6 ms·

I got an MSI motherboard from Amazon that was listed as "new", but was obviously heavily used and no longer functioning. No anti-static packaging, it was wrappe

I got an MSI motherboard from Amazon that was listed as "new", but was obviously heavily used and no longer functioning. No anti-static packaging, it was wrapped in cheapo foam paper and had what looked like scratch marks all over it. That's probably the worst shape item I've received, but I've also heard and got counterfeit baby items, which could be extremely unsafe. I'm being extremely careful with Amazon moving forward.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
That's insane, the worst any motherboard I own gets is dust and maybe overheating, but scratch marks all over? That sounds like someone who buys / sells hardware really often and just shoves parts in / out like it's nothing.
- amelius 7y ago
  Or retrieved from a dumpster.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Deliberately destroyed and returned to make a competitors product get bad review scores or banned from amazon entirely.
    - fragmede 7y ago
      This is the reason Amazon's job is way harder than it looks at scale. Any system used to try and prove that an account is legitimate or not has difficulty telling when an account has been hacked/bought. A smart attacker will bide their time and will do very few falsified reviews. Everyone is trying to game the system, and beat the other "players", and are willing to resort to nefarious means to quash their competitors because money is on the line.
mc32 7y ago
To offer a counter narrative (although I do have gripes with Amazon) I’ve bought things that were labeled “open box” condition “new”. Everything was as advertised. Was about 25% off for what amounted to having to download a PDF of the Manual/instructions.
- blowski 7y ago
  I used to buy from Amazon because I knew what I was going to get. All these stories make it sound more like eBay.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    At least on eBay it’s much more common to get a picture of the actual product and there’s no inventory commingling.
    - account42 7y ago
      > At least on eBay it’s much more common to get a picture of the actual product This part can be really annoying. I have been trying to collect all different boxed/DVD/etc releases of an old game and the Amazon listing just shows promotional cover art that I now suspect was never used for retail copies of the game (the publisher on the cover was bought out by another one before the game released). Definitely none of the copies that I got from that listing matched the image shown. On eBay you might need to sift through many listings to find the best price but at least you can usually see which version you are buying.
  - leggomylibro 7y ago
    It is basically like eBay, if you ignore who is selling the product. It's pretty easy to tell when you are, for example, buying Panasonic batteries from Panasonic as opposed to buying no-name lithium cells from a seller with a name like, 'krazedeals'. And sellers with a brand to maintain are unlikely to opt in to the 'comingling' program. I guess that Amazon could highlight the seller information a bit more, but it's already pretty prominent. I'm also a little bit confused reading all of these comments - do people think that Amazon sells everything on their website? It's rare to see an ecommerce business run that way these days - new-ish entries like Walmart also have third-party sellers, and old mainstays like Newegg have switched to that style of selling too. Personally I'm not a huge fan, but things have been like this for awhile now across the web. Do people not use other major online retailers? Or does Amazon get more flack because they are the service that almost everyone uses?
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
I avoid Amazon like the plague these days. They've become my last resort for reasons like this.
sigstoat 7y ago
there are clearly a lot of folks returning bad motherboards to amazon as "ordered wrong item" or whatever, and they make no attempt to verify the return. i had to stop getting motherboards there years ago.
- ct0 7y ago
  These people should really stop returning items this way, and label them as defective so they are removed from the inventory if they are in fact broken.
reaperducer 7y ago
I've also heard and got counterfeit baby items This is a big reason I have the rule "Never buy from Amazon anything that goes in or on a living thing." No food. No pet food. No personal products. Amazon simply can't be trusted. I know the violation of trust is from Amazon's "partners" but Amazon allows this to happen, and makes a profit off of it.
- larrik 7y ago
  Amazon getting the flak for a "partner" violation is completely part of them having "partners" at all...
  - mcv 7y ago
    Amazon should be doing more due diligence on checking out who their partners are and what they're selling. Blindly accepting everybody without knowing who they are and then randomly banning them based on customer complaints sounds like a very unreliable and dishonest way of doing business.
- kipchak 7y ago
  I've never personally had this happen but I've seen it alleged that items listed sold by Amazon occasionally get fakes in the mix or shared as common stock in Amazon warehouses for items like MicroSD cards.
- deepspace 7y ago
  My friend, who works in an Amazon warehouse, agrees with you. He advised me to never buy food or personal items from Amazon because the warehouse is heavily infested with rats and most items therefore end up coming into contact with rat waste.
  - jays 7y ago
    Ewww. Well that's good to know.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
nullspace 7y ago
I stopped ordering cat food from Amazon after one of the sets of cans quite obviously did not come from the manufacturer. Usually, canned cat food comes in a cardboard box with the manufacturers branding and some important labels, along with X number of cans inside arranged and kept tight in some fashion. This one was literally a bunch of cans inside a sealed, transparent plastic cover (and then inside the regular amazon box). When I checked the product page from which I purchased, it had only a handful of reviews (versus the usual 1000s of reviews on the real thing), but it had the correct supplier brand name. After reading a bunch about the colocation of products, this was fairly scary. Nowadays I just buy from Chewy / Petco / Petsmart etc. It's just not worth the risk. Edit: don't mean to add some FUD or anything with Amazon, I was just expanding parents comments about baby supplies with pets as well. Still buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but not anything where I stand to lose more than money.
- pravda 7y ago
  I've bought many cases of cat food from Amazon. So far, they have all come in the standard manufacture packaging. Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food? The only problem I had is in one Amazon shipment a few cans got smashed in. Chewy does packaging better!
  - stygiansonic 7y ago
    I can’t answer the question about cat food but there are fakes for one of the cheapest Casio watches out there, so it seems plausible. https://www.burningimage.net/genuine-and-fake-casio-f91w/ https://www.burningimage.net/genuine-and-fake-casio-f91w/
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    > Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food? Could be. You could get away with a lot lower product safety and quality for cat food than you could for human food. That means you could make it for a lot cheaper and sell it as a higher quality brand. It's easier to get away with killing or sickening a few cats than it is people.
  - SignalsFromBob 7y ago
badgers 7y ago
This rings true with my experience also. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of computer parts online, the majority from NewEgg and a MSI motherboard from Amazon. Hooked up everything and it wouldn't post. Thinking it was a power supply I swapped out and tested the new power supply in my old PC and it worked, so I took the old power supply and put it in my new PC and it didn't work. Returned the motherboard to Amazon and bought different brand from Best Buy and it's been working like a champ ever since. On a different shipment from Amazon I received a small bathroom rug. The weave of the design was off by over an inch on two of the sides. I've never had such bad experiences in the past from Amazon than the last couple months.
- mattferderer 7y ago
  Newegg, Walmart & others seem to be following Amazon here by offering items from random retailers.
Swizec 7y ago
We stopped ordering bird food because it kept arriving opened. Hello no I’m not feeding my bird preopened food. Who knows what contamination it’s got.
- frgotmylogin 7y ago
  We were having the same problem with cat litter

