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While I agree this is a problem - one which I have been the victim of as well - Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges. This, of course, is

While I agree this is a problem - one which I have been the victim of as well - Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges. This, of course, is not a great consolidation, especially for a novice who doesn't understand or encounters it too late. But I strongly disagree with "Amazon runs little to no risk selling the fraudulent products, but still makes money off of them." In the next paragraph the author outlines how they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk, and one that eBay is also arguably pretty publicly recovering from. I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns and erosion of trust for the infinitesimal rounding error that makes up the extra revenue they get from fake $20 thumb drives. I'm far from an Amazon fanboy, but I think the problem is more complex than Amazon turning a blind eye because they're making $10k extra profit a year from phony thumb drives. As an outsider, it seems like a difficult tradeoff of not creating incredible hurdles to list products, versus counterfeits getting through. In my case, the phony thumb drive I bought was delisted before I got home from the walk to the mailbox, literally.

mosselman 4y ago
The real Amazon and other nature is who pays the real bill of this in the costs to nature in terms of transportation impact and pure waste of this crap being created and thrown away. So yes, you might get your $20 back, but who will restore the cost to nature?
josephcsible 4y ago
> Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges But remember that Amazon keeps what's basically a social credit score on you that drops every time you return something, and then they permanently ban you (including from non-retail things like AWS and Prime Video) if it ever gets too low.
- anu7df 4y ago
  I did not know the consequences were so draconian. However, I would imagine returning faulty or fake products will not trigger a score decrease.
- thatwasunusual 4y ago
  Also, it's extra work involved in returning something that shouldn't have been delivered in the first place. Just a waste of time, resources, and what not.
- blackoil 4y ago
  >including from non-retail things like AWS is there any example of this?
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    This is more common than it should be for accounts. So best to assume the least charitable and plan accordingly. You lose access to your consumer Gmail, Drive, etc if your YouTube account gets banned for comments. You lose access to your Epic Games dev account if you get banned from Fortnite (unless they decoupled this in last few years). AWS used to be hard-linked to your Amazon shopping account back in the day (they can't separate them for you if you ask).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fasthands9 4y ago
  For my DIY hobby I buy a ton of stuff off Amazon - usually small parts under $15 dollars. I just checked and this year I've made 602 total purchases and, after checking the return e-mails they send, I've made 287 returns this year. I just click "bought by mistake each time". If there is a social credit score based on number of returned items I still haven't hit it.
  - alsodumb 4y ago
    The credit doesn't just go by the number of returns - it also considers the total value of the returns and the value of purchase to value of returns ratio.
    - fasthands9 4y ago
      The commenter above was suggesting that returning a USB drive could hurt your social credit and I am saying that is overblown. In my personal experience a large volume of returns won't even get you banned. A USB drive is also low value so assuming you are correct then again the fear of returning a USB drive should be zero.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    Excuse me, but do you believe this is "normal"? I mean, if you returned 287/602=48% of the items you ordered, either there is something wrong in what you order or - more likely - your supplier (Amazon) is not reliable. On the other side, if 48% of items (particularly if low value ones) are returned, the costs of shipping/returning/handling must be enormous.
    - fasthands9 4y ago
      I do not believe this is normal consumer behavior. The previous commenter claimed Amazon had a social score system that penalized people for concerns and you should be worried about making returns on things like USB drives. My point is that if someone like me can return almost half their items and Amazon doesn't care at all - then it's extremely unlikely the people are being banned from Amazon services for returning a USB drive.
