting until it arrives.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Is there another good place to get out-of-print books? Or
| are you saying that for current books, a brick-and-mortar
| store is best, and for out-of-print, rolling the dice with
| Amazon is better than nothing?
| dointheatl wrote:
| Oh wow, I had literally the exact same thing happen to me last
| June: https://imgur.com/a/qzVDuJr
| pintxo wrote:
| Now we all wonder if this is actually the same blanket ...
|
| I propose to add some markings to these products to explore
| how often Amazon will try to sell the same non-product.
| dointheatl wrote:
| Unlikely to be the same blanket, as Amazon did not request
| that I send it back to them as I recall.
| milesvp wrote:
| Years ago, when I worked as a hall tech. I'd mark certain
| parts that had intermittent errors, whenever I RMA'd them,
| so that when I got them back later, I would immediately
| know. Because it was SOP to replace parts until the PC
| worked (not every tech was particularly good at
| troubleshooting), parts would end up coming back pretty
| regularly, since there was often nothing wrong with them.
| But it was super frustrating to get back the motherboard
| you knew had a faulty dimm slot, only to see that dimm slot
| fail for another machine replacement.
| wiml wrote:
| This could be a really entertaining version of
| Wheresgeorge/Bookcrossing, but with returned Amazon
| shipments...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My brother has the opposite problem. He ordered a pan and got a
| very expensive Samsung SSD -- 3 times.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Lol what?
|
| But... Why?
| PTOB wrote:
| Because the pan took Teflon to get there.
| jimmyspice wrote:
| I would like to have that problem, which pan is it?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| What a terrible problem! What's the pan?
| jeanvaljean2463 wrote:
| I keep telling everyone I come across, STOP BUYING THINGS from
| Amazon. They know they have a huge problem and refuse to face
| it.
|
| I was injured in 2010 by counterfeit toiletries and since have
| embargoed them completely. I'm happy to buy things from the
| manufacture and pay shipping, at least I know with a reasonable
| confidence that what I am getting is going to be the real
| thing.
| greedo wrote:
| I was worried about getting ripped when I bought my last
| Samsung, so I ordered directly from their site. I don't think
| they use Amazon for fulfillment (unlike Anker), and all was
| well. Every time I order something from Anker, I worry about
| getting hosed.
| icedchai wrote:
| A shrink wrap machine is relatively cheap and does wonders for
| people running these operations. Nobody is going to check
| inside a "factory sealed" box.
|
| Folks were running scams like this in the 90's. I remember a
| friend of mine bought a hard drive from CompUSA. Turned out it
| was actually a brick sealed in a box.
| dnadler wrote:
| I don't suppose it was a MiniScribe Disk?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe
|
| > In July 1987, Jesse Parker, director of far east
| operations, told Wiles that something was amiss. In August,
| Wiles travelled to Hong Kong and Singapore where he found a
| complete loss of control. The inventory count from that fall
| showed that the numbers had grown to $15 million, mostly in
| Colorado. A report was prepared to consider various
| solutions, but Wiles suggested that they continue hiding the
| problem, ordering all copies of the report be destroyed. This
| led to the company's most infamous cover-up; the managers
| rented a second warehouse in Colorado, where they personally
| packed 26,000 bricks into hard drive boxes and shipped them
| to Singapore in order to shore up the inventory count. After
| the count was complete, they recalled those serial numbers as
| defective units, but instead of writing them off, they
| checked them into inventory, along with other failed drives
| that had been returned.[6]
|
| Maybe one of the bricks made its way to a store :P
| icedchai wrote:
| Hah. This was in the mid to late 90's (possibly '96 or
| '97), so not one of those. I'm pretty sure it was a Western
| Digital drive. It had large "retail" packaging that
| included foam padding and extra hardware, like mounting
| rails for a 5.25 bay, etc.
| nightfly wrote:
| Was it a 5.25" brick or a 3.5" brick?
| icedchai wrote:
| Hah. It was supposed to be a 3.5" hard drive. The box was
| big enough to be able to contain a regular sized brick
| and some padding.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Lol. I worked there in college and someone had the great idea
| to put things like hard disks and video cards on the shelf
| instead of behind the counter to reduce labor costs.
|
| People ran all sorts of scams, most commonly putting a $500
| video card in a $20 box. I'd catch them all of the time, but
| if you reported it you had a chance of losing commissions
| when loss prevention people interviewed you.
|
| Solution: avoid the aisle.
|
| The other crazy one was what we called the crime bus. A
| charter bus of Asian people, usually Chinese, would pull up
| and flood the store with like 30 people on a weekday, pinning
| down every employee with stupid questions. Another group
| would loot the aisles of hard disks, various video/other
| cards and certain inks. I was there for one -- it was
| absolutely insane.
|
| They put that stuff back behind the counter a few months
| later.
| geofft wrote:
| > _People ran all sorts of scams, most commonly putting a
| $500 video card in a $20 box. I'd catch them all of the
| time, but if you reported it you had a chance of losing
| commissions when loss prevention people interviewed you._
|
| Wait, what? The loss prevention people wanted you to not
| prevent loss?
| danielfoster wrote:
| I guess they would take away the commission for this sale
| and maybe question past sales?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| No, they would basically interrogate you.
|
| Sitting in some windowless office at $5.75 an hour for
| two hours basically cost me $100-300 in commissions from
| lost sales.
|
| Those jobs were great in the 90s. One year I paid for my
| College tuition in the week before Christmas.
| icedchai wrote:
| They'd also accept returns of software if you gave a
| plausible excuse. My friend would usually say one of the
| floppies had a read/write error, and he changed his mind.
|
| Too bad they went broke! In the 90's, CompUSA was one of
| the only local places that had a large selection of
| computer parts.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| This is why we can't have nice things like local computer
| stores :/
| mjayhn wrote:
| Losing the ability to rent PC games when I was about 8
| rocked my world. I'll never forget the last game I ever
| rented, SimTown. Going to that rental store was almost as
| exciting as walking through a computer expo.
| [deleted]
| derefr wrote:
| > Nobody is going to check inside a "factory sealed" box.
|
| I'm surprised Amazon doesn't X-ray incoming merchandise and
| then use Computer Vision (i.e. face tagging but for objects)
| to say whether what's inside the box matches what "should" be
| in there according to a database of SKU X-ray "fingerprints."
| dillonmckay wrote:
| So, that is why I thought they put in a security blanket
| inside the SSD box.
|
| Maybe some rudimentary thermal imagery, and that is the
| method?
