themachinestopsDevastated PC builder orders DDR5 RAM from Amazon, receives DDR2 and some weights — counterfeit 32GB kit a worrying sign of rising return and sales fraud
Cost doesn’t seem to matter with return fraud. I recently received a “new” $6 item that had its contents replaced with a $4 item and then taped shut. Seriously, who wastes their time on this stuff?
NOT_RICKProbably the same people running Pokémon card hustles. I recently saw a guy acting all pissy he had to wait in line at target to buy some packs, started berating the workers “you work at target, you’re broke as fuck”. The workers actually went in on him, I was so happy to see it. They made fun of him for trying to hustle over cards for children and told him to go home and cry to his mom about it.
That’s the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
Please sir, do you have a link.
Thanks, appreciate it
have you seen r/pokeinvesting, or r/pokecollecting. so sad losers of adults, they arnt even collecting because they play it, its to flip it. all TCPI/TPJ have to do is increase the pull rates, and increase printing of the cards, or have the ability to buy the individual cards on a official shop, instead of issuing RARE CARDS ON stupid events with a limited number and time, and location.
chaosCruiserIf your time is worthless to you and everyone else, that profit margin can be very tempting. Sounds like a symptom of a serious problem to me though.
PunkieKeep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.
I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There’s a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.
Maybe I haven’t understood your point but it sounds like you’re describing people both acting maliciously and being stupid about it., so I don’t see it as a case of Hanlon’s razor.
Exchanging the item for another one that’s cheaper, even if it’s only $6 total, is still dishonest. The fact that it may not even be worth it for them in the end doesn’t change the fact it was an attempt to mislead. They were listing a product, and delivered another one.
tomiantI hate that saying. It’s not a law. It’s a funny quote. Absolutely do not base any judgment you make on it.
Sally Strange@tomiant @punkwalrus Applied to interactions between strangers, "Hanlon's Razor" is a recipe for getting scammed.
LexamI miss Microcenter
I wish I had a Microcenter less than 8hrs away. Best Buy is all I have and I am not buying there.
Same, i don’t have one less than 7 hour round trip drive.
Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
Yeah this stuff is why i never buy tech from Amazon, you never know if you're gonna get a counterfeit item
Recommendations?
Newegg has been shit for a decade now (new owners fucked it to hell) and I don’t have a Microcenter closer than a 2-hour drive.
How did Newegg survive the outing from Gamers Nexus?
It wasn’t technology, but i ordered a new mad lib style book for my kid from Amazon. The book arrived with cellophane around it and a nice label that clearly said new. Once opened, it was very obvious the book was used, since the last kid had already filled out the whole damn thing including his name and address inside the cover.
I’m not mad at the kid, although his parents are probably bad people for returning the book at that point. I am livid that Amazon didn’t flip to any random page in the book too determine if the book was used or not.
Fuck Amazon.
CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]Iirc correctly, Amazon actually doesn’t resell their returns. At least not through their storefront.
They have “return auctions” where returns are put onto a pallet and then people bid on them to purchase. Apparently this is cheaper than having a workflow for their returns, checking them to make sure they are resellable, and then stocking them back into their warehouse.
So are all these people who say they are buying from Amazon actually buying from 3rd party sellers on Amazon? I’m always confused by these stories with used items being delivered.
Its all the same, you search for something on Amazon, find it, and buy. Not obvious if it is a 3rd party seller or no. It feels like all the same thing.
You can see on the right side of the screen who the seller is though? It is annoying there isn’t a proper filter but you can kind of use the qualified for free shipping filter to filter out third parties.
egretsAs I understand it, if any seller is using Amazon fulfillment centers, the product you’re given is picked out of the same box regardless of the named seller. That makes it impossible to buy confidently from Amazon based on the reputation of the seller, and makes Amazon themselves an unreputable seller.
northernlightsBasically if you filter by “prime delivery” you’re sure it comes amazon
BlackmistYou can be sure it comes out of an Amazon warehouse. And that’s not the same thing.
Although frankly, it should be. I don’t know how they’ve got this cushy position where they take items from others, store them, and then ship them out for enormous fees without taking on any retailer responsibility.
By having a convenient website that everybody knows about?
Yeah, but what I mean is Tesco and Walmart are a convenient stores that everyone knows about, but if I buy an Ali Express quality fire hazard from those, they’d get into trouble for it.
While Amazon will ask you to take it up with UFTNGDNH Ltd, who conveniently can’t be contacted any more, but here’s CVBXDFXE Inc selling the exact same items under a different “brand”.
The fraudster’s motto.
It does say “sold and shipped from amazon” in the listings, as opposed to “sold by random Chinese company”.
The principal issue is this, Amazon commingles stock. This means that there is one box for a particular SKU. If a seller sends product to Amazon for fulfillment it gets dumped into the bin with everyone else’s.
This means that if a seller sends counterfeit or poor products to Amazon it gets mixed in with the real ones from other sellers or Amazon’s own stock. This causes major problems as you can see.
Yup, this is the real answer. Verified vendors’ stock isn’t kept separate from the shitty scammers’ stock. Vendor has 10 good memory cards in stock, and a scammer has 5 fakes? The bin will have all 15 cards… So buying from the vendor doesn’t guarantee you get a real memory card, because the counterfeits are in the same bin.
Every professional photographer knows that good SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from B&H Photo Supply… While bad SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from Amazon.
Many years ago it used to be very obvious when you were buying from Amazon vs 3rd party sellers. Today the only difference is a small bit of text that says “Shipped and sold by Amazon”. The fact that you can even get prime shipping on items from third party sellers makes it so that people often don’t realize.
A_Random_Idiotthe problem is they mingle stock from every source into one pile with no discernable way to identify what came from where.
I bought a 3 pack of Corsair LL120 RGB case fans directly from Amazon.com (as the seller) before and got a 3 pack of someone’s old case fans instead (the old swapperoo). So Amazon told me to just keep them after I sent them many photos of the box and the LPN sticker on it, and they sent me another. Take a guess what was in that box? Yup, more swapperoos. But this was back in 2016-2017 so they may have changed up how they handle returns since then, or how they isolate their own products from 3rd party ‘FBA’ sellers
titanicxYou don’t know that Amazon is a marketplace? So is Walmart and Target. Com for example. You can open a store on any of these platforms and sell while using them for advertisement, warehousing, and shipping. You are responsible for fees and sales etc, but they handle everything else. Yes, they have their own products as well, but most their sales come from vendors on their platform.
Amazon Warehouse I believe is open box and returns. It also gets confusing that marketplace sellers are mostly outside of Amazon’s control
Captain AggravatedAmazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.
I don’t care if it was actually a store front. I blame Amazon for not doing oversight of its supply chain. So, it’s their fault, or it’s their fault.
bthestSupporting giant evil DOES sometimes get you free stuff… I know folks who have accidentally been shipped multiple of what they’re ordering (in two cases, the items were quite expensive) and when they’ve brought it up, they were told to keep the extras.
Maybe not worth the evil, but hey, free stuff is cool.
jonathanWhy put a weight? DDR2 weight vs DDR5 weight difference wouldn’t be noticeable until they put the weight in because now it would weight 3x what it should. I suspect the person claiming fraud is the one committing fraud or this is a fake article.
Axolotl
ORbituary
MaxfieldNo sympathy for anyone who still supports and buys from Amazon.
On the one hand, I loathe feeling that way sometimes. On the other hand, for the better part of the past decade+ any criticism I had about Amazon was met with victim blaming white knight replies and basically no support. At best I’m probably more on the ambivalent side of things than the no sympathy side, not that there’s effectively much difference.