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Recap as I understand it, since the blog post isn't 0. Buyer purchased item from third-party seller on Amazon 1. Seller picked a name and address in buyer's t

Recap as I understand it, since the blog post isn't 0. Buyer purchased item from third-party seller on Amazon 1. Seller picked a name and address in buyer's town, from an obituary, and sent parcel containing two baking mats thereto ( instead of camera lens ) 2. Occupant of that address signed for it believing it to be for the deceased relative 3. USPS updated status to 'delivered' with signature and address recorded 4. However the proof of delivery shows the address from (1) and not the buyer's address 5. Buyer repeatedly appealed on the basis of (4) but Amazon only check that the parcel was signed-for IN THE SAME TOWN. Therefore requests for refunds or further action were denied. Very clever seller, knows the system well. I wonder how many items he had to sell before striking it rich with a $1500 "lens".

garyfirestorm 9y ago
also its funny that even though the mail was sent to Jeff himself, no one in Amazon cared enough to verify the delivery address?
- GVIrish 9y ago
  A couple of possibilities: *The customer service reps have to answer a huge volume of cases and they really don't take time to read the email *It's ingrained into the customer service reps to follow policy to a T. So if it was signed for, deny. *They're using some sort of automated system that shows whether something was signed for. If 'yes', deny.
  - georgemcbay 9y ago
    I still use Amazon because of the convenience and because the vast majority of the time I never have to deal with their customer service, but in the rare instances I do I've noticed that over the past few years Amazon has become very Google-like in terms of putting everything behind systems that are either automated or may as well be (strict script-following offshore customer service). There used to be useful links ("Where's My Stuff?") directly attached to your order for inquiring about status if things are late, etc, with just a click or two... this all kinda still exists but has been buried so far up into the user interface that there's no way it isn't intentional obfuscation to try to limit any kind of meaningful interaction between the customer and anyone alive within Amazon, with a further barrier between the front-line alive people who are clearly all offshored and anyone in the US.
    - johngarrison 9y ago
      I've been decrying Amazon's usability for years. Such an unintutive mess of menus and sub-systems. Such a poor customer experience for anything other than simple "click and buy" usage. I blame their extreme position ahead of other emarketers. They have very little reason to be nice and helpful. People will throw money at them regardless.
    - ghostly_s 9y ago
      Personally, I would never buy anything on Amazon with a price tag more than a couple hundred dollars. They can't even confirm what carrier they will ship through; I'm not about to trust them for high-value items.
      - leesalminen 9y ago
        Agreed. I once had a new MacBook Pro delivered by OnTrac. That was not pleasant.
      - smsm42 9y ago
        I think buying from Amazon itself is relatively OK, I'd have hard time believing Amazon would run any scams. But third party sellers, given no customer service beyond robots and robot-like script readers... yep, better to steer clear.
        fredophile 9y ago
        Buying from Amazon isn't enough to avoid scams. Amazon mixes their stock with 3rd parties stock.
        smsm42 9y ago
        If it's the same item, then it's already not a scam. At least not that one. The whole scam is that there is no item at all. And if Amazon doesn't check stock before mixing (which I have hard time believing) then you'd get much better luck getting money back from Amazon branded sale than from third-party one, IMO.
erroneousfunk 9y ago
In addition, the package (listed on the USPS documentation) didn't have the correct weight, which should have been further proof that something was wrong. The package was 8oz, the lens itself, even without packaging, weighs 3.2 pounds.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Yup that seems like it, everything needed to prove that the transaction was fraudulent on the seller's part is included here by third party sources. Amazon completely blew it.
  - incompatible 9y ago
    So it seems that as a buyer, if you receive the wrong item, or the item is delivered to the wrong address, Amazon will do nothing. I'm not sure why the seller went to the trouble of sending to a different address, but didn't bother to bulk up the mass.
    - ChuckMcM 9y ago
      Technically, this also comes under Mail Fraud which is a federal crime[1]. This suggests that our author should contact both the FBI and the postmaster of their town because someone is using the Mail Service to commit their fraud. And as the latest rounds of advertisments from the Post Office state, "When you use the mail to do your business, it becomes our business." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud
lazyant 9y ago
> I wonder how many items he had to sell before "The seller had one good review but didn’t appear to be selling anything else." so it looks like maybe just one item
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  Probably has many alts.
  - giarc 9y ago
    You would need a credit card for each. Maybe they purchased fraudulent cards or this is the first of many scams on that account.
    - LoSboccacc 9y ago
      There are virtual credit card services around, don't think amazon managed to ban them all
    - 4ad 9y ago
      The same credit card can't be added to multiple accounts? Are you sure?
      - giarc 9y ago
        I'm not sure if you could or not, however if you were a scammer, you would probably not duplicate cards across accounts. If one account was banned, they would likely ban all accounts with same credit card, thereby wasting all that effort to starting multiple accounts.
      - vanviegen 9y ago