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| It's probably not worth the cost. Even though the numbers
| would seem large to us, at their scale it's probably not.
| londons_explore wrote:
| A percentage is a percentage...
| chrischen wrote:
| If theY ignore fraud the fraudsters will naturally
| increase their activity.
| AnssiH wrote:
| My guess: The chat agent selected an incorrect reason for the
| return, causing Amazon to expect the actual item back.
|
| Whenever possible, I always initiate the return myself to avoid
| customer service messing things up (there is a specific return
| reason "received incorrect item" in the dropdown).
| mountainb wrote:
| This could have been a warehouse error. I would err on the side
| of warehouse error. A real fraud would have sent you a brick or
| a worthless tile of the same dimension and weight.
| rayhendricks wrote:
| I got a paperlike screen protector from Amazon warehouse. When
| it arrived it had obviously been ripped off another iPad Pro
| and set on the floor. There was a pubic/pet/?? Hair under it
| and it was obviously unusable. Of course it still had the
| factory inspected seal though bc amazon drones dgaf.
|
| Amazon did refund, but made me resend the item rather than
| throwing in the trash. Proof:
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/f1jxjvooWAPVuh4DA
| bartread wrote:
| > Of course it still had the factory inspected seal though bc
| amazon drones dgaf.
|
| Given the purported working conditions in their warehouses,
| is it that much of a surprise?
| blitmap wrote:
| I know sometimes they use weight to detect if the right item is
| in the box. I would still expect a visual check though.
| mbesto wrote:
| Isn't this just "cost of doing business" for a company of
| Amazon's size? Like sure, this does happen but at what rate?
| paulcole wrote:
| Similarly I had to get a refund on a 10-pack of items when I
| only received a 5-pack. Months later I get an email saying I
| didn't return all 10 that I had ordered.
|
| No shit, that was the problem!
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I once ordered a rail of Atmel Microcontrollers from Digikey.
| Got four 74HC00's. Called them, sent them back. And then
| Digikey sent the $28 bill to collections. I complained and
| they politely told me to fuck off.
| CaptainBern wrote:
| There seems to be a real problem with those Samsung SSD's on
| Amazon. There's quite a few reviews where people even received
| a fake SSD, the only thing that gives it away is the
| connector[0]! I decided I wouldn't take the risk and bought
| mine elsewhere.
|
| [0]: https://images-na.ssl-images-
| amazon.com/images/I/71u2ZnjYcWL...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Could there be a crime ring in the factory?
| [deleted]
| stygiansonic wrote:
| There are scammers who will buy the item, open the shrink wrap
| and remove the item before rewrapping it to make it look like
| they never opened it. This becomes more difficult if there are
| security seals.
|
| See: https://lawyerrant.wordpress.com/favorite-scams/the-empty-
| bo...
| EE84M3i wrote:
| Does Amazon really maintain a database of products ->
| security seals and verify them when they come in?
| rajup wrote:
| Electronics on Amazon in general seems to be a hit-or-miss made
| worse by inventory commingling. Recently bought a PS4
| controller from Amazon (purportedly from Sony). Did not last 3
| months. The original controller I got with the PS4 itself still
| works great after more than 2 years.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Unfortunately I suspect _everything_ on Amazon is unreliable
| now, we just notice technology item issues first because we
| know them better.
| sixothree wrote:
| I bought gilette razors from Amazon and really was convinced
| Gilette was going downhill. Nope. They were probably
| counterfeits.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| So what do you think actually happened here? Was the
| controller a really good counterfeit, or was it real but
| used? In the latter case, did it show signs of wear?
| coldpie wrote:
| Yeah, there are fake PlayStation controllers floating
| around. Sony issued a warning about fake PS3 controllers a
| while back: https://www.playstation.com/en-
| gb/legal/warning-counterfeit-...
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Does anyone know if "Shipped from and sold by Amazon.com"
| still guarantees not co-mingled inventory?
|
| That's been my one line of defense against knockoffs after
| hearing in the past that was the case. Whereas an item that's
| "Sold by Sony and fulfilled by Amazon.com" will pay Sony for
| the sale but might actually use co-mingled inventory that
| came from a fraudulent seller.
|
| I guess neither of them address the problem in the article
| though which is now a new source of issues I didn't know I
| needed to be looking out for, of getting a return which may
| have been tampered with or swapped out instead of a brand new
| product.
| fredophile wrote:
| Did that ever guarantee you wouldn't get commingled
| inventory? The only guarantee I know is to buy amazon
| basics products. Unfortunately using this as a strategy to
| guarantee a minimum quality provides perverse incentives.
| Washuu wrote:
| As of a few years ago even "Shipped from and sold by
| Amazon.com" resulted in comingled inventory for me. I was
| unable to purchase a new Sony phone without getting some
| other seller's comingled inventory. Which was problematic
| since that seller incorrectly labeled Hong Kong versions of
| the phone as US versions.
| prashnts wrote:
| Interesting. I tore one down recently. It was a gift for my
| nephew but didn't work out of the box. Well, it did "work",
| as in, it identified as genuine controller; had all "real
| stuff" look, but buttons skipped, lagged, or just didn't
| work.
|
| The insides revealed a mix of genuine components (probably
| off of scrap?) and an assembly-line quality bodge-work. (I
| didn't take any pictures, but I still have it -- so I can
| post some pictures if anyone's interested.)
| stordoff wrote:
| I would certainly be interested to see this.
