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One thing I always try to remember is not to buy or sell electronics in Miami. Every time a "person" from Miami has purchased a device from me online, it turne

• walrus01 4y ago
  a city with a large portion of its development built on laundered cocaine money and the drug import trade has many shady businesses? [surprisedpikachu.gif] I'm sure all that money buying all of those $500,000+ yachts from south florida yacht dealers is totally legit
• kmacdough 4y ago
  Minimal regulations, but more importantly, practically zero enforcement. I remember a local electrician saying stuff like "ah just don't tell anyone and it'll be fine". I was utterly unsurprised, if devastated, when the apartment complex collapsed. It's best to keep regulations lean and manageable, so we don't waste tons on unnecessary work and triple-checks, but regulations they exist for a very good reason. Anyone who claims "regulations" are anti-business forget that business aren't the core of countries OR economies. People are. The only people who benefit from deregulation are the ones who own the businesses.
  • autoexec 4y ago
    I love regulations, but there's a legitimate problem that large and entrenched businesses can write their own laws and bribe politicians to pass them and/or appoint their own into regulatory agencies. It allows businesses to put insane regulations in place just to keep competitors away and leaves them to police themselves which works as well as you'd expect. Regulations are a tool. Useful as hammers, but just as painful if applied incorrectly.
    • wahnfrieden 4y ago
      Makes it sound like the answer is to remove owners and states from the equation
      • ErikVandeWater 4y ago
        Lol moving it to an even less accountable regulatory authority is a really bad idea. At least at the local level if something is insanely broken you can have action to correct it. But getting a law to do anything at the federal level is almost impossible unless you fill it with pork for every lobbyist in the DC zip codes.
        • wahnfrieden 4y ago
          Oops I meant states more generally, incl fed
          • TomSwirly 4y ago
            Us: "People abuse laws and regulations!" You: "Let's get rid of all laws and regulations then!"
            • wahnfrieden 4y ago
              hehe
            • wahnfrieden 4y ago
              btw, we’re not talking about people, we’re talking about Big Biz. crony capitalism is capitalism
      • borissk 4y ago
        Good try, Mr Lenin :D
      • autoexec 4y ago
        Until someone other than the government has the ability to throw people in jail and levy massive fines for violating regulations they're the ones for the job. The problem isn't who is in authority. Everyone is, to some degree, vulnerable to massive amounts of money. The solution is to increase transparency and hold people accountable for corruption.
  • someperson 4y ago
    > I was utterly unsurprised, if devastated, when the apartment complex collapsed. This was the literal collapse of the Surfside condominium!? Wow.
• what-imright 4y ago
  Have to second this. I’ve bought a great deal of electronics from Miami, and most were counterfeit, misrepresented or simply unrecoverable, damaged. To me any Florida company is disqualified for business now.
  • latchkey 4y ago
    > I’ve bought a great deal of electronics from Miami, and most were counterfeit, misrepresented or simply unrecoverable, damaged. 'great deal'? Why keep buying if you knew they were bad?
  • ladzoppelin 4y ago
    Miami is not making this equipment, why attack the messenger and not the source of the problem? Also, Amazon has a big counterfeit problem most likely making billions and most likely manufactured by the same people who supply these idiots.
• newhotelowner 4y ago
  Also, Goods are purchased using stolen credit cards and get shipped to hotels. Later, they schedule FedEx to pickup items from the hotel, which get shipped to Miami. It happened few times at my hotel. One time we told the FedEx that the package is not here and ask thme to leave the prepaid label. I googled the address, and found few snippets, reviews & complained about unauthorized purchases and shipments to that address.
  • CamperBob2 4y ago
    So, you can actually get the FedEx driver to create and apply a prepaid label to a box located at an arbitrary address? I'm unclear on how that works.
