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It's called brushing and basically a Chinese seller sends something cheap (like seeds, or trinkets) and then creates a review from "someone in the US". The shi
by wyxuan 6y ago
It's called brushing and basically a Chinese seller sends something cheap (like seeds, or trinkets) and then creates a review from "someone in the US".
The shipping portion is necessary because they need the tracking info for the sale to be counted.
edit:oops, accidentally mixed up churning with brushing. churning is something else
- walrus01 6y agoNot just that but there's also a method where the product name and photo is edited later. So they ship one dollar items and later edit it to be something much more valuable on amazon.
- skellera 6y agoThere are so many items that have reviews for obviously different items right now. I’ve seen it on a lot of COVID related items like no contact thermometers. Should be easy to catch these.
- paulie_a 6y agoPeople take a good listing and rename everything for some fake piece of shit product. It's incredibly despicable people are finding a way to risk people's lives over covid for a dollar in profit
- duskwuff 6y agoThat's a longstanding Amazon bug. As I understand it, a seller can "hijack" the reviews of another product that's no longer available by registering their product as a variant of the existing one.
- godelski 6y agoOne person's bug is another person's feature.
- jacobush 6y agoJeffs feature
- _puk 6y agoIs there any way to report these? I found one obvious one the other day, but after about 15 minutes of searching couldn't work out how to report it without a seller account..
- paulgb 6y agoI had a similar experience trying to report a product that extremely misrepresented itself and yet had ~5 stars from reviews that were obviously assigned from an unrelated product. My impression is that Amazon doesn't want to know: good reviews, fake or not, drive more transactions in the short term.
- wongarsu 6y agoThat seems very short sighed of Amazon. The viability of Amazon's open marketplace depends on the review system. Once all trust in reviews is gone people will increasingly shop somewhere else (whether that's a shop with more reliable reviews or one that carefully selects what they sell)
- jschwartzi 6y agoThe other issue I'm seeing with thermometers is that they are saying "FDA Certified." The FDA doesn't certify anything. They provide Pre-Market Approval in a letter. A lot of these thermometers also aren't approved. They haven't done a 510k submittal to market these products in the US. Please check that any thermometer you buy on Amazon has a 510k approval letter logged by the FDA, or it may not provide accurate temperature information.
- Scoundreller 6y agoThis is the part that doesn't make sense: these items don't have Delivery Confirmation. They're untracked. I even entered in a few from the Facebook link below where people posted their own screenshots, and yep, UJ.........CN tracking numbers aren't tracked once they reach USA. So what's the point of sending out anything at all? Just include any old tracking number for any other legit purchase as proof of sending something on an illegit purchase.
- sideshowb 6y agoDunno how China works but in the UK you can obtain proof you posted an untracked item, it would verify the address you sent it to
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoYa can’t tell me Bezos doesn’t know this. How isn’t this enabling fraud? Shouldn’t be able to completely change the listing. Versión bumps might be ok maybe?
- jjeaff 6y agoI believe completely changing the listing can sometimes trigger a review. But most of the times, they change it slowly in separate revisions so it is impossible to detect.
- fiblye 6y agoIt shouldn’t be impossible. Diff the latest revision with the first. If it’s simply a revision of an existing product, things don’t change that much. If it’s substantially different, it’s simply a new product. Even small revisions of products usually get entirely new product names and numbers. It’s weird to let one product hang around for 10 years and go through several changes. Hell, don’t let the product name change. Have a base name and an extension that can be appended and edited, with a text requirement for each (eg 12 characters minimum for the product name and 30 characters max for revision extension.) Do something similar with the description content and have a space for product changes/enhancements following an uneditable and mandatory product description.
- teddyh 6y agoYou’re trying to solve a social problem with a technological solution. The social problem is that Amazon doesn’t want to fix this. What Amazon wants is more sales, and as long as this kind of thing does not impact what they want, it would be a waste of money to do something which would not benefit them. Meanwhile, Amazon is a huge market for lemons¹ which drives out all sellers except the cheap junk ones, while simultaneously being so absolutely huge that nobody can realistically stop selling on Amazon or stop buying from Amazon. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- acdha 6y ago
- gopalv 6y ago> It's called churning There was an almost identical scam which has been going on for a while called "Brushing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce) Some of it is to get the "verified purchase" reviews, but the specific discussion was around the Alibaba IPO and whether it can be used to inflate stock price via fake revenues.
- molticrystal 6y agoI somehow got put on a Brushing list for a while, I was sent a camping stove, some XXL size pajamas, a bartender kit, and a Chinese wedding jacket. I only was able to track down the glowing review for the bartender kit, I have no idea where the other stuff was purchased from.