| arm85 wrote:
| A similar thing has happened to me in the past. Brought a phone
| dock from amazon, and when it arrived, it didn't fit my phone,
| looking at the serial number on the dock itself, it was for the
| previous model of phone but the packaging was for the latest.
|
| So someone had decided to upgrade for free.
| tsyd wrote:
| It happened to me when I bought a new motherboard from Amazon
| (shipped and sold by Amazon, not Amazon Warehouse nor fulfilled
| by Amazon). I opened the motherboard box and inside was a 10-year
| old motherboard.
|
| I knew this was a possibility when buying from Amazon Warehouse
| but didn't expect it when buying new directly from Amazon.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| The way Amazon runs things is completely inexcusable. If you
| can't order _directly_ from Amazon and get a non-fraudulent
| product, then the whole platform is basically going to a flea
| market, having all the vendors turn their backs, shuffling
| product amongst the vendors, and sending normal citizens
| through to buy what they want.
|
| Any traceability and trust the end consumer would have is gone.
| Amazon may be able to trace a particular product to a vendor,
| but that's of no help to a consumer wanting a consistent supply
| of goods. Amazon also doesn't show if a vendor chooses to opt
| out of comingled inventory, which would go a long way towards
| helping end consumer trust.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| A year ago I bought a TV (same as you: directly from Amazon).
| It came with the screen cracked. I asked for a new one... The
| replacement came cracked. On the reviews, I saw a couple people
| mentioning that the screen came cracked. They wanted me to send
| them back by Canada Post, but I said no way I would do that, as
| I don't drive, and I would not carry 2 55" TVs on the streets.
| They ended up paying for purolator to pick them up at my place.
|
| I asked for a refund and bought on Best Buy. No problems!
| TD-Linux wrote:
| Someone did this scam even at a local Best Buy. When I returned
| it, they unpack it and scan the barcode on the case, but of
| course not on the actual HDD. (the person doing the scam didn't
| even do a good job, and broke some of the plastic clips in the
| process)
| projproj wrote:
| What are your favorite alternatives to Amazon? E.g., I go to
| monoprice for cables. Are there other niche options that you like
| for different products where you can expect quality?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I just plain don't buy electronics on Amazon. I've rarely had it
| go well. It's usually something - anywhere from something like
| this, to paying full price for something that was obviously
| previously opened.
| t0mbstone wrote:
| I don't understand who all these people are who are having bad
| experiences with Amazon. I only ever buy products that have the
| Prime label and have plenty of verified positive reviews. Stuff
| always arrives very quickly (often the next day), and I have
| literally never had a fake product mailed to me when I do this.
|
| One time I bought a used product from Amazon and it was a
| little beat up but it still worked.
|
| Another time I bought something that was clearly manufactured
| and sold from China, and sure enough it sucked, but I just
| returned it and it was no big deal.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This was a big reason that I stopped buying stuff from best Buy.
|
| I would buy some peripheral or appliance, get home, open the box,
| and see a dirty, stained, clearly broken device.
|
| They were always very good about refunding, but they treated my
| wasted time as if it were nothing.
|
| This has not [yet] happened to me with Amazon, for new devices,
| but it did happen once with a used "New condition" peripheral
| (what arrived was broken, dirty, and packed with toilet paper and
| rolled up newspapers). The third-party vendor jerked me around so
| much, I had to use Amazon's A-Z guarantee.
|
| I tend to use Costco for home appliances, these days, and my
| expensive kit from manufacturers.
| akerro wrote:
| There is a post about it every week on /r/datahoarder
| [deleted]
| eugenekolo wrote:
| Welcome to Amazon shopping for the past 5 or so years. Everything
| is fakes, used goods marked as new, and low quality goods with
| 4.7+ stars from fake reviews.
|
| The convenience is so nice, yet about 50% of the time I'm
| disappointed with any purchase made on Amazon.com. But, those
| stock profits :heart_eyes_emoji:.
| redm wrote:
| This is why retailers are starting to get drivers licenses to
| complete a return; its much harder to scam if you cant do it
| anonymously.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I doubt this will do much. They would still need to actually
| investigate the issues which they already don't do.
|
| Online banks nowadays do ID verification with passports, etc
| and yet very basic fraud committed intentionally by the account
| holder is still happening because the truth is even though the
| information to identify the perpetrator is there nobody can be
| bothered enough to act on it.
| gibba999 wrote:
| I shopped on Amazon for many years. I never had problems until
| around the time of COVID19. It seems to be a cesspool of scammers
| and conartists now. Amazon doesn't do much of anything about it
| either. I'm out a couple hundred bucks.
|
| I'm kind of annoyed. I need a reliable place to order stuff.
| Aliexpress and eBay seem ahead of Amazon now. That's bad.
|
| My favorite scam: Futures. Sellers will sell low-availability
| things at (slightly) inflated prices and long ship times. If
| prices go down, you get the product. If prices go up, they refund
| you. It's too complex for Amazon minimum wage drones to
| understand why this is a scam, so you can't do anything about it.
|
| Amazon wouldn't refund my Prime, which renewed around the time of
| COVID19, and which hasn't really worked. That's turning into a
| scam too.
| tehlike wrote:
| File a dispute with your bank.
| kube-system wrote:
| If you do that, you'll never have to worry about getting
| scammed at Amazon again, since they'll probably close your
| account.
| grugagag wrote:
| Ok, then open another one. It is a bit time consuming but
| at least you don't take the loss.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's not that easy, Amazon closes accounts that attempt
| to evade their bans too, by cross referencing shipping
| addresses, names, emails, credit cards, IP addresses,
| etc.
| tehlike wrote:
| "Amazon wouldn't refund my Prime" -> I assumed this was to
| close account :)
|
| And i believe they wouldn't close the account.
| kube-system wrote:
| Why would you assume that? A prime subscription is not a
| requirement for an Amazon account. It seems to me they
| were saying that they didn't want to pay for expedited
| shipping if Amazon couldn't provide expedited shipping.