- teamspirit 4y ago
  I have always wondered about this. I buy and return a lot from Amazon. Do you have any further information? I've always looked to see but have never found anything myself. Anecdotally, twice after periods of large purchases and high dollar amount of returns (because I was buying a lot of equipment and sometimes had to buy several of the same due to them coming faulty), I noticed same-day and next day shipping would disappear for a few months. I was never able to conclusively determine what the reason was though.
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  Amazon tracks your returns, but if you're within their model, which is not particularly tight, you don't have anything to worry about. It's mostly targeted toward people who are egregious, and more importantly, lose Amazon money. If you return a few too many DSLRs, Apple laptops or other high end gear you'll quickly find yourself on the rocks, or decide you're going to start a drop-shipping business from your Prime account or maybe you regularly put bricks in your returns instead of the actual products. By comparison there is my friend. She shops a lot on Amazon but not a huge amount, maybe 15 items or so a month on average. She returns a lot of items, at least 20%, sometimes 50% or 100%. Far from banning her she routinely gets courtesy credits and outside policy refunds to keep her happy. This is after she had actually been banned by Amazon, but not by retail. Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    >> If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about > How do I know if I'm doing anything wrong? >> ... that's proprietary
  - magic_hamster 4y ago
    I mean, she could just download pirated books at this point. It doesn't matter if she got it through the store or not if she's going to exploit the system to read it without paying. The author won't see any money either way, so she can drop the pretense.
    - thatguy0900 4y ago
      I would imagine the author would rather you just pirate the book than do this. Returns on a book can't be great for recomendation algorithms.
      - kennend3 4y ago
- dymk 4y ago
  That’s called fraud prevention
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- monkeydust 4y ago
  Is there a way to get this score under GDPR?
- amelius 4y ago
  Yeah banning your customers seems like a great strategy /s
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Banning your rare, abberantly unprofitable customers who may be abusing the return system is a good strategy, yes.
Ephil012 4y ago
This is true for obvious scams (e.g. a blender that breaks in a week). However, for subtle scams people often don't realize the scam. For instance, many people won't hit the actual size limit of the USB and won't realize it's not 1TB. In these cases, Amazon does not take a reputation hit for these individuals due to them being unaware of the scam. Only the technically inclined or those who research before buying will realize the scam and think less of Amazon.
- gizmo686 4y ago
  A typical user might not recognize the nature of the scam. But they very easily could realize that the drive they bought from Amazon is defective. 8GB is not that much space (particularly when the OS thinks it has 1TB to play with). When the firmware runs out of real space to play with, it needs to start dropping data, and that is very visible.
  - supermatt 4y ago
    > When the firmware runs out of real space to play with, it needs to start dropping data, and that is very visible. Only if you are actively verifying the data. Im pretty sure most people would just look at a file listing and consider it stored.
- RobertRies 4y ago
  No one is arguing the scam isn't insidious and inherently difficult to detect for possibly even most customers. The argument is that Amazon is complicit because they're banking off those sweet counterfeit thumb drive profits, and that there's little risk to Amazon. I'm suggesting there is a significant risk, and anyone reasonable at Amazon would account for it. There's enough users (tech savvy, or heavy researchers as you point out, and ultimately some portion of casual customers) who will have a negative experience and potentially be skeptical of all purchases - major or minor. Amazon will certainly incur reputational and real return/handling costs. It seems fairly implausible to me that Amazon would make the decision to say "Yeah, while tech savvy and discerning customers, and some portion of casual users will discover the scam, we just make so much money from fake thumb drives that it's worth it to destroy our reputation with that subset since a significant portion may not notice or ultimately associate Amazon with selling low quality products." All while we see the listings for these items get removed nearly as quickly as the pop up. Doesn't add up.
