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How are they reacting that way for an established seller, yet they are apparently incapable of getting rid of the "don't buy via amazon, contact me at my email

How are they reacting that way for an established seller, yet they are apparently incapable of getting rid of the "don't buy via amazon, contact me at my email address first, I will reject all orders via amazon" scammers that put fake offers at half market price in? That sounds more like an intern clicking on a few things. If their scam-hunting-systems (which I'd reason are an important part) are fully automatic and that bad, it's a miracle how AWS works.

user5994461 7y ago
It seems an established account is as likely as any account to sell a ton of ghost items and cash away the money. Consider if the vendor account gets hacked or the wife of the vendor pulls a stunt on him. The reward for fraud only gets bigger as the account is more trusted.
- luckylion 7y ago
  By that logic they should always freeze all accounts, because "they've not scammed up until now, which makes them more likely to scam in the next five minutes then ever before". It looks more like a simplistic trigger that somebody just threw in there that doesn't take e.g. Amazon's ability to fulfill FBA orders. And it looks like a terrible policy to just say "yeah, fuck the seller, shut them down, we don't do manual reviews of the decisions of some Perl script from a decade ago".
  - user5994461 7y ago
    I'm saddened that you don't consider these serious issues in the real world. I personally know a man who used to run a small company (not related to Amazon) and whose wife drained all the money away over a small period of time, as well as taking a few extra lines of credits, before vanishing. Thankfully scams are limited in time. Freezing funds for 30 or 60 days is an effective fraud prevention tactic. P.S. Of course in this case it's stupid and there should be a way to contact a human and release some of the funds.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      I do consider them serious, I just don't believe that Amazon cares at all. I run into scam shops on the German amazon site all the time, they don't get removed, and they are trivial to identify, so much so that you can generate a very good list for manual screening with a simple regex on the description. Amazon does not remove them. Amazon does not care. But I bet that Amazon would pretend to care and remove them if I could make noise on social media and shame them for allowing scams to happen on their marketplace. > Freezing funds for 30 or 60 days is an effective fraud prevention tactic. It's also an effective tactic to ruin companies. Amazon should pay a hefty sum for any false positives, they currently have little to no incentive to a) make their automated systems work well ("just block everyone that looks kinda suspicious, the ones with lawyers and enough money will get our attention") b) actually have a process in place to check their automatic decisions.
    - salawat 7y ago
      Freezing funds is one thing. Freezing funds and being unwilling to get in contact and work with the person in question to evaluate and remedy the state of affairs is an entirely different issue.

user5994461 7y ago

It seems an established account is as likely as any account to sell a ton of ghost items and cash away the money. Consider if the vendor account gets hacked or the wife of the vendor pulls a stunt on him. The reward for fraud only gets bigger as the account is more trusted.

luckylion 7y ago
By that logic they should always freeze all accounts, because "they've not scammed up until now, which makes them more likely to scam in the next five minutes then ever before". It looks more like a simplistic trigger that somebody just threw in there that doesn't take e.g. Amazon's ability to fulfill FBA orders. And it looks like a terrible policy to just say "yeah, fuck the seller, shut them down, we don't do manual reviews of the decisions of some Perl script from a decade ago".
- user5994461 7y ago
  I'm saddened that you don't consider these serious issues in the real world. I personally know a man who used to run a small company (not related to Amazon) and whose wife drained all the money away over a small period of time, as well as taking a few extra lines of credits, before vanishing. Thankfully scams are limited in time. Freezing funds for 30 or 60 days is an effective fraud prevention tactic. P.S. Of course in this case it's stupid and there should be a way to contact a human and release some of the funds.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    I do consider them serious, I just don't believe that Amazon cares at all. I run into scam shops on the German amazon site all the time, they don't get removed, and they are trivial to identify, so much so that you can generate a very good list for manual screening with a simple regex on the description. Amazon does not remove them. Amazon does not care. But I bet that Amazon would pretend to care and remove them if I could make noise on social media and shame them for allowing scams to happen on their marketplace. > Freezing funds for 30 or 60 days is an effective fraud prevention tactic. It's also an effective tactic to ruin companies. Amazon should pay a hefty sum for any false positives, they currently have little to no incentive to a) make their automated systems work well ("just block everyone that looks kinda suspicious, the ones with lawyers and enough money will get our attention") b) actually have a process in place to check their automatic decisions.
  - salawat 7y ago
    Freezing funds is one thing. Freezing funds and being unwilling to get in contact and work with the person in question to evaluate and remedy the state of affairs is an entirely different issue.