|
| And it is fairly common for online retailers to ban
| accounts that do charge-backs. Amazon will ban people for
| having too many returns.
| jedberg wrote:
| > It's too complex for Amazon minimum wage drones to understand
| why this is a scam, so you can't do anything about it.
|
| Too be fair, it's not exactly a scam. No one is really being
| cheated out of anything. It's annoying for sure, but there is
| no deception.
| sukilot wrote:
| Charging the card and not yet shipping is a scam.
| jedberg wrote:
| But they don't charge the card until they ship.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Yes but they tie up the opportunity to charge the card
| for weeks on end while you try to get them to ship or
| have Amazon cancel it. Imagine buying a $500 widget and
| the seller delays and delays. You decide to order
| elsewhere and then finally the seller fulfills the order.
| You are now committed to $1000 of widget when you only
| wanted one.
| jedberg wrote:
| But when you buy from the second vendor you can just
| cancel the first order.
|
| Amazon lets you cancel any time before shipment. They
| don't do pre-auths on the card either.
| gibba999 wrote:
| It is a scam. It's a sophisticated scam. I thought I was
| buying an item. I was giving the seller a free options
| contract, valued at a few hundred dollars.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_of_options
|
| Price jumped up by a $150, and I never got my item. I needed
| the item and not receiving it resulted in a couple hundred
| bucks of damages. If price had gone down a hundred bucks, I
| would have overpaid by that much.
|
| The seller, by the way, did charge my card. It was marked as
| shipped. The seller issued a refund on the day it was
| supposed to arrive, claiming it was "lost in trucking." Many
| other buyers had their orders "lost in trucking" too from
| reviews of that and other sellers.
|
| My opinion is that Amazon should have made the seller fulfill
| the orders. At the time I ordered, several items were
| available at the same price. At the time I was to receive the
| order, price had gone up $150. It's not like the seller
| couldn't have fulfilled it; they would have just taken a loss
| to do so.
|
| I'll mention this isn't the only time I got scammed on Amazon
| this year; just the most clever scam.
| teraflop wrote:
| Never mind third-party sellers, I've had Amazon themselves
| pull this on me with a book I pre-ordered directly from
| them.
|
| On the day my order was supposed to be delivered, it
| mysteriously became "unavailable", only to reappear a
| couple of weeks later at a higher price.
| bdowling wrote:
| > It's not like the seller couldn't have fulfilled it; they
| would have just taken a loss to do so.
|
| Contract law exists to enforce contracts that one party
| doesn't want to complete because they regret entering into
| the deal once they have more information, or the costs
| change, etc.
|
| You could try to sue the vendor in small claims court to
| recover your damages, including the costs of the suit. The
| vendor is counting on you and other parties not actually
| doing that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem is that the vendor is technically Amazon;
| they are the one who provide the technical, financial and
| logistical services as well as profit from it (if the
| scam went in the seller's favor). The seller itself is
| likely abroad.
|
| We have a regulatory problem here where you think you
| deal with a local company abiding by local laws, you get
| charged by a local company that's supposed to be abiding
| by local laws (Amazon charges customers and they pays out
| the sellers later), but when things go wrong they can
| suddenly pull the "we are a platform" get-out-of-jail-
| free card. This should not be possible.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what was the item that has such price
| swings?
| gibba999 wrote:
| Chest freezer.
|
| A lot of items had these swings though: face masks were
| the most obvious, but virtually all emergency supplies
| went through major up-and-down spikes. Dry shelf-stable
| food, some medicines, toilet paper, etc. All of a sudden,
| the whole world wanted to stock up.
|
| That made it really hard to buy those items if you have a
| non-emergency use for them.
| stefs wrote:
| imo it's a bit like an auction where the seller can accept or
| refuse to honor the outcome, depending on the highest bid.
|
| but is there actually "no deception"? i mean, if i order
| something i'm usually reasonally sure i'll actually get the
| product. them not honoring their side of the contract does
| seem like deception.
| kube-system wrote:
| I switched mainly to eBay a few years ago. No inventory
| commingling, and the users generally post seller reviews
| associated with the seller instead of on a generic product
| page.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Aliexpress and eBay seem ahead of Amazon now.
|
| Wow, that is bad.
| sn_master wrote:
| Got a Motorola phone, same-day shipping from the US, and actually
| got it just few hours later.
|
| Phone screen broke. Contacted Motorola for support, they said the
| phone IMEI is from India and can't be serviced in the US under
| warranty, I have to ship it to India if I want it fixed by them
| :/
| [deleted]
| disiplus wrote:
| why would they swap in a 8 tb one thah still has value and not a
| idk 500g one and profit more ?
| pwinnski wrote:
| I have a NAS that holds four drives. If I upgrade 8TB drives
| for 16TB drives, I would have no further use for the 8TB
| drives. I also don't have half-TB drives lying around.
| disiplus wrote:
| sure, but if you are a scammer then selling the 8T for at
| least 100$ and picking one for basically free would net you
| more profit. maybe it was somebody that did not think he does
| something wrong because "amazon is big and will eat the cost"
| netsharc wrote:
| Huh, honestly it'd be "cleverer" to find a broken drive
| (that the OS wouln't even detect) and swap it into the
| enclosure. Then the thief can say it was defective, or the
| next buyer would, and there would be less of a chance of an
| investigation/change of policy.
| yalogin wrote:
| I don't know how best buy our other brick and mortar stores deal
| with this kind of scams. Unless they actually hook it up and
| check for that kind of scam its tough. In that sense its not a
| uniquely Amazon issue. At Amazon's scale though it gets
| exaggerated and also because of that scale they can ignore it and
| keep replacing items for their customers. The process to check
| each and every item for scams might be too costly. Its a
| fascinating study nonetheless and it will be great to get some
| real insight from people working on these issues.
| sn_master wrote:
| You can just drive back and hand it to them and get a new one
| or a refund in just an hour or so. Not so easy with Amazon.
