Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
coryklein.com
coryklein.com
Seriously: Fuck eBay.
Because you need no postal address.
It's a easy way to turn stolen credit cards to money (or stolen Paypal accounts)
Someone tried the same arbitraging bitcoins on ebay and got burned.
Not totally sure this is eBays fault. I'd guess the actually were bought with stolen assets.
(Even with confirmation, they will still try to rip you off if the buyer balks. But you have zero chance without Delivery Confirmation.)
> ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers
Wicked karma :)
When Nexus 4 was launched, I ended up with multiple devices (automated parallel purchases). It gave a lot of joy to sell them at cost (on craigslist) rather than cancel my purchase or pocket the premium they could've fetched.
Request shipping to post office, open package in post office while filling with smartphone. If you don't want to pay for a trusted retailed, you have to put in some work yourself.
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/usp...
As for what could solve the actual problem, there is one solution that always works, and that is insurance. Based on the claims, including false claims (it doesn't really matter), a company can calculate the loss probability, and sell protection. It would be a form of seller protection insurance that would save you from various situations as long as you follow the guidelines.
Of course, mail swap fraud is incredibly stupid because the perp is accepting the package to do their deed, leaving a decent trail of evidence. Mail theft is also stupid because there are harsh laws in place that would make it so not worth it compared to other forms of theft. So both are fairly rare. But they do happen because there are no shortage of idiots.
Since filing a false police report is in itself a crime, the honest innocent victims should all be filing more police reports, and PayPal and eBay should act based on these. So if someone returned a brick, you could file a report, have PayPal confirm it, and get your money back. Everyone should help you along this process, and it should be made simple and fairly easy. They don't, and it isn't.
And if you're a victim of a false police report, then you should be compensated even more for your troubles. If we have red light cameras that automatically send us fines, there is no reason we couldn't build a system for transaction fraud that would automate much of the violations involved in commerce. The credit card chargeback system is an example of one such system which are all maintained by corporations for their users. I'd opt for a public one for the people.
so I understand paypal's and ebay's stance 1. They are up against CC companies who will side with their customer 2. A market suspected of selling fraudulent goods fails quickly 3. Sellers enter the agreement knowing full well there is a risk of a bad buyer and they will lose in the dispute.
One interesting niche that eBay is considered both great and terrible for is watch buying. There are often descriptions that note "the watch in the picture is the watch you receive!" -- which is hilarious -- and "no buyers with less than n feedback" etc. It's considered a minefield for myriad reasons, and it's kind of a necessary evil if you want affordable vintage pieces or the increasingly rare "barn find" type of watch. But there is not an insurer or delivery proxy that I know of. On Craigslist, a lot of this is mitigated via the local nature of it, e.g. I will only buy your watch if you meet me at a Rolex dealer and get it authenticated on the spot before hand off.
I've been careful about documenting shipments since. Overall, I am reluctant to sell on Amazon these days because of the A-Z guarantee, which is only sustainable for large sellers.
Fraud is a sticky problem at scale. A few bad actors poison the well for everyone. As a buyer I appreciate Amazon's policies, but as an occasional seller I find them completely draconian. There is very little you can do to contest a decision against you.
From reading online, this is due to their use of Experian for identity verification. But if you don't have any credit history, as I do not, you do not exist within Experian's system and are automatically considered by Amazon to be a fraud threat and so are effectively cut out of the system and blacklisted without recourse, even if you're a longstanding good customer with other Amazon products.
Amazon's was especially bad because it allegedly had an appeal process that allowed submitting other forms of identity documents to bypass Experian's failure, but it never functioned correctly and attempting to verify my identity would fail because I had not yet verified my identity, and then the fact that I wouldn't verify my identity manually sent up a bigger red flag that permanently blacklisted me from the service with zero recourse now, even as I explained that I was unable to because their system wouldn't let me. Their customer support people would just say "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You are not allowed to participate in this service anymore." I lost a lot of respect for Amazon at that point.