- debaserab2 6y agoWell... how were they?
- NullPrefix 6y agoApparently bartender kit was top stuff
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kalium-xyz 6y agoA friend had his information (leaked from some company who he used to buy products from its database) used for this. I wonder if they usually get their information from stolen user DBs
- Thorrez 6y agoThey really made a mistake choosing something suspicious like seeds. They should have chosen something more innocuous such as a bracelet or a pencil.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago> Chinese seller sends something cheap I don't understand. Why do they need to ship anything in the box at all? They could ship empty boxes and still have tracking numbers show as delivered.
- ivalm 6y agomaybe weight requirements?
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoMaybe also customs would get suspicious if they start detecting empty boxes?
- greenyoda 6y agoCustoms might get even more suspicious about seeds, since (1) there are all sorts of regulations about agricultural imports and (2) the seeds could be for an illegal substance, such as marijuana.
- Yeri 6y agoA few seeds don't weigh much. And then why not add some old newspaper in there?
- Scoundreller 6y agoThese packages are untracked and don't have delivery confirmation. I checked a few. So I don't know what's going on.
- balola 6y agoIn China they usually need to pay 1 to 1.5 dollars for someone willingly doing it for them, it's open secret and an entire industry, it feeds platform's ranking/recommendation system to get ahead, sometimes platforms actively encourage it. You may have heard of the Singles Day shopping event, it's common for sellers to boost their revenue that day to meet requirements from platforms, like selling a cheap T-shirt for $150 then refund it upon receiving the package.
- mikepurvis 6y agoI like the "Ship of Theseus" name myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21547112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21547112
- floatingatoll 6y agoWould reporting the tracking number on the package to Amazon help catch them?
- balola 6y agoThe thing is, platforms don't really care, it adds to their GMV and fees, in turn it boosts their valuation.
- coronadisaster 6y agoBut seeds cast a whole other dimension onto this problem... It is not a problem if they send you a cheap plastic bracelet but seeds can have unforseen consequences
- balola 6y agoSeeds are a common e-commerce scam, coz by the time you knew what it turned out to be, it's too late to do anything.
- belval 6y agoIndeed, the seed page on Aliexpress is one the most peculiar thing I've seen in a while, blue strawberries, giant tomatoes (advertised to be as big as a watermelon) and all sorts of other weird fruits. I spent 5$ on these a while back with some friends, about 50% never arrived and the other 50% didn't sprout. Could be my bad though.
- gbrown 6y agoIf you actually want weird seeds, try Baker Creek.
- chromatin 6y agoI can vouch for Baker Creek. We have grown some incredible heirloom plants.
- asah 6y agoDitto. Purple beans ftw!
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoYes, Baker creek is awesome! Also their seed catalog is the prettiest/most enjoyable one I've ever seen.
- 6y ago
- blhack 6y agoThis has never made sense to me. Just mail an empty envelope if that is your goal.
- baddox 6y agoMight it be the case that another party is handling fulfillment and this isn’t an option for the manufacturer who wants to create fake reviews?
- cryptica 6y agoThe fiat monetary system has broken capitalism. How insane is it that all of the most profitable strategies are those which are based on wasting products and energy? Wasting postal service and products to write your own fake reviews, wasting electricity to mine Bitcoin, wasting office space to create useless office jobs, news websites which waste people's attention on tabloids, gossip and fake news instead of real news, wasting capital on startups (Snapchat, Uber, WeWork, Softbank)... Anyone see the pattern emerging? Waste = profit
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- criddell 6y agoIs this why I get magazines in the mail that I don't subscribe to? For the past six or seven years we get magazines like Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and a couple others off and on. I haven't bought or subscribed to a paper magazine in 20 years, yet these keep showing up in the mail. I thought maybe it was the publication trying to adjust their demographics to increase rates (we live in a zip code with lots of college graduates and high incomes).
- maxlybbert 6y agoI know I used to receive several free magazines because having a large audience for advertisers is apparently more profitable than actually selling the magazine. But I don’t remember ever receiving a magazine I didn’t ask for.
- lionsdan 6y agoThe same thing happened to me, I started getting Cosmopolitan and InStyle unsolicited. It happened shortly after my college-aged daughter bought a small Coach bag (using a credit card on my account), so I assumed they determined our household was the right demographic for their advertisers.
- hibbelig 6y agoWhat they did with me was to send me the magazine three times, then they sent me a letter thanking me for my subscription, and an invoice.