| seancoleman wrote:
| This reminds me of how a friend (as a teenager in the 90s) would
| buy expensive video cards from Best Buy and CompUSA only to swap
| them out with cheap cards off eBay, re-shrink wrap the box and
| return for a hefty profit. I thought it was a clever, profitable
| hack at 16 years old but now I'm ashamed I didn't just call this
| what it was: theft.
| StavrosK wrote:
| I have a friend who regularly buys items on Amazon, uses them
| for a couple of years and then returns them just before the
| warranty expires because of "dead pixels" or some other excuse,
| and gets a full refund.
| crististm wrote:
| find better friends
| milankragujevic wrote:
| That is so mean.
|
| Meanwhile I got a new Galaxy S9+ (not in USA obv.) which was
| broken from day 1 and couldn't get it replaced without suing
| the store and that would take years. I had to get a brand new
| phone serviced instead (battery, motherboard). And maybe it
| wasn't water resistant anymore after being opened.
|
| World isn't fair. :(
| Spivak wrote:
| There are some products that are so unreliable that I have
| zero sympathy for the company that's reaping what they sow
| with the warranty. I have a personal electric heater that has
| a two year warranty but refuses to last a winter. Like it
| just sits in my bedroom living a cushy life as far as heaters
| go. But I'm on my 3rd replacement and they keep re-upping the
| warranty and so I'll probably get a new one every year at
| this point.
| raincom wrote:
| Fry's electronics when I was there was a victim of that. Fry's
| management in their heydays (before newegg, amazon) gave the
| directive to open boxes, even when these boxes appear new,
| during the return-process. This is the result of lessons.
|
| Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the
| vendors.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| X-ray plus machine learning could probably solve that problem
| quite effectively.
|
| Or tamper-resistant RFID tags attached directly to the
| product.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| At least they were doing something about it. In my younger
| days working retail at CompUSA, I once pointed out that a
| customer was attempting to return a cheaper video card in a
| better video card's box.
|
| I got in trouble (not much trouble, but still) for making the
| customer unhappy :/.
| kodt wrote:
| I recall people doing this but just putting a NIC in there
| and returning it to Best Buy. The Geek Squad employee would
| open the box to verify a card was in there, but wouldn't know
| what it should look like and would accept a $15 NIC in place
| of a $200 video card.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious Amazon has done the math and
| determined it's not worth their time to do anything about it.
| kayfox wrote:
| Fry's is the only retailer I have been to where an LP
| associate insisted on opening up a product I just bought new
| to inspect it. Yep, its a rice cooker, I should have went
| over to returns to return it as its condition changed from
| new to open box before I left the store.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| too bad fry's is done for. despite the problems, i miss
| them now.
|
| towards the end, ie the last few years, when i brought an
| expensive-ish item to the counter, or more often when they
| brought it out of the cage for me to complete the purchase,
| i'd open the item at the counter in front of the cashier.
| 100% of the time the cashier would balk "hey you can't do
| that" (i hadn't paid yet), which is of course stupid to
| say. i just needed to verify that the item was new and also
| not a 52-switcheroo, as we used to call it.
|
| recently (2019-2020) i've bought 2 damaged high end
| products from best buy. outer box perfect, inner product
| damaged. luckily BB is like amazon and has complete no-
| hassle returns.
|
| more longer ago i've received a few duds from ebay and
| other non-amazon retail merchants. smaller value things i
| just write off but some of the bigger ones it's been
| painful getting the rep to take it back. the next time i do
| such a purchase i am setting up a camera to do an unboxing
| video.
| bdowling wrote:
| > Yep, its a rice cooker
|
| A rice cooker is a cylindrical item that usually comes in a
| rectangular box that leaves empty room in the corners. The
| LP associate was checking for additional unpurchased items
| in the box, not that you were getting a rice cooker.
| kayfox wrote:
| It was a sealed box.
| raincom wrote:
| Yes, they are like that. However, it is mandatory for the
| LP to check any thing that an employee has bought. They
| also check lunch bags, boxes. One time, LP caught an
| employee who stuffed his lunch bag with lots of DVDs.
|
| Other time, the LP manager and the customer service manager
| (who manages the front checkouts and cash) got colluded,
| and switched the direction of the camera near the cash
| counting area; then $10K cash was gone. Both managers got
| fired.
|
| Another incident. One LP associate and another guy at the
| return counter ran a scam together by issuing store credit
| for things that are NOT returned. For every return there,
| LP associate has to sign off.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Should have? Just because 'floor model/return' and 'only
| the box was touched' fall under the same umbrella doesn't
| mean you should treat them the same.
|
| A discount would be unreasonable, and getting your money
| back wouldn't improve your situation at all. Unless that
| was some kind of collector's item rice cooker.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the
| vendors.
|
| The problem is, it'd be trivial for someone with a sticker
| printer to slam a new label on the drive, saying 16TB. It'd
| be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform
| QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You
| see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even
| plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough
| to find most fakes.
|
| I think the only real solution is this to be fixed at the
| government level. At the moment it's too expensive and risky
| to go after customers, even when Amazon can determine they
| are running this scam. Either you get drawn into a legal
| battle trying to prove it, or you get labeled as evil Amazon
| going after the innocent little guy in the media. It's
| easiest for Amazon to just raise prices 1% and call it a day.
| Which is what Walmart does for theft/return fraud as well,
| and likely every company in the U.S.
|
| There needs to be a law that makes it easy for Amazon (and
| other companies) to go "this account was found to have
| returned different merchandise 5 times, they need to pay
| $xxxx fine" and it to be done. But if even if one of these
| cases go to trial, it'd be at least a $5000 expense to
| Amazon.
|
| As long as this is impossible in our legal system, these
| scammers will continue to thrive.
| sukilot wrote:
| The solution is don't buy expensive sensitive equipment at
| a flea market like Amazon.
| bestnameever wrote:
| > At the moment it's too expensive and risky to go after
| customers, even when Amazon can determine they are running
| this scam.