Pro life tip: just get a credit card or two and nurture your credit score. Don't fuck over your utilities and make sure your payments are on time. Voila. You're a real boy. Not my rules or something I endorse but hey someone here had to say it.
In my area, it's almost impossible to even rent an apartment without good credit history, and it's absolutely impossible to rent a non-crappy apartment. Why? Because there are enough people with solid credit histories to fill the buildings, and because of the lower risk, there's no reason not to rely on credit checks.
Real pity because it's hard to know where to sell that sort of thing these days.
1. Craigslist is slow. On eBay, you're done in 7 days. It can be pretty hard to get full market value on Craigslist in anywhere near that amount of time, if at all, especially if you're in a smaller city.
2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
3. People on Craigslist are needy. On eBay, I list and then I sell. I am selling two items on Craigslist right now. You should see my phone's messaging app. It's full of the unknown numbers of un-serious buyers asking pointless questions they'll never follow up on.
4. People on Craigslist are, well, people. That means I have to meet them somewhere. Arranging that always ends up being more difficult than a trip to the post office.
I view the tradeoff like this:
eBay = simple, easy, fast, but with a nonzero likelihood of total loss
Craigslist = nearly guaranteed to be difficult, slow, and annoying, but with a very low chance of total loss
I don't think it's an easy decision. They are definitely not interchangeable.
I was beginning to think that buyers on Craigslist are instructed to act this way. :P
I was moving and had to sell a lot of stuff fast. I scheduled around 6 people to come look at a futon. 0 showed. Even after I offered to give it away for free. Huge waste of time.
http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/31621453/2-people-shot-d... http://www.cbs46.com/story/26038628/two-people-injured-in-kc...
The site would also collect identifying information about everyone who transacts while using it. Maybe phone number, or driver license photo. You are not allowed to have more than one account, although you can have multiple "personas" if you wish, each with their own ratings. (but creating multiple personas cannot fool site anti-abuse staff, who can all obviously see the same account behind it) Creating an account is hard. The site would employ advanced protections against account takeover.
Whenever you buy and sell from someone, perhaps you can see the "7 degrees of Kevin Bacon" style interpersonal connections that link you to them via vouches. If fraud happens, it makes all of your connections look bad, and there would be an incentive for them to shun you, if they care about retaining their access to the site. When fraudsters get onto the platform, you can always trace their vouches back to the "bad apple" who showed poor judgment and began inviting the wrong certain people. Indeed, perhaps in order to retain access to the platform overtime, you have to keep getting vouches every once in a while.
Big sites would not use these policies since they would invoice friction on purchases in result in lower conversion. But perhaps there is a niche somewhere for a highly trusted online auction house.
I wonder how far a system like this could go in stamping out fraud online. It seems like the problem with fraudsters is that they can always keep coming back with new accounts that everyone is forced to treat with the certain default degree of trust, and then the fraudsters exploit that. If you made it difficult for each person in the world to have more than one account on the service, then anyone engaging in repeat fraud would very quickly stand out as such. (As many personas as you want, but only one account)
Seriously boggles the mind what people are willing to say on Nextdoor.
Or phrased another way, its like the gun control problem where the only people following the gun control laws are the non-criminals you have no need to fear, and the people who don't play by the rules are the only source of problems.
Unfortunately even though eBay violated their own written policy by siding with him, this is SOP for them. They have a decades-long unwritten policy of shitting all over their sellers. This became apparent when they removed sellers' ability to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, which led to a huge influx of scammy buyers. eBay didn't care because more buyers means more revenue, and the sellers who had built their entire business on eBay had little choice but to stick around for the shafting.
I haven't sold on eBay for ages. There's very little I want to sell that is worth enough to go through the hassle though I'm not sure there are generally good alternatives. (For used photo gear, I'd use one of the online stores. I won't get as much but there's much less risk and hassle.)
