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Two years into the pandemic, I've wondered why Amazon still allows counterfeit KN95 to be sold all over their site. It's really hard to verify that the masks yo

Two years into the pandemic, I've wondered why Amazon still allows counterfeit KN95 to be sold all over their site. It's really hard to verify that the masks you're buying actually have the rating they claim unless you buy from a trusted vendor that gets their masks directly from known good suppliers, sites like projectn95.org.

khuey 5y ago
Amazon has had a big counterfeit problem for years. And they commingle their inventory so that there's no way for a customer to even buy from a "reputable" seller. I don't think anything short of regulator cracking down hard is going to make them care.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I can only imagine they actually like the counterfeit products as they must represent a fair portion of their sales. If they didn’t like them I feel they could come up with a supply chain tracing system for reputable sellers. The problem has existed for so long I don’t believe they’re trying to stop it.
nrdgrrrl 5y ago
floatingatoll 5y ago
Amazon’s a flea market, and flea markets operate so cheaply by neither vetting sellers, nor inspecting goods, nor taking any responsibility for sales outcomes. Amazon will do everything in its power to avoid those duties because their retail profit model is to dodge human responsibilities such as those for labor savings. Buying from a “fulfilled by Amazon” trusted vendor won’t necessarily help either, because Amazon also bins all products with a given UPC into a single bucket, no matter who the seller is.
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  On the upside, Amazon is normally pretty happy to accept returns. They have set the bar so high in how easy it is to return just about everything.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Amazon won’t accept returns of low-value or misdelivered items, and instructs customers to throw them into their wastebin for a refund rather than have to process them. 7 months ago, 624 comments were posted in a discussion about Amazon returns neither being painless nor simple. My favorite is this write up noting that returns are only processed if your predicted future revenue exceeds the return requested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333273 But in general, Amazon won’t honor their purchase protection policy for high value items without extensive argument and delaying tactics, which puts shoppers at risk for precisely the purchased that most need protection.
LordDragonfang 5y ago
The simple answer is that the money they make from the sale of counterfeit masks is greater than the amount they lose from the hit to their reputation. Amazon has established a de-facto monopoly on general-purpose online shopping, so they don't have to worry about people going elsewhere. They also have no legal liability, so they have no incentive to spend more than a token effort combatting their massive fraud problems. It's simple business calculus.
dunham 5y ago
I don't think they really care as long as they get a cut. Maybe if they get enough negative publicity people will turn on them and they'll clean things up, but I doubt they'll do anything until it cuts into their profits. I'm pretty sure I've gotten counterfeit GE light bulbs from them. It was an appliance bulb, packaging looked right, the bulb died within a day. I found another at a local grocery store, same packaging, slightly different tint to the glass, and it's been going for years now (in an oven that I frequently run at 550 F).
shadowgovt 5y ago
The larger question is why the government hasn't regulated them to stop doing that, because Amazon will sell what people are buying: 1) If anything, the company leadership has demonstrated their amorality when it comes to exchanging dollars for things people want 2) The company leadership doesn't feel the need to be particularly hand-holdy to a public that is still running them dry on Ivermectin as fast as it comes in. ... but there's nothing really stopping the government from saying "If you're going to sell medical supplies you must be regulated as a medical supplier" other than lack of will.
kingcharles 5y ago
It's not just masks on Amazon: SSDs, flash cards have huge amounts of fakes which report the right size but have a fraction of the actually claimed memory on them.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Photographic filters are notorious for being mostly fake on Amazon.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Damn, thanks for the heads-up. I even wonder about things like batteries too. There are probably hundreds of categories that are ripe for fakes that are not easily detectable.
- mmh0000 5y ago
  This is such a true comment. I recommend anyone who purchases flash storage devices from untrustworthy retailers to check out f3[0]. f3 - Fight Flash Fraud¶ f3 is a simple tool that tests flash cards capacity and performance to see if they live up to claimed specifications. It fills the device with pseudorandom data and then checks if it returns the same on reading. F3 stands for Fight Flash Fraud, or Fight Fake Flash. [0] https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    I just bought one of those $20 2TB SSDs just to run f3 on it and see what the output says. Been running for 2 solid days and only at 25% complete.
jrockway 5y ago
This is a little bit of an off-topic story, but still somewhat relevant. I was shopping on Amazon for LED light strips recently. I noticed that some of them said "no-waterproof" in the description, which I thought was weird. Like if they're not waterproof, just don't say anything. I searched for "waterproof", and of course they show up in the top results. Everyone looking for waterproof LED light strips will find these instead of ones that are actually waterproof. The search is just a dumb word search. (I have no idea if people want or buy waterproof LED light strips, or even if such a thing actually exists. Mine are going in a 3D printer which is ostensibly not damp.) So, I opened up the OpenAI playground to see if GPT-3 could do better. I prompted: "Q: Is a product called "KXZM 24V LED Strip Light Natural White 600LEDs, 16.4ft Flexible SMD2835 High Brightness 4000-4500K No-Waterproof IP33 LED Tape Lights" waterproof? A:" and it answered "It's not. As you can see, this product is not waterproof. It says so in the product description." (GPT-3 is always a bit mean to me, but in this case, I obviously deserved it. What else could "no-waterproof" mean, ya idiot ;) My conclusion is that GPT-3 could easily filter out products that don't actually match a search query, and prevent disreputable sellers from abusing naive keyword matching, making the shopping experience better for everyone. And, Amazon obviously has the talent and compute resources to build their own model like GPT-3. But they don't do it! They don't care if you buy the wrong thing or that the search results are irrelevant. As long as you click something and buy it, they make money. I don't know how this works out long term, but I'm guessing that people don't notice they're not waterproof, and Chinese Factory A that did keyword optimization makes more money than Chinese Factory B that sprayed the LEDs with a conformal coating. (If the return rate gets too high, you just pick 8 more random all-caps letters and start a new company.) Simple use of an API could solve this problem in seconds. Customers would be happier. We wouldn't be rewarding manipulation. It's easy. And yet, they don't. They just "select * from products where keywords like '%$1'". My conclusion is that Amazon simply doesn't care. They're #1, and you can't get better than #1, right? If they kill a few people in a pandemic with counterfeit masks, who cares? #2 DREAMS they were killing people in a pandemic!
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Eventually something terrible is going to happen, some kind of mass-casualty incident that can be directly traced to a counterfeit or illicit product sold on Amazon. At that point, Congress will fall upon them like a band of starving wolves and make them fix their broken system. If Congress doesn't act, plaintiffs' attorneys will. It'll be the McDonald's coffee case all over again. They're not just asking for it, they're begging. Until that happens, they simply DGAF. As you say, they're #1, and in Amazon-world, that means you stop trying.