|
| Amazon could very easily prevent future returns from these
| customers, preventing them from running the scam.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| No one goes after doorstep package thieves, why would they
| crack down on this?
| sharkmerry wrote:
| > It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools
| and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on
| their site. You see a similar problem with knock off
| headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song
| wouldn't be enough to find most fakes.
|
| If amazon doesnt have capacity to verify products they are
| selling, they shouldnt be selling them. They are knowingly
| contributing to fraud and we write it off as "they're too
| big to regulate themselves"
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| So should most customer returns just go to a landfill?
| LegitShady wrote:
| Returns are sold in pallets to resellers who accept the
| risk. But amazon shouldnt be selling returns if they
| can't or haven't verified the item is correct and
| functional.
| inetknght wrote:
| My father was a victim to that type of fraud.
| gruez wrote:
| >now I'm ashamed I didn't just call this what it was: theft.
|
| Isn't it technically fraud?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Possibly both theft and fraud
| DanBC wrote:
| Theft: dishonestly appropriating something, with the intent
| of permanently depriving the owner.
|
| He dishonestly took the item. He had no intent of giving it
| back.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's technically both - theft by defrauding.
| hn_check wrote:
| A very common tactic during the period when video cards were
| improving rapidly was to buy a card, use it for six months, and
| then return it and buy the newer one.
|
| Rinse and repeat.
|
| For a while a lot of these electronics retailers had a zero
| question policy, but when they moved to asking "Why?", people
| would proudly talk about ruining the card with 120v to justify
| the return.
|
| There are ways that people can rationalize these gaming of the
| system behaviors, but it just seems to be a descent to
| crapitude, where every retailer treats every return as a crime,
| because often it really is.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > There are ways that people can rationalize these gaming of
| the system behaviors, but it just seems to be a descent to
| crapitude, where every retailer treats every return as a
| crime, because often it really is.
|
| I do wonder where the line is, though.
|
| I didn't have a PS3 growing up, but I wanted to play
| Uncharted and a few other games when I was in High School.
| Game rentals were long gone by then, much less console
| rentals--but I realized that Gamestop had a 7-day return
| policy on used hardware.
|
| So one year, during spring break, I bought a used PS3 and
| copies of Uncharted 2 and 3. I didn't manage to finish the
| latter in time, but I still enjoyed myself.
|
| I am to this day convinced I did nothing wrong. The console
| was used both before and after purchase, and I took good care
| of the hardware and followed the written return policy. And
| in the process, I bought multiple non-returnable games from
| the store.
|
| But I was _definitely_ taking advantage of the return policy,
| since I had no intention of holding on to the console.
| fortran77 wrote:
| You could write a check to Best Buy (have it delivered via an
| attorney to protect your identity) and make good on your theft.
| It's too late for CompUSA--you already put them out of
| business.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > your theft
|
| > you already
|
| It was their friend, not them.
| mbajkowski wrote:
| Used to work at Computer City in the mid 90s. It was not always
| that easy to verify if you had the right product in the box
| even when opening a returned item, especially if you were not
| familiar with the product being returned. Looking things up on
| the internet was not always possible / slow.
|
| Every store did have a shrink wrap machine which were used
| nightly. Hard to say how many improperly returned products were
| resold back then, or even how many goods may have been
| repackaged in the back warehouse on reception before ever
| hitting the floor.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I recall seeing youtube videos about people who purchased pallets
| of returned items from Amazon. Kind of an "unboxing" video for a
| huge stack of returned items. Yes I was bored.
|
| They had a few similar scenarios where people had clearly
| purchased expensive computer components like motherboards etc and
| then returned the box with some worthless motherboard in there
| instead of the expensive one. You can imagine some poor Amazon
| warehouse worker receiving the package, opening it up and seeing
| the motherboard "yup - looks like some computer gubbins.
| approved." and off it goes.
|
| The video people seemed to react like this was quite a common
| occurrence.
|
| So this makes me wonder, if amazon are bundling-up returned items
| into pallets and selling them in bulk, how did clearly returned
| items get sold back to an end user? Frankly I am amazed the
| scammer went to the effort of putting in a 8TB device and
| connecting it, rather than either returning it empty or with some
| random old IDE drive in it as a decoy.
| cleansingfire wrote:
| You've described the process: When the Vendor misses the bogus
| return, it's sent back to another sales bin, and resold. Next,
| the Customer accepts it, or returns it again. At this point,
| the loop should exit, but we already know the Vendor is
| imperfect. I've wondered how often this iterate before exiting.
| The worst case is fun to speculate on, since both are motivated
| to pass that hot potato.
| AnssiH wrote:
| > So this makes me wonder, if amazon are bundling-up returned
| items into pallets and selling them in bulk, how did clearly
| returned items get sold back to an end user?
|
| If the item is (looks) unopened and pristine, Amazon will
| usually sell it again as new.
|
| Some switcharoos are caught, some are not.
| balls187 wrote:
| > If the item is (looks) unopened and pristine, Amazon will
| usually sell it again as new.
|
| This is a big reason I stopped purchasing most goods from
| Amazon.
|
| I was tired of getting open-box merch sold as brand new.
| novok wrote:
| Isnt this mass fraud being committed by amazon then?
| adrr wrote:
| They could catch it multiples ways. Simple precise weight
| measurement would catch basic scammers. They could X-ray the
| package and use cv to determine if the contents have been
| modified or not.
| qppo wrote:
| Why automate? Pay someone to open the box and check.
| ohazi wrote:
| And now the (possibly fake) security seal is definitely
| broken, so "probably new" becomes "definitely used"
| skylanh wrote:
| Cost of multiple shifts at multiple locations + cost of
| implementing verification process + cost of security and
| oversight + cost of extra inventory loss due to employee
| theft
|
| vs
|
| Cost of negative image (deferred via simple returns) +
| cost of inventory loss duo to fraud + cost of inventory
| loss due to employees
|
| It's simpler to simply eat the cost of abuse.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Xray + CV will fail horribly when the device is sent back
| with the power cable wrapped around it...