Another lesson about ebay: Don't ever ship something to an address other than the one ebay has. My brother sold his phone and the guy asked him to ship it to "his daughter's house for a present". Turns out the account had been hacked and now he had just sent his phone to a scammer.
The last horror story i have: The same brother sold an iphone on ebay and the guy claimed it came with the screen cracked. Ebay sided with him on the return and my brother received a letter in return with nothing in it. Fortunately for him that time, ebay just let him keep the money and the scammer keep the phone (albeit, after 2 hours of arguing with their customer service).
TLDR: I've had way too terrible experiences on ebay to ever use them again.
So not only do you have to worry about scammers, you have to deal with a market for lemons [1]. (Quite ironic now that I think about it as that is one of my favorite economic articles)
[1]: https://www.iei.liu.se/nek/730g83/artiklar/1.328833/AkerlofM...
As things get more expensive on eBay, you become a bigger target for scammers and stand to lose much more, so it becomes a terrible option both because of how many scammers there are and their policy of screwing over sellers. Also the more expensive it is the more likely I'll be able to move it on craigslist which is a sure thing.
The company I left last year sells the bulk of their products on Amazon, and maybe 1/4th of their inventory (same type of products) is listed on eBay. Amazon sales are relatively smooth with much less friction per sale than eBay. It's gotten better since they went with a sales aggregator service, but they still barely break even on eBay as opposed to Amazon and physical storefront sales, when they figure in labor and time costs. When I worked there the sales personnel were able to list five or six items on Amazon in the time it took to list one item on eBay.
eBay really doesn't make sense for a larger business unless they have thousands of the exact same, new sealed merchandise, and that tends to be the cheap mass produced garbage that you find on wish.com and similar sites. The small to mid closeouts wholesaler doesn't have a place on the site anymore, which is why many are moving to Amazon. Unfortunately, as this article points out, scammy buyers are just as much a problem there.
I've sold hundreds of items on eBay, almost all payable only via bank transfer/cash, and never had serious problems. If I get a smaller audience, well, that's an acceptable compromise in the long term.
FWIW my friend and I made an app called "Emberall" it makes it easy to record/label video and save it to the cloud. It's mostly used my new moms recording their kids, but would be equally useful to anyone that wanted to regularly record and archive video evidence like the article suggested.
It's bad for sellers, too. Imagine shipping a $400 LCD (this is approximately how much the MacBook Pro retina screens cost) and the buyer receives it scratched or broken. It happens alarmingly often. As the seller, the only thing you can do is replace or refund. That's why you basically have to make a ton of profit off of these--or really learn how to package them (many sellers won't bother.)
Amazon could easily add an insurance policy option for sellers with a few minimal requirements for documenting the sale/shipping - Amazon collects a small fee, encourages better habits among small sellers and it all works.
The buyer's history was full of similar purchases.
https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/scammed-by-amazons-a-...
tl;dr I sold my old cell phone on Amazon and the buyer claimed it was stolen. Amazon refunded him in full and took the money out of my bank account.
I also sold a computer on Amazon around the same time and the buyer tried to do the same thing. That one I caught and argued successfully for, but it was still a pain to go back and forth.
I had another laptop I wanted to sell online, but because of these two experiences I was really gun-shy. I ended up stuffing it in a cabinet for over a year and eventually sold it to a friend for significantly less than I would have sold it for online--but at least I knew I wouldn't get scammed.
I've had better luck with the Amazon trade-in program, especially since they sometimes do incentives. I've traded in two Kindles and ended up getting a new Paperwhite for only about $40-50 after all the incentives from both old Kindles were in my account.
Perhaps Amazon Sellers are attempting to buy iPhones on the grey market at a discount, in order to resell them on Amazon at a profit. However the person they're dealing with upstream is actually shipping them clay or similar and plans to disappear when discovered.
Don't get me wrong, buyer scams exist, and that might be what is happening here. But why even post a review at all? The A-Z guidelines don't require it. He's also making the assumption that an Amazon Seller is going to open a sealed phone, or that their channels never get fraud in them.
