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Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

• strict9 8y ago
  >Amazon in recent weeks also has deleted thousands of suspect reviews, That's a drop in the ocean. But it's not reviews and brushing, the real issue is fraudulent and counterfeit products. I don't even trust Amazon to buy books anymore. Just like craigslist, facebook, and countless other things, once something gets to be too big, it gets co-opted by bad actors and the risks outweigh the benefits. edit: highly recommend this Reply All episode about Amazon, brushing, and counterfeit goods: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124
  • jackhack 8y ago
    Thus the importance of sites like https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ checking for likely-fake 5-star reviews before making an expensive purchase is a good idea.
    • ikeboy 8y ago
      Fakespot and others like it have crappy algorithms. I know sellers that have never done anything shady for reviews that get graded poorly by fakespot. And their Chinese competitors that blatantly fake reviews get A.
      • sct202 8y ago
        I suspect that the spammers are also starting to do things to not get flagged by Fakespot, especially since FS lists out a lot of the criteria that they use.
• del82 8y ago
  https://outline.com/rjnnqM https://outline.com/rjnnqM
  • anonymouzz 8y ago
    Thanks! A short note what is under the link would get more clicks/be more usable. Otherwise you're asking too much trust.
    • gnicholas 8y ago
      On HN, it is well known what an Outline link is for, especially on WSJ articles.
      • elliottcarlson 8y ago
        It was actually new to me.
  • InGodsName 8y ago
    Does outline have some special deals with media sites? And if it's simply stealing content, why aren't companies suing outline into oblivion like they did with Napster?
    • sct202 8y ago
      I doubt they have a deal. The only place I've seen it used is HN, so they might not have noticed yet.
• taftster 8y ago
  If it can be gamed for profit, it will be gamed. > The tactics include pummeling rivals’ listings with overly positive or negative reviews, and repeatedly clicking on links to products they want boosted to trick Amazon’s algorithm into ranking them higher in search results Amazon is seemingly coming to this realization very late. The downfall of many search engines has been the inability to deal with the tricks that subvert their ranking systems. If you take any external signal as an indication of popularity, it will be manipulated. The overly positive reviews is an interesting spin on this manipulation; it creates seeds of doubt when a product looks like it's been overly reviewed. The "fake review" is easy to pick out. [edit: formatting]
  • gboudrias 8y ago
    They've surely realized very early on, they've just been trying very hard to be hush about it. Can't blame them, much as I dislike them.
    • taftster 8y ago
      Well that's fair. Realized AND acted on a problem vs. just realizing the problem. It unfortunately has to hit them in the public eye before they are willing to really start addressing the problem. I further contend there really is no solution. It's a war of escalation. We've seen it play out with SEO and search engines over the years. You can still "game" Google, but it's a lot harder to do it, the barrier to entry is a lot harder than it used to be when you could just list your site with a link farm. I am guessing that Amazon is in a similar war.
      • deegles 8y ago
        Maybe the current state of affairs is despite significant efforts to combat it. That would explain some of the silence on all these complaints, since "we're doing everything we can and it's still happening" is more embarrassing than "we know it's happening and we're looking into it."
        • deleted 8y ago
• bloopernova 8y ago
  My (anecdotal) experience with dodgy sellers was this: I bought something that didn't work correctly, I left a review. The seller contacted me and offered money direct to paypal, bypassing Amazon. They did so by attaching an image with the offer to the ticket. I wasn't comfortable with that kind of interaction, so I informed Amazon. Lots of copious apologies from Amazon, and I assume the company was "fired". But the company just changed their name slightly and are still selling the same items.
  • ineedasername 8y ago
    With the ability to create fake reviews that can (far) outnumber the negative, I'm surprised sellers bother that much like this... I wonder if a legitimate negative review somehow has more "signal to noise" in it in terms of how it's shown and received by buyers.
    • bloopernova 8y ago
      It's gotten to the point where I won't buy from sellers with names that look like they're from a password generator set to "letters only, human pronounceable" I did send amazon fraud dept a detailed email about my experiences and the new company selling the exact same items. Amazon needs to have a vastly larger fraud department staffed with actual humans, instead of automated systems that people can game very easily. Or offer bounties to customers for successful fraud removals. Although people would probably game that too.