| adrr wrote:
| The reference was to shrink wrapped(unopened) returns. If
| it's open, employees could do a manual inspection.
| saagarjha wrote:
| How would this catch this particular case, were you just
| put the same thing back in except one has a small "8 GB"
| sticker on it?
| zaroth wrote:
| No, this was an Amazon Warehouse deal, in which you
| purposefully buy a returned item at a discount.
| AnssiH wrote:
| Right. Though it does happen with "new" items as well, I've
| been hit with RAM swapped in the package with an older
| module (sold by Amazon as new).
| globular-toast wrote:
| Those bundles are liquidation pallets where, for whatever
| reason, Amazon decide they want to sell the stock for cash. It
| doesn't mean every returned item will be liquidated in that
| fashion.
| mNovak wrote:
| I think what a lot of people are missing in the comments when
| they say "I bought <product> from <brand> not a third party..."
| is that for new products the 'seller name' you're buying from
| does not correspond to which box you get off the shelf. It's
| called co-mingled inventory--Amazon doesn't track which box you
| (as seller) sent them, they just throw it on the shelf with all
| the other "new" same product boxes.
|
| Obvious fraud is at least somewhat Amazon's problem since it gets
| returned, but the huge problem for the name-brand vendors is all
| the support requests / bad reviews they get when people get
| counterfeit crap, thinking they bought from <brand> directly.
| viggity wrote:
| IIRC, if you're a seller, you have to pay extra to not have
| your goods co-mingled with the "same" product from other
| companies. It would appear that seagate didn't do that.
| bdowling wrote:
| > if you're a seller, you have to pay extra to not have your
| goods co-mingled
|
| It would be great if Amazon passed that information on to the
| purchaser. It might even justify paying a higher price to buy
| from a non-comingled vendor because it would indicate
| increased accountability.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| While true, this does not apply in this case, "Warehouse" (=re-
| sold returned goods) inventory is not comingled.
| zimbatm wrote:
| Pro tip: don't bother with Amazon France, order from the UK.
|
| For some reason, all the non-consumables that I ordered in France
| were re-furbished items sold as new. In contrast, the UK has
| always been stellar. Once Brexit hits, I will stop using Amazon
| altogether.
| Asuchug4 wrote:
| Does it matter at all? Won't the item be shipped from closest
| amazon warehouse regardless of site used?
| teh_klev wrote:
| Due to Brexit this is changing:
|
| https://tamebay.com/2020/07/amazon-fba-brexit-bombshell-
| efn-...
|
| Previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888510
| alibert wrote:
| Anecdotal but my current experience is the opposite.
|
| Just some weeks ago, I bought a dumb phone (new and sold by
| Amazon FR) on the Amazon FR website and it was sent by a
| fulfillment center in UK. The phone I received was opened,
| missing earbuds and was the Middle East version with the wrong
| keypad.
| lubujackson wrote:
| I bought a new kid's book from Amazon.
|
| A child had written their name inside the cover.
| netsharc wrote:
| Gavin Free of the Slow-Mo Guys talked on a podcast how he got 2
| cans of Dr. Pepper instead of a dremel:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-LRgWpyMEI&t=29s
|
| I wonder what else could "black hats" do with this "exploit". Buy
| laptops, install malware, return them? The higher-end the laptop,
| the higher the chances are the next buyer will be rich, and that
| seems like an interesting way to access someone's bank account.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Curious what countries this is happening in?
|
| I'm in the Uk and never had these problems despite being a fairly
| prolific Amazon user.
| tiernano wrote:
| I buy a lot of stuff from amazon and only on 1 occasion did
| something like this happen. Bought a 16Gb DDR4 SODIMM, mind you
| from the warehouse deals (half price!) and a 4Gb module
| arrived. Opened a case with Amazon and they sent me a second
| one, but this time the correct size...
| zaroth wrote:
| "Amazon Warehouse", for those not familiar with it, is an option
| you can select specifically to buy an item that was previously
| returned.
|
| Amazon has done a cosmetic inspection of the item and gives it a
| ranking on how it appears which you see when you are buying it.
|
| There are certain types of items where you can save a huge amount
| of money and get great deals using Amazon Warehouse. Hard drives
| are obviously not one of them due to the assumption that
| everything is returned _for a reason_. An example of a type of
| item that I've always had good luck with is pots and pans.
|
| The interesting thing about this is assume that the tracking is
| in place to identify who returned the original item. What would
| you do?
|
| Maybe the actual scam (I don't mean in this specific case) is
| buying perfectly good Amazon Warehouse items but, knowing that
| they had been previously returned, _claiming_ the item was
| swapped out after swapping it out yourself.
|
| So Amazon can't really know who to blame from a single incident.
| But certainly I would expect accounts would accumulate warning
| flags and at some point be banned.
| stordoff wrote:
| I got a set of Hue bulbs for less than half price (packaging
| was beat up, but the contents were fine), and a pair of
| headphones for 25% off the new price (had a cable missing).
| I've also had stuff arrive in _far_ worst condition than was
| noted on the listing. It's a bit hit and miss.
| danielfoster wrote:
| I often wonder if Amazon even inspects returns. I will often
| order items with listed cosmetic defects (major scratches) but
| receive brand new items in sealed packaging.
| vinhboy wrote:
| I feel like this needs to be the top comment. Buying warehouse
| items is risky, that's why it's cheaper.
|
| Also, you can just return it if you don't like.
|
| I don't think this deserves the scrutiny it's getting here.
| amiantos wrote:
| Outrage drives clicks... link has been up for 5 hours and is
| on the front page of HN, while other links with (probably)
| more worthwhile content stagnate and die. It's just how the
| internet works.
| hn_check wrote:
| "But certainly I would expect accounts would accumulate warning
| flags and at some point be banned."