    • newhotelowner 4y ago
      Package with CamperBob2 got shipped to the hotel from Walmart. CamperBob2 creates a FedEx pickup order. CamperBob2 calls hotel saying that his plans got changed but he had ordered something that would be delivered to the hotel. And ask hotel to hand it FedEx pickup driver. CamperBob2 didn't have a reservation at the hotel. The hotel hands the package to the FedEx pickup driver. I am not an expert on how this scam works. But it happened two times. Usually, when we get something that is not in our name, we look it up to see if the guest is already in the house, and coming. The first few times we handed a few packages to FedEx with a name whom didn't have any reservation. As soon as we asked questions about it and held one package, it stopped. It started again after covid with the same pattern.
    • NavinF 4y ago
      Amazon does this with both UPS and FedEx for returns. They pay for the shipping label and for a guy to show up at your front door with said label. If you leave a box marked “fedex pickup” or something similar at the door, they’ll just take it without disturbing you.
      • CamperBob2 4y ago
        Hmm, interesting. I've always printed the return label myself, because I didn't know there was any other way. This sounds... abusable. Why should I take the risk of porch piracy, for example, if the FedEx driver will do it for me?
• sem000 4y ago
  I used to sell large volumes of used electronics on eBay and Amazon. We consistently had this issue with purchases being routed through freight forwarders and 9/10 of the customers would claim they never received the item. eBay and Amazon would refund them and deduct it from me even when the tracking showed delivered. I finally got fed up and decided one day to try adding signature confirmation to see what happens. Never lost the case again.
  • TwoNineFive 4y ago
    This is my exact experience with freight forwarders, except it was 100% scams. Now I google first and just won't ship to them at all. eBay needs to get sued over this. They are taking part in the scam, knowingly, and profiting from it.
  • Spooky23 4y ago
    I was the one guy who didn’t get ripped off. I sold a Sun Workstation when I was in college to a dude in Bolivia via a freight forwarder. I didn’t realize at the time (late 90s) that cashiers checks can take 60 days to settle. I was really sweating it for a few weeks, as most of my net worth at the time was tied up in that computer!
• ac29 4y ago
  Miami is the closest large city in the US to the Carribean, Central America, and South America. Thats why a lot of freight forwarders are located there. And yes, some of them are definitely shady - I gather some people use freight forwarders because they are more cooperative with fraduently filling out customs forms or other import documentation.
• mise_en_place 4y ago
  > Beautiful city, but something about it seems to attract the shadiest businesses. Something about it? Lol it was the cocaine capital of the USA.
  • borissk 4y ago
    I thought it was Langley.
  • fuzzfactor 4y ago
    >>Beautiful city, but something about it seems to attract the shadiest businesses. >Attracted to the shadiness that was there to begin with. Why not quote myself here? See my other post about the pre-drug culture. During the 1960's "drug culture" which coincided with the Vietnam War, increasingly large numbers of young people started rebelliously smoking cannabis which had always been available clandestinely in the bigger cities even after it had been taxed and criminalized since 1937. Not so much in South Florida since there weren't nearly as many natives younger than 30, but northern influence was still strong along with affluent west coast surfers who sometimes outnumbered locals while visiting the disappointingly small waves of the nicely warm ocean. Also in Vietnam many Americans stationed in the theatre were exposed to religious and medical cultures which had an unbroken history of traditional cannabis consumption, plus drugs like opiates. In 1968 & 1969 pop music festivals began to proliferate, not even culminating at Woodstock, and were promoted and attended by the same culture who had become wary of toxic drugs through experience, but cannabis demand was ever growing. Enterprising Califonia "hippies" had been smuggling as much cannabis as they could from traditional growing areas in Mexico like Acapulco and Michoacan, and this led to many more Mexican farmers getting involved in cannabis but adopting more hemp-like strains that could be cultivated at larger scale under poorer conditions. Traditional hashish had been found in the middle east and Indian subcontinent, and was being smuggled from overseas, and about this time the Rastafarians of Jamaica began to be approaching limited recognition as a religious culture traditionally involved with cannabis, and under what was considered ideal growing conditions. Similar to Mexico, growth increased (but much faster) to meet demand, this time for the eastern US where the trend was a bit behind the west coast. Mafia-type organizations were very strong distributors up north and prospered bigly along the whole supply chain before goods even arrived