herbst 4y ago
90% of Amazon.de is AliExpress with a 200-300% margin. I don't know about the other Amazons but it's definitely not only thumb drives.
- kennend3 4y ago
  This is the main reason i stopped using Amazon around 2 years ago and cancelled my prime. Why not just go to the source (aliexpress) and save the large margin in exchange for a longer wait time?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I often find the Amazon ones to be within a buck or two, now that Aliexpress’ free shipping is gone on small items. For a buck or two, I’m willing to take Amazon’s speed and easy returns.
- Sakos 4y ago
  It has become quite awful. I was looking for gloves the other week and I ended up buying them at Decathlon because the selection at Amazon was so terrible and untrustworthy.
rendaw 4y ago
It's hard to say they don't like it when they're not doing _anything_ visible to combat it. Filter by country of seller? No. Filter by history/longevity of brand? No. Sort by recency of good reviews, or reviews since the last product change? No. Brand reputation, or per-brand reviews? No. Actual brand/seller contact information in the country you reside? No. Do they even require brands have company registration in the country, or are these total phantom stores? So "it's difficult" for them but at the same time they've done nothing...
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  Amazon does SKU aggregation in their warehouses for all the sellers that use Amazon fulfillment. Every delivery of that SKU, by whomever, gets thrown into the same pile from witch they pick whenever someone orders said SKU through whoever is selling that stuff on Amazon. This means that the product you receive from seller X was probably not delivered to the warehouse by seller X, but would be part of a batch delivered by any other seller that uses Amazon fulfillment for that SKU. This makes it impossible for them to punish the seller whenever a fake or defective product turns up for you if they had no detected it before it got into the pool.
  - rendaw 4y ago
    That's another of numerous scams on Amazon, not the one discussed in the article. The SKUs themselves are fraudulent here.
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    How does Amazon do this SKU aggregation? It must use some kind of product identifier (barcode / QR code / RFID tag etc.)? Why not include vendor information with it? Please stop using this tired excuse. It is not a difficult problem to solve if you have the intent.
    - CommieBobDole 4y ago
      I don't think it's a tired excuse, I think it's a withering indictment of Amazon's complicity in selling counterfeit merchandise. It's not a difficult problem to solve at all, Amazon simply chooses not to solve it because the upside is profit and the downside is mostly reputational which is hard to convert to a number on a spreadsheet, so for business purposes it might as well not exist.
goodpoint 4y ago
> Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges No, this is true only in some countries. If there's no amazon store in your country you are in trouble.
- prvit 4y ago
  I’ve had no issues with Amazon returns/refunds in multiple countries without their own Amazon store.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    Did they pay the full cost of your shipment? If yes, you are very lucky.
    - prvit 4y ago
      “It is very difficult for me to send a return internationally, could you please issue a refund instead?” Works every single time. If they refuse multiple times, hang up and call again.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
Nope. Most of the times, they're going to tell you to return it at your own costs to <random city in China>, so pay 50€ for your product that's worth 50€. The sellers lie on where they're located, pretend they're in Germany, you receive the wrong product, and you're shit out of luck. They close their account, reopen one and keep dropshipping. All the while Amazon happily deletes bad reviews and pockets money.
lreeves 4y ago