        I actually tried that last week. It seemed to work at first, but a couple of minutes after ordering they sent me an email that they blocked my (second) account due to suspicion of fraud, and invited me to FAX THEM (I'm not making this shit up) a bunch of documents, and they'd get back to me in a couple of weeks or so... Well, fuck you too. No details for the fraud scoring given, of course, but I'm guessing the dup credit card combined with an overseas delivery address must have done the trick.
tyingq 9y ago
There's several holes with buyer side fraud as well with Amazon. Similar issues where common sense things are ignored by Amazon. Mentioned because I think it's the case that they just don't care about anyone...versus, for example, being biased towards sellers.
KGIII 9y ago
Lana is usually a female name, isn't it? Not that it much matters, they still appear to be jerks.
- ztjio 9y ago
  It's common in white collar crime/social engineering schemes to use female names regardless of the criminal's gender as socially people are less suspicious of women, for whatever reason.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    That's probably true, though I'm not sure that's enough to assume the gender of the offending party. Tangentially related, and not white collar, I once had a car stolen by a female. No damage was done and, being a silly old man, I didn't press charges. I was kinda surprised that it was done by a female.
    - ztjio 9y ago
      Sorry, I never meant to imply the offender was male or female. On the contrary, due to the value of using a female name, it should not be regarded as evidence of the offender's actual sex or gender at all.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        It's all good. It just seemed a bit odd as we're usually pretty good about not assuming gender at HN. I'm not sure why someone would vote me down, but what good is karma if you don't spend it? ;-)
        EpicEng 9y ago
        Perhaps because talking about "assuming gender" is nonsense and a complete waste of time? I'm sure you have other things to do aside from looking for ways to be offended.
  - 9y ago
jjoonathan 9y ago
I got hit with the same-zip-code scam for a $6000 VNA on eaby and the response was completely different. Customer service immediately shuffled me off to a special claims department that investigated and got my money back within about a week. At no point did I encounter anything resembling the Kafkaesque web of strategic incompetence that I half expected. They followed up every step of the way with courtesy and professionalism even though the seller had woven a substantially more convincing lie than in OP's case -- they had a many year history of selling equipment and radio astronomy books along with two previous successful VNA sales. Evidently it was an account hijack. In this price bracket, even a solid account history isn't a guarantee. I no longer resent the 10% cut eBay takes. They saved my bacon on this one. It sounds like Amazon's team could learn a thing or two from eBay.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  I have shifted all my budget and used buying from Amazon Marketplace to eBay. At this point it seems like there are new stories about Amazon Marketplace scams almost daily. Does anyone think Marketplace is a priority for Amazon leadership these days? Does Bezos even know it is still operating? It's not getting the A team, obviously. Meanwhile connecting sellers and buyers is all eBay does. They don't make devices, produce TV shows, run cloud services, etc. etc. Of course their support is good. It has to be.
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    Right, but if you're a seller and you get scammed, you're screwed, since eBay heavily favors the buyer.
  - stryk 9y ago
    If you're buying eBay is great. If you're the seller however, it's an entirely different story. eBay heavily, heavily, heavily favors the buyer in almost all disputes -- so much so that at times it seems as if it's automatic to the buyer's favor. I guess that's how they get people to spend money on the platform, and of course take their cut of the transaction. There are tons and tons of seller horror stories, especially with buyers from Asian countries. They will buy an iPhone or something, pay for it, then request a return/refund from the seller but they send back a box of scrap. Even if you don't manually refund their money, they will dispute it, and eBay just sees the return tracking # as 'delivered' and gives them their money back. It really doesn't matter how much you protest, eBay pretty much always sides with the buyer.
dheera 9y ago
Hopefully this publicity on HN and elsewhere will encourage Amazon to refund him and deal with the seller.
daveheq 9y ago
Why start at 0? Did you echo this from an array? I think Amazon is part of the scam for allowing it to happen while doing nothing about it and profiting off it like the seller!
sigi45 9y ago
Why would amazon trust the customer anyway? You just could say that in the package was bricks instead of a lens. I started to make a video while i pack or unpack expensive stuff. Otherwise there is no proof there anyway. I wouldn't have open the package in front of the ups guy just to return it immedialy.
- tempestn 9y ago
  He had concrete proof that the package was sent to the wrong address and had the wrong weight. The people at Amazon weren't actually listening or comprehending. Yes, it would be possible to just ship a bunch of bricks instead of the actual product, but this scam was pretty transparent.
- lb1lf 9y ago
  For this very reason, I always open packages with expensive stuff in them at my local post office, under the nose of a postal clerk. That way, if someone tries to scam me, at least I have a presumably reliable eyewitness to what was actually in the package when I received it.
jneal 9y ago
I don't understand why Amazon keeps claiming it was sent to the person's address when it was clearly shipped elsewhere. He even has a picture that shows the tracking number and the fact that it was delivered somewhere else. This should be an open and shut case for Amazon, a very obvious scam.

garyfirestorm 9y ago

also its funny that even though the mail was sent to Jeff himself, no one in Amazon cared enough to verify the delivery address?