in South Florida. The average shipment from Jamaica was at least 4 or 5 tons per vessel on a "banana boat". In 1974 English pop musician Eric Clapton visited Jamaica, and released a pop version of a song from local Rastafarian artist Bob Marley & the Wailers, recorded while Clapton was in Miami. This rapidly brought the Rasta culture to widespread recognition across the US. By this time it was known locally that 4 to 6 of the 5-ton Jamaican cannabis vessels were simultaneously arriving to different obscure Florida ports per month, and it took a number of years before a few individual vessels were apprehended per year. This allowed organized crime to develop a very resilient, more vertical supply chain, from growth incentive given to farmers, until final distribution. The DEA had also been newly formed, not admitting that its strategic purpose was to cut off Jamican supply as if it was an island, since that would be considered unsurmountable until the agency developed some clandestine strength of its own. After a few more years apprehensions began to make a serious dent from Jamaica, and a much more ancient, traditional cannabis culture was located in Columbia which could be tapped by the same organized crime approach and smuggled in alternative ways. It's really not that far of a distance from Columbia to Miami by air, and the cannabis strains were more potent and sold for higher retail prices so it seemed like it did become economically sustainable for the air smugglers to begin with. But if you're criminalized anyway, and you're going to fly from Columbia to Miami with contraband, there's a lot more money for every toxic kilo of cocaine that you bring instead of relatively harmless cannabis. Columbians were already traditionally growing the coca too, they just needed to be convinced to grow more. Much more it turns out. And that's how the DEA started popularizing more cocaine to US consumers than they had ever dreamed of. In 1977 Clapton then released his pop song "Cocaine". Since then he unsurprisingly admitted to being affected by toxic substances. By the early 1980's cocaine had risen from insignifigance to the biggest Florida industry in billions of dollars by many measures.
• rafaelm 4y ago
  I understand where you are coming from, but most of the time that's the only way people that live in south or central America can buy stuff online at decent prices. It's cheaper for me to pay the shipping fees to my country than it is to buy stuff here. I use a freight forwarder to do most of my online shopping through Amazon, ebay and lots of other stores. I've bought everything from phones, TVs and even a standing desk. It's a huge industry here. If you go to any warehouse district in Miami near the airport you'll find a bunch of these companies. As a sidenote, I did some small development work for a friend that owns one of these companies. He was running a smallish operation and was making some good money. There's a couple of software solutions for tracking, billing, ,support and CRM for those types of companies and they are absolutely abismal. There, I gave someone a business idea :)
  • silisili 4y ago
    That's really interesting, thanks for your perspective. I tried to be careful not to blame the buyers but the forwarders. From a seller's perspective, they are a pain, and leave us wondering when and if a product will be delivered. I once sold a nice watch that way, and paid a lot to insure it. About 2 weeks later, I get the shipment back with REFUSED scrawled on it. I offered to refund the buyer minus shipping fee, which then led to a big back and forth fight via ebay. I felt sorry for them, paying for nothing, but why should I have to eat that? In the end, I won but refunded half the shipping cost as a gesture of good will. In any event, I'm curious why it's cheaper to buy things from the US? Is it to do with tariff wriggling, or is business locally that inefficient? In that I mean, it seems some local company would realize they could import say a thousand Iphones, mark them up slightly, and make money while being cheaper than you paying to ship a single one from the US.
    • bruce511 4y ago
      A combination of taxes, tariffs and an extra middleman. If I buy an imported product here I pay local sales tax, import tariff (indirectly) and the overhead of a local importer/shop. If I buy on ebay, especially if its second hand, I pay little to none of that. (actually, in practice, the govt here has figured it out and sales tax and tariff are usually collected on incoming shipments - stuff acquired in person overseas are more or less not paid. Depending on your country ymmv.) But local importer & retail alone can add plenty to the overhead, and hence retail price. Of course buying from the US this way is still very expensive, the real value is in buying direct from China.
• cm2012 4y ago
  I used to work in business lending and by far the two highest rates of fraud places in the US were Long Island and South Florida.
  • hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
    What's the deal with Long Island?
• fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Attracted to the shadiness that was there to begin with.