The reason these drives bother with firmware that makes them look larger to the operating system is so that people buy them and don't notice it was a scam until after the return ratio. Also I don't know what the internal politics are like at Amazon but it is inexplicable that these listings are present and top of the results for probably a year by my reckoning - fake drives are easily spotted by anyone who knows what current drive sizes and form factors are and in theory it there should be some friction to making a selling account so that you can't just keep re-listing the same fake products under infinite new names. Though that seems to be exactly what's happening. Also bonus points, if it's a third party seller in my recent experience Amazon literally does not let me report a product as fake, only request refunds and replacements from said seller. When I finally used a LinkedIn contact to reach out to Amazon they told me to create a marketplace seller account to report copyright infringement - but that's only if I own the copyright lol.
- Kalium 4y ago
  I would bet there's a series of seller-facing teams focused on making sure there's as little friction as possible to on-boarding and selling on Amazon.
frognumber 4y ago
I don't find returns to be helpful at all. - If I buy medicine, and it's fake, that's a serious problem. - If I buy a bottle of vanilla, and it's tainted, that's a serious problem. - If I buy a piece of electronics, and it's a piece which was returned for working intermittently, that's a problem too. - If I buy clothing from brands I trust, and I get a knock-off which falls apart in 6 months, that's a problem. Unless Amazon can get supply chain issues under control, it's too risky to buy most of the stuff I used to buy there. I find eBay and Aliexpress to be more reliable, probably due to reviews sticking to sellers. I think it's a matter of time before someone starts selling ransomware on Amazon. You plug in a device, and your computer is compromised. The device is a buck cheaper.
- RDaneel0livaw 4y ago
  Because of all these reasons I have stopped purchasing almost anything at all on amazon. Also, it's been like this for YEARS, they clearly don't have any interest at all in fixing it. They make more money the way it is. Nowadays, I try mostly just to buy direct from the company selling the product. Usually the cost is the same. It's slower, yes, and returns are more difficult, yes, but at least I know I'm getting the actual product and not a cheap ripoff that'll either fall apart or poison me.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  And the great thing about an Amazon ransomware attack is that if your implant waits long enough to trigger, you can probably get the customer to return the device to Amazon where they'll dutifully stock it back in their warehouse ready for another victim. So efficient.
  - adolph 4y ago
    1. Customer: buys USB drive, plugs in 2. USB: infect, report wrong size 3. Customer: returns USB drive 4: Amazon: restocks USB drive Goto 1
  - usefulcat 4y ago
    I doubt they bother to restock most items, unless maybe they’re sufficiently expensive. For example, see https://pirscapital.com/blog/amazon-liquidation-buying-returned-products-from-amazon/ https://pirscapital.com/blog/amazon-liquidation-buying-retur...
thathndude 4y ago
They need to stop commingling FBA goods. Full stop. It’s a smart, efficient idea in a world of good-faith actors. Not in a world of scammers and knock offs
orev 4y ago
The issue is that Amazon is not incurring the costs that other retailers do to try to prevent these issues, so they can keep prices low and seemingly sustain their fast shipping model while their competitors who are trying to do something about it lose out on business. Eventually those competitors are forced out of business, or have to reduce themselves to the same lack of controls and everybody loses. Viewed on that way, there’s actually consumer harm, and maybe there’s an opening for an anti-trust case (which in the US requires proof of consumer harm).
hitpointdrew 4y ago
> . I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns I am not so sure about that. I think it’s a calculated risk, how many people will actually put in the time and effort to return the product and how many will just not care enough to go through the return process and just eat the cost.
vineyardmike 4y ago
> they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk They should do something about it if they care. They’re turning into a flea market and it seems their business plan (which doesn’t matter because AWS makes all the money) is to run out the clock and hope they put everyone out of business first. They should stop allowing listing changes that completely change the product. They should allow specific vendors (probably at some cost) evade the SKU binning that co-mingles counterfeits with genuine products. Fuck, they should issue a statement acknowledging the problem and tell us they’re trying to fix it before we abandon them. That said, I had to buy an SD card recently and with all these scam products I went with the Amazon basics version since they’re the only seller of AB. Funny how that works…