GVIrish 9y ago
A couple of possibilities: *The customer service reps have to answer a huge volume of cases and they really don't take time to read the email *It's ingrained into the customer service reps to follow policy to a T. So if it was signed for, deny. *They're using some sort of automated system that shows whether something was signed for. If 'yes', deny.
- georgemcbay 9y ago
  I still use Amazon because of the convenience and because the vast majority of the time I never have to deal with their customer service, but in the rare instances I do I've noticed that over the past few years Amazon has become very Google-like in terms of putting everything behind systems that are either automated or may as well be (strict script-following offshore customer service). There used to be useful links ("Where's My Stuff?") directly attached to your order for inquiring about status if things are late, etc, with just a click or two... this all kinda still exists but has been buried so far up into the user interface that there's no way it isn't intentional obfuscation to try to limit any kind of meaningful interaction between the customer and anyone alive within Amazon, with a further barrier between the front-line alive people who are clearly all offshored and anyone in the US.
  - johngarrison 9y ago
    I've been decrying Amazon's usability for years. Such an unintutive mess of menus and sub-systems. Such a poor customer experience for anything other than simple "click and buy" usage. I blame their extreme position ahead of other emarketers. They have very little reason to be nice and helpful. People will throw money at them regardless.
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    Personally, I would never buy anything on Amazon with a price tag more than a couple hundred dollars. They can't even confirm what carrier they will ship through; I'm not about to trust them for high-value items.
    - leesalminen 9y ago
      Agreed. I once had a new MacBook Pro delivered by OnTrac. That was not pleasant.
    - smsm42 9y ago
      I think buying from Amazon itself is relatively OK, I'd have hard time believing Amazon would run any scams. But third party sellers, given no customer service beyond robots and robot-like script readers... yep, better to steer clear.
      - fredophile 9y ago
        Buying from Amazon isn't enough to avoid scams. Amazon mixes their stock with 3rd parties stock.
        smsm42 9y ago
        If it's the same item, then it's already not a scam. At least not that one. The whole scam is that there is no item at all. And if Amazon doesn't check stock before mixing (which I have hard time believing) then you'd get much better luck getting money back from Amazon branded sale than from third-party one, IMO.

erroneousfunk 9y ago

In addition, the package (listed on the USPS documentation) didn't have the correct weight, which should have been further proof that something was wrong. The package was 8oz, the lens itself, even without packaging, weighs 3.2 pounds.

ChuckMcM 9y ago
Yup that seems like it, everything needed to prove that the transaction was fraudulent on the seller's part is included here by third party sources. Amazon completely blew it.
- incompatible 9y ago
  So it seems that as a buyer, if you receive the wrong item, or the item is delivered to the wrong address, Amazon will do nothing. I'm not sure why the seller went to the trouble of sending to a different address, but didn't bother to bulk up the mass.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    Technically, this also comes under Mail Fraud which is a federal crime[1]. This suggests that our author should contact both the FBI and the postmaster of their town because someone is using the Mail Service to commit their fraud. And as the latest rounds of advertisments from the Post Office state, "When you use the mail to do your business, it becomes our business." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud

lazyant 9y ago

> I wonder how many items he had to sell before "The seller had one good review but didn’t appear to be selling anything else." so it looks like maybe just one item

LoSboccacc 9y ago
Probably has many alts.
- giarc 9y ago
  You would need a credit card for each. Maybe they purchased fraudulent cards or this is the first of many scams on that account.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    There are virtual credit card services around, don't think amazon managed to ban them all
  - 4ad 9y ago
    The same credit card can't be added to multiple accounts? Are you sure?
    - giarc 9y ago
      I'm not sure if you could or not, however if you were a scammer, you would probably not duplicate cards across accounts. If one account was banned, they would likely ban all accounts with same credit card, thereby wasting all that effort to starting multiple accounts.
    - vanviegen 9y ago
      I actually tried that last week. It seemed to work at first, but a couple of minutes after ordering they sent me an email that they blocked my (second) account due to suspicion of fraud, and invited me to FAX THEM (I'm not making this shit up) a bunch of documents, and they'd get back to me in a couple of weeks or so... Well, fuck you too. No details for the fraud scoring given, of course, but I'm guessing the dup credit card combined with an overseas delivery address must have done the trick.

tyingq 9y ago

There's several holes with buyer side fraud as well with Amazon. Similar issues where common sense things are ignored by Amazon. Mentioned because I think it's the case that they just don't care about anyone...versus, for example, being biased towards sellers.