khuey 5y ago

Amazon has had a big counterfeit problem for years. And they commingle their inventory so that there's no way for a customer to even buy from a "reputable" seller. I don't think anything short of regulator cracking down hard is going to make them care.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
I can only imagine they actually like the counterfeit products as they must represent a fair portion of their sales. If they didn’t like them I feel they could come up with a supply chain tracing system for reputable sellers. The problem has existed for so long I don’t believe they’re trying to stop it.

nrdgrrrl 5y ago

floatingatoll 5y ago

Amazon’s a flea market, and flea markets operate so cheaply by neither vetting sellers, nor inspecting goods, nor taking any responsibility for sales outcomes. Amazon will do everything in its power to avoid those duties because their retail profit model is to dodge human responsibilities such as those for labor savings. Buying from a “fulfilled by Amazon” trusted vendor won’t necessarily help either, because Amazon also bins all products with a given UPC into a single bucket, no matter who the seller is.

dghlsakjg 5y ago
On the upside, Amazon is normally pretty happy to accept returns. They have set the bar so high in how easy it is to return just about everything.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Amazon won’t accept returns of low-value or misdelivered items, and instructs customers to throw them into their wastebin for a refund rather than have to process them. 7 months ago, 624 comments were posted in a discussion about Amazon returns neither being painless nor simple. My favorite is this write up noting that returns are only processed if your predicted future revenue exceeds the return requested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333273 But in general, Amazon won’t honor their purchase protection policy for high value items without extensive argument and delaying tactics, which puts shoppers at risk for precisely the purchased that most need protection.