mosselman 4y ago

The real Amazon and other nature is who pays the real bill of this in the costs to nature in terms of transportation impact and pure waste of this crap being created and thrown away. So yes, you might get your $20 back, but who will restore the cost to nature?

josephcsible 4y ago

> Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges But remember that Amazon keeps what's basically a social credit score on you that drops every time you return something, and then they permanently ban you (including from non-retail things like AWS and Prime Video) if it ever gets too low.

anu7df 4y ago
I did not know the consequences were so draconian. However, I would imagine returning faulty or fake products will not trigger a score decrease.
thatwasunusual 4y ago
Also, it's extra work involved in returning something that shouldn't have been delivered in the first place. Just a waste of time, resources, and what not.
blackoil 4y ago
>including from non-retail things like AWS is there any example of this?
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  This is more common than it should be for accounts. So best to assume the least charitable and plan accordingly. You lose access to your consumer Gmail, Drive, etc if your YouTube account gets banned for comments. You lose access to your Epic Games dev account if you get banned from Fortnite (unless they decoupled this in last few years). AWS used to be hard-linked to your Amazon shopping account back in the day (they can't separate them for you if you ask).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fasthands9 4y ago
For my DIY hobby I buy a ton of stuff off Amazon - usually small parts under $15 dollars. I just checked and this year I've made 602 total purchases and, after checking the return e-mails they send, I've made 287 returns this year. I just click "bought by mistake each time". If there is a social credit score based on number of returned items I still haven't hit it.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  The credit doesn't just go by the number of returns - it also considers the total value of the returns and the value of purchase to value of returns ratio.
  - fasthands9 4y ago
    The commenter above was suggesting that returning a USB drive could hurt your social credit and I am saying that is overblown. In my personal experience a large volume of returns won't even get you banned. A USB drive is also low value so assuming you are correct then again the fear of returning a USB drive should be zero.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  Excuse me, but do you believe this is "normal"? I mean, if you returned 287/602=48% of the items you ordered, either there is something wrong in what you order or - more likely - your supplier (Amazon) is not reliable. On the other side, if 48% of items (particularly if low value ones) are returned, the costs of shipping/returning/handling must be enormous.
  - fasthands9 4y ago
    I do not believe this is normal consumer behavior. The previous commenter claimed Amazon had a social score system that penalized people for concerns and you should be worried about making returns on things like USB drives. My point is that if someone like me can return almost half their items and Amazon doesn't care at all - then it's extremely unlikely the people are being banned from Amazon services for returning a USB drive.
teamspirit 4y ago
I have always wondered about this. I buy and return a lot from Amazon. Do you have any further information? I've always looked to see but have never found anything myself. Anecdotally, twice after periods of large purchases and high dollar amount of returns (because I was buying a lot of equipment and sometimes had to buy several of the same due to them coming faulty), I noticed same-day and next day shipping would disappear for a few months. I was never able to conclusively determine what the reason was though.
dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
Amazon tracks your returns, but if you're within their model, which is not particularly tight, you don't have anything to worry about. It's mostly targeted toward people who are egregious, and more importantly, lose Amazon money. If you return a few too many DSLRs, Apple laptops or other high end gear you'll quickly find yourself on the rocks, or decide you're going to start a drop-shipping business from your Prime account or maybe you regularly put bricks in your returns instead of the actual products. By comparison there is my friend. She shops a lot on Amazon but not a huge amount, maybe 15 items or so a month on average. She returns a lot of items, at least 20%, sometimes 50% or 100%. Far from banning her she routinely gets courtesy credits and outside policy refunds to keep her happy. This is after she had actually been banned by Amazon, but not by retail. Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.
- aliqot 4y ago
  >> If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about > How do I know if I'm doing anything wrong? >> ... that's proprietary
- magic_hamster 4y ago
  I mean, she could just download pirated books at this point. It doesn't matter if she got it through the store or not if she's going to exploit the system to read it without paying. The author won't see any money either way, so she can drop the pretense.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    I would imagine the author would rather you just pirate the book than do this. Returns on a book can't be great for recomendation algorithms.
    - kennend3 4y ago
dymk 4y ago
That’s called fraud prevention
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
monkeydust 4y ago
Is there a way to get this score under GDPR?
amelius 4y ago
Yeah banning your customers seems like a great strategy /s
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Banning your rare, abberantly unprofitable customers who may be abusing the return system is a good strategy, yes.

Ephil012 4y ago

This is true for obvious scams (e.g. a blender that breaks in a week). However, for subtle scams people often don't realize the scam. For instance, many people won't hit the actual size limit of the USB and won't realize it's not 1TB. In these cases, Amazon does not take a reputation hit for these individuals due to them being unaware of the scam. Only the technically inclined or those who research before buying will realize the scam and think less of Amazon.

gizmo686 4y ago
A typical user might not recognize the nature of the scam. But they very easily could realize that the drive they bought from Amazon is defective. 8GB is not that much space (particularly when the OS thinks it has 1TB to play with). When the firmware runs out of real space to play with, it needs to start dropping data, and that is very visible.
- supermatt 4y ago
  > When the firmware runs out of real space to play with, it needs to start dropping data, and that is very visible. Only if you are actively verifying the data. Im pretty sure most people would just look at a file listing and consider it stored.
RobertRies 4y ago
No one is arguing the scam isn't insidious and inherently difficult to detect for possibly even most customers. The argument is that Amazon is complicit because they're banking off those sweet counterfeit thumb drive profits, and that there's little risk to Amazon. I'm suggesting there is a significant risk, and anyone reasonable at Amazon would account for it. There's enough users (tech savvy, or heavy researchers as you point out, and ultimately some portion of casual customers) who will have a negative experience and potentially be skeptical of all purchases - major or minor. Amazon will certainly incur reputational and real return/handling costs. It seems fairly implausible to me that Amazon would make the decision to say "Yeah, while tech savvy and discerning customers, and some portion of casual users will discover the scam, we just make so much money from fake thumb drives that it's worth it to destroy our reputation with that subset since a significant portion may not notice or ultimately associate Amazon with selling low quality products." All while we see the listings for these items get removed nearly as quickly as the pop up. Doesn't add up.