KGIII 9y ago

Lana is usually a female name, isn't it? Not that it much matters, they still appear to be jerks.

ztjio 9y ago
It's common in white collar crime/social engineering schemes to use female names regardless of the criminal's gender as socially people are less suspicious of women, for whatever reason.
- KGIII 9y ago
  That's probably true, though I'm not sure that's enough to assume the gender of the offending party. Tangentially related, and not white collar, I once had a car stolen by a female. No damage was done and, being a silly old man, I didn't press charges. I was kinda surprised that it was done by a female.
  - ztjio 9y ago
    Sorry, I never meant to imply the offender was male or female. On the contrary, due to the value of using a female name, it should not be regarded as evidence of the offender's actual sex or gender at all.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      It's all good. It just seemed a bit odd as we're usually pretty good about not assuming gender at HN. I'm not sure why someone would vote me down, but what good is karma if you don't spend it? ;-)
      - EpicEng 9y ago
        Perhaps because talking about "assuming gender" is nonsense and a complete waste of time? I'm sure you have other things to do aside from looking for ways to be offended.
- 9y ago

jjoonathan 9y ago

I got hit with the same-zip-code scam for a $6000 VNA on eaby and the response was completely different. Customer service immediately shuffled me off to a special claims department that investigated and got my money back within about a week. At no point did I encounter anything resembling the Kafkaesque web of strategic incompetence that I half expected. They followed up every step of the way with courtesy and professionalism even though the seller had woven a substantially more convincing lie than in OP's case -- they had a many year history of selling equipment and radio astronomy books along with two previous successful VNA sales. Evidently it was an account hijack. In this price bracket, even a solid account history isn't a guarantee. I no longer resent the 10% cut eBay takes. They saved my bacon on this one. It sounds like Amazon's team could learn a thing or two from eBay.

snowwrestler 9y ago
I have shifted all my budget and used buying from Amazon Marketplace to eBay. At this point it seems like there are new stories about Amazon Marketplace scams almost daily. Does anyone think Marketplace is a priority for Amazon leadership these days? Does Bezos even know it is still operating? It's not getting the A team, obviously. Meanwhile connecting sellers and buyers is all eBay does. They don't make devices, produce TV shows, run cloud services, etc. etc. Of course their support is good. It has to be.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Right, but if you're a seller and you get scammed, you're screwed, since eBay heavily favors the buyer.
- stryk 9y ago
  If you're buying eBay is great. If you're the seller however, it's an entirely different story. eBay heavily, heavily, heavily favors the buyer in almost all disputes -- so much so that at times it seems as if it's automatic to the buyer's favor. I guess that's how they get people to spend money on the platform, and of course take their cut of the transaction. There are tons and tons of seller horror stories, especially with buyers from Asian countries. They will buy an iPhone or something, pay for it, then request a return/refund from the seller but they send back a box of scrap. Even if you don't manually refund their money, they will dispute it, and eBay just sees the return tracking # as 'delivered' and gives them their money back. It really doesn't matter how much you protest, eBay pretty much always sides with the buyer.

dheera 9y ago

Hopefully this publicity on HN and elsewhere will encourage Amazon to refund him and deal with the seller.

daveheq 9y ago

Why start at 0? Did you echo this from an array? I think Amazon is part of the scam for allowing it to happen while doing nothing about it and profiting off it like the seller!

sigi45 9y ago

Why would amazon trust the customer anyway? You just could say that in the package was bricks instead of a lens. I started to make a video while i pack or unpack expensive stuff. Otherwise there is no proof there anyway. I wouldn't have open the package in front of the ups guy just to return it immedialy.

tempestn 9y ago
He had concrete proof that the package was sent to the wrong address and had the wrong weight. The people at Amazon weren't actually listening or comprehending. Yes, it would be possible to just ship a bunch of bricks instead of the actual product, but this scam was pretty transparent.
lb1lf 9y ago
For this very reason, I always open packages with expensive stuff in them at my local post office, under the nose of a postal clerk. That way, if someone tries to scam me, at least I have a presumably reliable eyewitness to what was actually in the package when I received it.

jneal 9y ago

I don't understand why Amazon keeps claiming it was sent to the person's address when it was clearly shipped elsewhere. He even has a picture that shows the tracking number and the fact that it was delivered somewhere else. This should be an open and shut case for Amazon, a very obvious scam.