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-style-rating-helps-bran...
|
| Though there seems to be a bit of a conflict with such a system
| -- wouldn't every retailer want to say everyone is terrible,
| you surely don't want to deal with them, etc.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| But isn't the fact that it's anti-retailers the whole
| purpose, that it holds retailers more accountable? The whole
| reason it's controversial with Uber is that the drivers are
| more like independent contractors, rather than businesses,
| and as such is very stressful for them. Whereas with
| e-commerce, the way the retailers present themselves and
| operate as is much more like a proper business. Holding them
| more accountable here isn't as bad as with Uber.
| raincom wrote:
| That's why Fry's Electronics--a bay area retailer--scans the
| serial numbers of hard drives, DIMM memory and other electronic
| stuff. During the return process, Fry's employees check the
| serial number of the returned item against what's there in the
| receipt. This strategy was born precisely because of the scam
| that Amazon is seeing now.
| mountainb wrote:
| Some manufacturers also opt in to similar SN tracking on
| Amazon. This is a smart way to handle it. Amazon is not nearly
| proactive enough in dealing with return fraud in part because
| it tends to externalize those costs to their vendors (the
| brand) and to third party sellers, who also absorb the cost of
| returns.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Amazon does this for Apple products. My recent Apple Watch
| purchase had its serial number on the invoice, which I managed
| to use to look up its date of manufacture. (I needed one that
| works with a jailbreakable iPhone.)
|
| Amazon was motivated to include the serial number presumably
| because Apple stuff either had a lot of return fraud, or Apple
| themselves requested for the supply chain to be tightened up.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But here an _internal component_ was swapped. The serial number
| on the product was unchanged.
|
| I've never seen a receipt list any serial number, let alone
| serial numbers of multiple internal components.
| toast0 wrote:
| On the WD external drives, the serial number on the case
| matches the serial number on the drive inside. Once you get a
| couple complaints from either WD corporate returns or
| customers you sold the returned product to, I'd expect
| returns to be checked for this --- especially if there looked
| opened, but it takes a minute to power on and ask the disk
| for its serial number. You can check the smart pre-failure
| indicators too and maybe decide not to ship hard drives in a
| big empty box with three air pillows. (I dunno, I'm never
| buying a hard drive from amazon until they learn how to ship
| them)
| raincom wrote:
| At least Fry's electronics used to TEST memory sticks,
| motherboards, CPUs in front of customers during the return
| process. I knew cases where customers tried to return CPUs
| with bent pins, and their returns were denied.
|
| IIRC, Fry's did not test hard disks, except to match the
| serial numbers. So, now this scam requires testing of hard
| drives of their capacity during the return process. And this
| is a cat-and-mouse game.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I feel like the testing was more of a way to 1. try to
| avoid the return by proving it worked and 2. put it right
| back out on the shelf for sell. Actually picked up some
| good deals in the good days of Frys from returns. It's a
| shame they're nothing more than an as seen on tv store
| these days.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| There's basically no way to stop a consumer returning
| something, no matter what state they got it in or what
| state it's in now.
|
| Any discussion about how it was when it was sold is their
| word against yours.
|
| Ultimately they can just charge-back. Short of taking
| them to court, what are you going to do about that?
|
| It's important for consumer rights though.
| raincom wrote:
| First, they used to put these reshrink-wrapped items back
| on the shelves without any labels. Few years later, they
| started to put the label "Returned item".
|
| Fry's is dead, as their HQ on Brokaw Road is being
| converted to an office complex. They missed the dot com
| gravy train; had they gone to IPO around 1999, they would
| have made a killing. However, Fry's brothers and their
| management are weird.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| oh is it? last i knew there were 3 bids over the last
| year or os, all unable to get through re-zoning. The last
| news I heard was april 2020 and it is still stuck.
|
| do you know something very recent, or are you going on
| vaporware press releases.
| raincom wrote:
| Nothing new, just that April 2020 news. Fry's done for
| now thanks to Covid. It was slowly dying before that.
|
| Here are some facts: (a) most of the shelves are empty;
| (b) shelves between two shelves are removed, to make it
| appear business as usual; (c) vendors were not getting
| paid by Frys; (d) therefore, any decent vendor doesn't
| want to send them items on credit; (e) so, Fry's is left
| with the junk we see on TVs.
|
| In some aspects, I miss Fry's. Fry's used to hire all
| kinds of people, gave jobs to new immigrants without
| English skills. Now we such people driving Uber, Lyft.
| vernie wrote:
| Tangent: Isn't Fry's on the brink of death?
| js2 wrote:
| I recently purchased a open box Apple Pencil from BestBuy. When I
| got it, it didn't work. I realized the pencil s/n didn't match
| the box and looked up the manufacture date. It was several years
| old and the battery must've been shot. Someone had bought a new
| pencil and used the box to return their old pencil and BestBuy
| must not have checked.
|
| BestBuy gave me a new one, no hassle. But then crazily enough,
| the brand new Apple Pencil didn't work either. Bad luck! They
| were out of stock at that point so they just gave me a refund.
|
| Anyway, I know this is a risk with open box. A friend just
| purchased a brand new Garmin Fenix via Amazon. When she opened
| the Garmin box, nothing was inside! Amazon refunded her. She
| purchased it from REI instead.
| davestephens wrote:
| A close friend has a very similar thing recently, except it
| was/should have been a new Ryzen 3700x, not a warehouse deal.
|
| If you've bought one you'll know it comes in a box with a big
| cooler on top, and the proc is at the bottom in a bit of plastic
| packing.
|
| He got the big cooler but no Ryzen. Contacted Amazon, got another
| Ryzen and cooler sent out.
|
| I think this is incredibly common...
| laurentdc wrote:
| I've ordered three Xbox Play and Charge kits from Amazon, two
| were blatantly counterfeit (came in a plastic bag, scratched and
| with no markings, I don't believe it's "OEM"), the other was
| genuine but with batteries manufactured four years before and
| pretty much DOA (probably used and sent back by someone?)
|
| I had to order from Microsoft directly to get an acceptable
| product.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-07-24 23:00 UTC)