giancarlostoro 7y ago

That's insane, the worst any motherboard I own gets is dust and maybe overheating, but scratch marks all over? That sounds like someone who buys / sells hardware really often and just shoves parts in / out like it's nothing.

amelius 7y ago
Or retrieved from a dumpster.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Deliberately destroyed and returned to make a competitors product get bad review scores or banned from amazon entirely.
  - fragmede 7y ago
    This is the reason Amazon's job is way harder than it looks at scale. Any system used to try and prove that an account is legitimate or not has difficulty telling when an account has been hacked/bought. A smart attacker will bide their time and will do very few falsified reviews. Everyone is trying to game the system, and beat the other "players", and are willing to resort to nefarious means to quash their competitors because money is on the line.

mc32 7y ago

To offer a counter narrative (although I do have gripes with Amazon) I’ve bought things that were labeled “open box” condition “new”. Everything was as advertised. Was about 25% off for what amounted to having to download a PDF of the Manual/instructions.

blowski 7y ago
I used to buy from Amazon because I knew what I was going to get. All these stories make it sound more like eBay.
- kube-system 7y ago
  At least on eBay it’s much more common to get a picture of the actual product and there’s no inventory commingling.
  - account42 7y ago
    > At least on eBay it’s much more common to get a picture of the actual product This part can be really annoying. I have been trying to collect all different boxed/DVD/etc releases of an old game and the Amazon listing just shows promotional cover art that I now suspect was never used for retail copies of the game (the publisher on the cover was bought out by another one before the game released). Definitely none of the copies that I got from that listing matched the image shown. On eBay you might need to sift through many listings to find the best price but at least you can usually see which version you are buying.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  It is basically like eBay, if you ignore who is selling the product. It's pretty easy to tell when you are, for example, buying Panasonic batteries from Panasonic as opposed to buying no-name lithium cells from a seller with a name like, 'krazedeals'. And sellers with a brand to maintain are unlikely to opt in to the 'comingling' program. I guess that Amazon could highlight the seller information a bit more, but it's already pretty prominent. I'm also a little bit confused reading all of these comments - do people think that Amazon sells everything on their website? It's rare to see an ecommerce business run that way these days - new-ish entries like Walmart also have third-party sellers, and old mainstays like Newegg have switched to that style of selling too. Personally I'm not a huge fan, but things have been like this for awhile now across the web. Do people not use other major online retailers? Or does Amazon get more flack because they are the service that almost everyone uses?