      • CamelCaseName 8y ago
        You want to know the best way, in my experience, to see if an Amazon seller is legitimate? Check if their seller name is trademarked with the USPTO. Trademarks take 9 months to get, and aren't necessary to sell on Amazon, but a real business will usually trademark its name.
        • bloopernova 8y ago
          That sounds like a Firefox/Chrome extension waiting to be written ;)
• deegles 8y ago
  (Please hold your pitchforks) Since a lot of these scams come from Chinese sellers, I wonder if Amazon could talk to the Chinese government about interfacing with their new social-credit system... you can't sell on the platform if your score is below XYZ, and reports of fraud affect them directly. Obviously this would lead to a lot of sellers mysteriously relocating to other countries, and there would be a lot of patsies set up to take the credit score hit, but it's all about defense-in-depth right?
  • jmcgough 8y ago
    The much talked about social credit score doesn't really exist yet https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social...
    • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      So, only most of its features are real, and most of the rest are planned for the next couple of years? That's not really reassuring.
    • mherdeg 8y ago
      Yeah I suppose it's true that a system which has only "blocked more than 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed train trips by the end of April [2018]" http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1103262.shtml http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1103262.shtml is not "real". Chinese high-speed rail carries more than a billion passengers per year ( http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/1110/c90000-9291147.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/1110/c90000-9291147.html ). If vastly fewer than 1% of rides are affected by the so-called social credit blacklist, is it a real thing? Personally I have been disappointed that the commentators are making the "Black Mirror" comparisons without carrying the reference further back to Cory Doctorow's "Whuffie".
  • strictnein 8y ago
    Abusing Orwellian government schemes to protect your company seems really gross.
  • 8y ago
• cremp 8y ago
  Why on earth would Amazon allow whole-seller accounts to edit other peoples listings? That just seems like a recipe for disaster, as seen here...
• rootusrootus 8y ago
  As proof that I am clearly not qualified to run a nearly trillion-dollar company, I offer this advice to Amazon -- ditch the marketplace. No more third party sellers. I have been a reliable Amazon Prime consumer for years, but I have begun making purchases elsewhere because I can not even trust "Ships from and sold by Amazon" any more. At the very least, quite intermingling stock. And at this point you're going to have to be public about that change and put a guarantee behind it. Your reputation is slipping.
  • strictnein 8y ago
    And the prices on some of the stuff is just weird, with a lot of the Amazon provided stuff now stuck behind Amazon Prime Pantry. I used to order a lot of our daily household stuff from Amazon: cleaners, dish soap, detergent, etc. So much of that stuff now is priced just horribly. $4 for a bottle from Amazon, but it's just from Prime Pantry so you have to order a bunch of stuff or be stuck with a high shipping cost. If you go with one of the other sellers, the prices are frequently 2-3x normal retail, I guess preying on the fact that people don't realize they're getting ripped off.
    • Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      >If you go with one of the other sellers, the prices are frequently 2-3x normal retail, I guess preying on the fact that people don't realize they're getting ripped off. And as a result, I've become much more careful about checking prices on Amazon, which can't be good for Amazon overall. By contrast, when I go to the grocery store, I generally assume the amount I'm paying is more-or-less the same as what I would pay elsewhere. (Likely a poor overall mindset on my part, but good for the store.)
      • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        Yeah, there's a lot of specific products that are always wildly overpriced on Amazon. Mostly anything that is out of print/out of production, no matter how recently it went out or how easy it is to find, but I recently ran into it with Hanes underwear of all things--there wasn't a single seller that wasn't asking at least 50% over Target's online price. For out-of-print books/toys/games/etc., eBay is usually your best bet. Computer hardware (video cards, RAM, etc.) is often cheaper on either eBay or NewEgg. Et cetera.
• oflannabhra 8y ago
  One thing I've been thinking about: Amazon (and Google) have essentially taken the old CPG paradigm of stock shelves (including visibility and monetization of that physical space) and turned it into a new paradigm: Infinite shelf space that dynamically changes based on customer inputs. Across one axis, this is better for the consumer and better for Amazon: customers get better results, and Amazon can charge for the (still limited) high priority space much more than a typical retailer could charge a CPG manufacturer for visibility. Across another axis, this is much worse for Amazon: they cede a significant amount of control over a highly valuable asset, which also greatly impacts customer experience. All of the inputs they build their system on can be faked or gamed, and now they have the added responsibility of distinguishing real vs fake, and managing those inputs. I don't really have any answers, but I think it is an interesting thought exercise to consider how the old paradigm had some advantages, even if those advantages are likely unable to scale.