herbst 4y ago

90% of Amazon.de is AliExpress with a 200-300% margin. I don't know about the other Amazons but it's definitely not only thumb drives.

kennend3 4y ago
This is the main reason i stopped using Amazon around 2 years ago and cancelled my prime. Why not just go to the source (aliexpress) and save the large margin in exchange for a longer wait time?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I often find the Amazon ones to be within a buck or two, now that Aliexpress’ free shipping is gone on small items. For a buck or two, I’m willing to take Amazon’s speed and easy returns.
Sakos 4y ago
It has become quite awful. I was looking for gloves the other week and I ended up buying them at Decathlon because the selection at Amazon was so terrible and untrustworthy.

rendaw 4y ago

It's hard to say they don't like it when they're not doing _anything_ visible to combat it. Filter by country of seller? No. Filter by history/longevity of brand? No. Sort by recency of good reviews, or reviews since the last product change? No. Brand reputation, or per-brand reviews? No. Actual brand/seller contact information in the country you reside? No. Do they even require brands have company registration in the country, or are these total phantom stores? So "it's difficult" for them but at the same time they've done nothing...

PeterStuer 4y ago
Amazon does SKU aggregation in their warehouses for all the sellers that use Amazon fulfillment. Every delivery of that SKU, by whomever, gets thrown into the same pile from witch they pick whenever someone orders said SKU through whoever is selling that stuff on Amazon. This means that the product you receive from seller X was probably not delivered to the warehouse by seller X, but would be part of a batch delivered by any other seller that uses Amazon fulfillment for that SKU. This makes it impossible for them to punish the seller whenever a fake or defective product turns up for you if they had no detected it before it got into the pool.
- rendaw 4y ago
  That's another of numerous scams on Amazon, not the one discussed in the article. The SKUs themselves are fraudulent here.
- programmer_dude 4y ago
  How does Amazon do this SKU aggregation? It must use some kind of product identifier (barcode / QR code / RFID tag etc.)? Why not include vendor information with it? Please stop using this tired excuse. It is not a difficult problem to solve if you have the intent.
  - CommieBobDole 4y ago
    I don't think it's a tired excuse, I think it's a withering indictment of Amazon's complicity in selling counterfeit merchandise. It's not a difficult problem to solve at all, Amazon simply chooses not to solve it because the upside is profit and the downside is mostly reputational which is hard to convert to a number on a spreadsheet, so for business purposes it might as well not exist.

goodpoint 4y ago

> Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges No, this is true only in some countries. If there's no amazon store in your country you are in trouble.

prvit 4y ago
I’ve had no issues with Amazon returns/refunds in multiple countries without their own Amazon store.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Did they pay the full cost of your shipment? If yes, you are very lucky.
  - prvit 4y ago
    “It is very difficult for me to send a return internationally, could you please issue a refund instead?” Works every single time. If they refuse multiple times, hang up and call again.

ohgodplsno 4y ago

Nope. Most of the times, they're going to tell you to return it at your own costs to <random city in China>, so pay 50€ for your product that's worth 50€. The sellers lie on where they're located, pretend they're in Germany, you receive the wrong product, and you're shit out of luck. They close their account, reopen one and keep dropshipping. All the while Amazon happily deletes bad reviews and pockets money.