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

I avoid Amazon like the plague these days. They've become my last resort for reasons like this.

sigstoat 7y ago

there are clearly a lot of folks returning bad motherboards to amazon as "ordered wrong item" or whatever, and they make no attempt to verify the return. i had to stop getting motherboards there years ago.

ct0 7y ago
These people should really stop returning items this way, and label them as defective so they are removed from the inventory if they are in fact broken.

reaperducer 7y ago

I've also heard and got counterfeit baby items This is a big reason I have the rule "Never buy from Amazon anything that goes in or on a living thing." No food. No pet food. No personal products. Amazon simply can't be trusted. I know the violation of trust is from Amazon's "partners" but Amazon allows this to happen, and makes a profit off of it.

larrik 7y ago
Amazon getting the flak for a "partner" violation is completely part of them having "partners" at all...
- mcv 7y ago
  Amazon should be doing more due diligence on checking out who their partners are and what they're selling. Blindly accepting everybody without knowing who they are and then randomly banning them based on customer complaints sounds like a very unreliable and dishonest way of doing business.
kipchak 7y ago
I've never personally had this happen but I've seen it alleged that items listed sold by Amazon occasionally get fakes in the mix or shared as common stock in Amazon warehouses for items like MicroSD cards.
deepspace 7y ago
My friend, who works in an Amazon warehouse, agrees with you. He advised me to never buy food or personal items from Amazon because the warehouse is heavily infested with rats and most items therefore end up coming into contact with rat waste.
- jays 7y ago
  Ewww. Well that's good to know.
- crazygringo 7y ago

nullspace 7y ago

I stopped ordering cat food from Amazon after one of the sets of cans quite obviously did not come from the manufacturer. Usually, canned cat food comes in a cardboard box with the manufacturers branding and some important labels, along with X number of cans inside arranged and kept tight in some fashion. This one was literally a bunch of cans inside a sealed, transparent plastic cover (and then inside the regular amazon box). When I checked the product page from which I purchased, it had only a handful of reviews (versus the usual 1000s of reviews on the real thing), but it had the correct supplier brand name. After reading a bunch about the colocation of products, this was fairly scary. Nowadays I just buy from Chewy / Petco / Petsmart etc. It's just not worth the risk. Edit: don't mean to add some FUD or anything with Amazon, I was just expanding parents comments about baby supplies with pets as well. Still buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but not anything where I stand to lose more than money.

pravda 7y ago
I've bought many cases of cat food from Amazon. So far, they have all come in the standard manufacture packaging. Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food? The only problem I had is in one Amazon shipment a few cans got smashed in. Chewy does packaging better!
- stygiansonic 7y ago
  I can’t answer the question about cat food but there are fakes for one of the cheapest Casio watches out there, so it seems plausible. https://www.burningimage.net/genuine-and-fake-casio-f91w/ https://www.burningimage.net/genuine-and-fake-casio-f91w/
- nkrisc 7y ago
  > Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food? Could be. You could get away with a lot lower product safety and quality for cat food than you could for human food. That means you could make it for a lot cheaper and sell it as a higher quality brand. It's easier to get away with killing or sickening a few cats than it is people.
- SignalsFromBob 7y ago

badgers 7y ago

This rings true with my experience also. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of computer parts online, the majority from NewEgg and a MSI motherboard from Amazon. Hooked up everything and it wouldn't post. Thinking it was a power supply I swapped out and tested the new power supply in my old PC and it worked, so I took the old power supply and put it in my new PC and it didn't work. Returned the motherboard to Amazon and bought different brand from Best Buy and it's been working like a champ ever since. On a different shipment from Amazon I received a small bathroom rug. The weave of the design was off by over an inch on two of the sides. I've never had such bad experiences in the past from Amazon than the last couple months.

mattferderer 7y ago
Newegg, Walmart & others seem to be following Amazon here by offering items from random retailers.

Swizec 7y ago

We stopped ordering bird food because it kept arriving opened. Hello no I’m not feeding my bird preopened food. Who knows what contamination it’s got.

frgotmylogin 7y ago
We were having the same problem with cat litter