• reaperducer 8y ago
  I'm glad this has finally begun. But it's too late for the Christmas shopping season. With the exception of items from Amazon Global, I've already bought all of my gifts from brick-and-mortar stores because I can no longer trust that Amazon won't ship me fakes. Maybe next year.
• rchaud 8y ago
  One of the first things I remember about moving to a rich country was the absence of knockoff products sold in retail stores. It seemed amazing to me that companies would deal only with authorized distributors. These days, I feel like I'm in a twilight zone where 'wealth creation' is happening by putting a fresh face on 3rd-world country business models. First it was Uber with the "hire a random guy off the street to be my driver". Next it was Fiverr/Upwork/ etc, the digital equivalent of rounding up day labourers in the Home Depot parking lot. Now it's Amazon selling bootleg crap at scale. What's their excuse? Some variant of "move fast, break things", no doubt.
  • decebalus1 8y ago
    > These days, I feel like I'm in a twilight zone where 'wealth creation' is happening by putting a fresh face on 3rd-world country business models. It's not a secret that lots of business models coming out of Silicon Valley are just regulatory workarounds/loopholes. It's a matter of chance that they coincide with some 3rd world country models as the latter's fuels are survival/corruption/perceived lawlessness while over here it's 'disruption'/first-to-market and the drive to become a temporary monopoly on a regulatory loophole.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      "Disruption" is SV for "Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."
      • ohyeshedid 8y ago
        Technology always outpaces legislation.
        • reaperducer 8y ago
          That’s a popular SV cliche, but it’s not true. For example, without the DMCA, neither Twitter nor YouTube would exist.
        • 8y ago
• LordHumungous 8y ago
  I was shopping with my fiancee on Amazon last night, and she mentioned that she always ignores the first row of search results, which are often highly reviewed but unknown Chinese brands, and goes for the brands that she knows and trusts. She feels that the reviews are not always trustworthy.
• legohead 8y ago
  If there is an alternate news source can you please not use WSJ? It is paywalled pretty hard.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    For any article, replace the wsj with fullwsj in the url. It will redirect you to a non paywall link through Facebook. If don’t have to have a FB account.
  • randomsofr 8y ago
    https://outline.com/rjnnqM https://outline.com/rjnnqM
• BadassFractal 8y ago
  Amazon fixing fake reviews would be a giant step in the right direction. What could be more important than having your users believe you're a trusted source?
  • nkrisc 8y ago
    I used to go to Amazon to look at reviews, regardless of where I was shopping. Now, in the rare moments I'm shopping on Amazon, I go to other sites to read the reviews.
    • goostavos 8y ago
      I've noticed that too -- it's kind of a weird full circle. I used to stand in a brick and mortar store and pull up my phone to checkout amazon reviews before purchasing. Now, I feel higher levels of trust in the supply chain of most Brick and Mortar stores. I've got no clue who to trust in the review space. I tend to trust comments I find in niche subreddits more than I should. They're probably 50% astroturfed or driven by poor incentives, but overall it tends to push towards higher end established brands rather than cheap knockoff garbage. At least going towards the former isn't an electrocution risk, I guess..
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I think the gist of the article was "Hey we're working on fixing the problems." but my experience with Amazon is that they aren't working hard enough. The question is when does it show up in their bottom line (and stock price) and when does Walmart start advertising "100% fully verified products on our web site."
• oblib 8y ago
  This time last year I ordered some Rose Oil from "Essential Oil Labs" at Amazon. What I got wasn't Rose Oil, it was garbage. Amazon issued I refund but when I looked into it further I found reviews from others who got crap from them as well, but those reviews were well buried. Because I'd requested a refund I wasn't allowed to post a review that warned others about them. That felt to me like Amazon was shielding the vendor from negative reviews. As a result of how this was handled I've not bought anything from Amazon this year and I canceled our "Prime" membership this month when it expired. This "crackdown" feels like too little too late, and it will be a long time before I go back there, if ever.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• viburnum 8y ago
  I remember when they could ship booked undamaged. Those were good times.
• pyman 8y ago
  I have to pay to read this article? Shameful promotion of a paid service.