lreeves 4y ago

The reason these drives bother with firmware that makes them look larger to the operating system is so that people buy them and don't notice it was a scam until after the return ratio. Also I don't know what the internal politics are like at Amazon but it is inexplicable that these listings are present and top of the results for probably a year by my reckoning - fake drives are easily spotted by anyone who knows what current drive sizes and form factors are and in theory it there should be some friction to making a selling account so that you can't just keep re-listing the same fake products under infinite new names. Though that seems to be exactly what's happening. Also bonus points, if it's a third party seller in my recent experience Amazon literally does not let me report a product as fake, only request refunds and replacements from said seller. When I finally used a LinkedIn contact to reach out to Amazon they told me to create a marketplace seller account to report copyright infringement - but that's only if I own the copyright lol.

Kalium 4y ago
I would bet there's a series of seller-facing teams focused on making sure there's as little friction as possible to on-boarding and selling on Amazon.

frognumber 4y ago

I don't find returns to be helpful at all. - If I buy medicine, and it's fake, that's a serious problem. - If I buy a bottle of vanilla, and it's tainted, that's a serious problem. - If I buy a piece of electronics, and it's a piece which was returned for working intermittently, that's a problem too. - If I buy clothing from brands I trust, and I get a knock-off which falls apart in 6 months, that's a problem. Unless Amazon can get supply chain issues under control, it's too risky to buy most of the stuff I used to buy there. I find eBay and Aliexpress to be more reliable, probably due to reviews sticking to sellers. I think it's a matter of time before someone starts selling ransomware on Amazon. You plug in a device, and your computer is compromised. The device is a buck cheaper.

RDaneel0livaw 4y ago
Because of all these reasons I have stopped purchasing almost anything at all on amazon. Also, it's been like this for YEARS, they clearly don't have any interest at all in fixing it. They make more money the way it is. Nowadays, I try mostly just to buy direct from the company selling the product. Usually the cost is the same. It's slower, yes, and returns are more difficult, yes, but at least I know I'm getting the actual product and not a cheap ripoff that'll either fall apart or poison me.
YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
And the great thing about an Amazon ransomware attack is that if your implant waits long enough to trigger, you can probably get the customer to return the device to Amazon where they'll dutifully stock it back in their warehouse ready for another victim. So efficient.
- adolph 4y ago
  1. Customer: buys USB drive, plugs in 2. USB: infect, report wrong size 3. Customer: returns USB drive 4: Amazon: restocks USB drive Goto 1
- usefulcat 4y ago
  I doubt they bother to restock most items, unless maybe they’re sufficiently expensive. For example, see https://pirscapital.com/blog/amazon-liquidation-buying-returned-products-from-amazon/ https://pirscapital.com/blog/amazon-liquidation-buying-retur...

thathndude 4y ago

They need to stop commingling FBA goods. Full stop. It’s a smart, efficient idea in a world of good-faith actors. Not in a world of scammers and knock offs

orev 4y ago

The issue is that Amazon is not incurring the costs that other retailers do to try to prevent these issues, so they can keep prices low and seemingly sustain their fast shipping model while their competitors who are trying to do something about it lose out on business. Eventually those competitors are forced out of business, or have to reduce themselves to the same lack of controls and everybody loses. Viewed on that way, there’s actually consumer harm, and maybe there’s an opening for an anti-trust case (which in the US requires proof of consumer harm).

hitpointdrew 4y ago

> . I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns I am not so sure about that. I think it’s a calculated risk, how many people will actually put in the time and effort to return the product and how many will just not care enough to go through the return process and just eat the cost.

vineyardmike 4y ago

> they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk They should do something about it if they care. They’re turning into a flea market and it seems their business plan (which doesn’t matter because AWS makes all the money) is to run out the clock and hope they put everyone out of business first. They should stop allowing listing changes that completely change the product. They should allow specific vendors (probably at some cost) evade the SKU binning that co-mingles counterfeits with genuine products. Fuck, they should issue a statement acknowledging the problem and tell us they’re trying to fix it before we abandon them. That said, I had to buy an SD card recently and with all these scam products I went with the Amazon basics version since they’re the only seller of AB. Funny how that works…