LordDragonfang 5y ago

The simple answer is that the money they make from the sale of counterfeit masks is greater than the amount they lose from the hit to their reputation. Amazon has established a de-facto monopoly on general-purpose online shopping, so they don't have to worry about people going elsewhere. They also have no legal liability, so they have no incentive to spend more than a token effort combatting their massive fraud problems. It's simple business calculus.

dunham 5y ago

I don't think they really care as long as they get a cut. Maybe if they get enough negative publicity people will turn on them and they'll clean things up, but I doubt they'll do anything until it cuts into their profits. I'm pretty sure I've gotten counterfeit GE light bulbs from them. It was an appliance bulb, packaging looked right, the bulb died within a day. I found another at a local grocery store, same packaging, slightly different tint to the glass, and it's been going for years now (in an oven that I frequently run at 550 F).

shadowgovt 5y ago

The larger question is why the government hasn't regulated them to stop doing that, because Amazon will sell what people are buying: 1) If anything, the company leadership has demonstrated their amorality when it comes to exchanging dollars for things people want 2) The company leadership doesn't feel the need to be particularly hand-holdy to a public that is still running them dry on Ivermectin as fast as it comes in. ... but there's nothing really stopping the government from saying "If you're going to sell medical supplies you must be regulated as a medical supplier" other than lack of will.

kingcharles 5y ago

It's not just masks on Amazon: SSDs, flash cards have huge amounts of fakes which report the right size but have a fraction of the actually claimed memory on them.

dboreham 5y ago
Photographic filters are notorious for being mostly fake on Amazon.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Damn, thanks for the heads-up. I even wonder about things like batteries too. There are probably hundreds of categories that are ripe for fakes that are not easily detectable.
mmh0000 5y ago
This is such a true comment. I recommend anyone who purchases flash storage devices from untrustworthy retailers to check out f3[0]. f3 - Fight Flash Fraud¶ f3 is a simple tool that tests flash cards capacity and performance to see if they live up to claimed specifications. It fills the device with pseudorandom data and then checks if it returns the same on reading. F3 stands for Fight Flash Fraud, or Fight Fake Flash. [0] https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I just bought one of those $20 2TB SSDs just to run f3 on it and see what the output says. Been running for 2 solid days and only at 25% complete.

jrockway 5y ago

This is a little bit of an off-topic story, but still somewhat relevant. I was shopping on Amazon for LED light strips recently. I noticed that some of them said "no-waterproof" in the description, which I thought was weird. Like if they're not waterproof, just don't say anything. I searched for "waterproof", and of course they show up in the top results. Everyone looking for waterproof LED light strips will find these instead of ones that are actually waterproof. The search is just a dumb word search. (I have no idea if people want or buy waterproof LED light strips, or even if such a thing actually exists. Mine are going in a 3D printer which is ostensibly not damp.) So, I opened up the OpenAI playground to see if GPT-3 could do better. I prompted: "Q: Is a product called "KXZM 24V LED Strip Light Natural White 600LEDs, 16.4ft Flexible SMD2835 High Brightness 4000-4500K No-Waterproof IP33 LED Tape Lights" waterproof? A:" and it answered "It's not. As you can see, this product is not waterproof. It says so in the product description." (GPT-3 is always a bit mean to me, but in this case, I obviously deserved it. What else could "no-waterproof" mean, ya idiot ;) My conclusion is that GPT-3 could easily filter out products that don't actually match a search query, and prevent disreputable sellers from abusing naive keyword matching, making the shopping experience better for everyone. And, Amazon obviously has the talent and compute resources to build their own model like GPT-3. But they don't do it! They don't care if you buy the wrong thing or that the search results are irrelevant. As long as you click something and buy it, they make money. I don't know how this works out long term, but I'm guessing that people don't notice they're not waterproof, and Chinese Factory A that did keyword optimization makes more money than Chinese Factory B that sprayed the LEDs with a conformal coating. (If the return rate gets too high, you just pick 8 more random all-caps letters and start a new company.) Simple use of an API could solve this problem in seconds. Customers would be happier. We wouldn't be rewarding manipulation. It's easy. And yet, they don't. They just "select * from products where keywords like '%$1'". My conclusion is that Amazon simply doesn't care. They're #1, and you can't get better than #1, right? If they kill a few people in a pandemic with counterfeit masks, who cares? #2 DREAMS they were killing people in a pandemic!

CamperBob2 5y ago
Eventually something terrible is going to happen, some kind of mass-casualty incident that can be directly traced to a counterfeit or illicit product sold on Amazon. At that point, Congress will fall upon them like a band of starving wolves and make them fix their broken system. If Congress doesn't act, plaintiffs' attorneys will. It'll be the McDonald's coffee case all over again. They're not just asking for it, they're begging. Until that happens, they simply DGAF. As you say, they're #1, and in Amazon-world, that means you stop trying.