I hadn't considered this possibility, but it is definitely possible as well. I see it as less likely, because the Amazon Seller that is the responsible party would probably get flagged for fraud and their account disabled. Additionally - the profiles of the buyers posting the reviews raises suspicion on their part.
> But why even post a review at all? The A-Z guidelines don't require it.
Claims that aren't resolved between buyer and seller involve a customer service individual from Amazon. If the buyer can point to pictures/reviews they posted, it likely strengthens their case and encourages the customer service to resolve in their favor, especially when the seller has no alternative picture evidence.
You realize that the "buyer profiles" you're mentioning are actually "reviewer profiles" that only list what other reviews that buyer has posted. It does not tell you a buyer's history (unless they post a review for an item), nor does it tell you when they signed up. It's not uncommon for people who have been using Amazon for years to never post any reviews, at least not until they're disappointed by their purchase.
And I'm not so sure that pointing to a review they posted strengthens an A-z Claim, at all. If images played a role, they'd let buyers upload an image when filing a claim, but they don't let that happen. They just let you fill in info about the shipment and then give you 2000 characters to explain the claim.
That said, Amazon definitely sides with the buyer most of the time. Filing a claim makes it so that the seller is automatically guilty unless they can prove otherwise. Auxiliary proof of wrong-doing is not necessary at all, especially since, as you mentioned, most sellers do not have proof that they _didn't_ ship the clay.
While the privacy implications are large, it is an area where the more data around the transaction can identify systemic fraud. (which is to say organized group that spread their activity across a wide area to keep it below the radar of fraud detection algorithms).
In the case of phones, the seller has a lot of power. They can record the serial number/IMEI data from the box prior to selling it. At which point you can track where the phone is and if its being used. The challenge has always been taking action against the scammers. So perhaps there is a startup idea for a private investigation group in large cities that would go get scammers and recover merchandise. Such action would quickly reveal if the scammers were part of a larger organization or acting independently.
You mean the police?
But investigating these "small time" frauds benefits from scale. And like the company that was fixing parking tickets (normally a time consuming and costly exercise for the ticket receiver) by apply resources across a lot of people with parking tickets, I could imagine an equivalent "fraud fighter" business where the "fee" was 1/2 the recovered value. So the company investigates 1000 fraudulent amazon sales in the greater New York area, lets say they can prove half the time that it was fraud and get the appropriate fraud protection coverage to kick in. If they keep 50% of that value, they have now a revenue stream that is 25% of the defrauded value.
The mechanic here is that small time fraud allows millions (maybe billions) to be siphoned out of the commercial shopping stream. That burden is generally born by the sellers who raise prices to cover their losses. If a startup can mitigate those losses by 50%, and the seller is willing to split the mitigation 50/50 with the startup, then the seller has 25% less "loss due to fraud" and the startup has 25% of revenue from defeating fraud. It takes money out of the fraud pipeline.
When larger fraud rings are uncovered by the startup they can hand them off to the police who are willing to go after multi-million dollar criminal enterprises.
"Meanwhile, the product page is flooded with fraudelent (sp) reviews, poisoning the well and moving future customers away from Amazon and towards trusted Apple retailers. Amazon and customers lose, but Apple possibly gets more customers."
I'm surprised Amazon hasn't been sued by Apple for still allowing these to be sold.
Buying printer ink I have found to be essentially impossible.
And there are more examples, those are just two obvious ones. It really doesn't seem like it would be all that hard for Amazon to distinguish between things they themselves are selling and things they are brokering through third parties.
The site claims to do this but in reality it doesn't. For one simple example, all reviews for a specific product are in common, so the reviews for off-brand fake printer ink and OEM real stuff are just all in the same product listing page because they have the same SKU presumably.
These problems are obvious, and it seems like Amazon is more than capable of fixing them, so you have to assume they don't by choice.
UPS, Fedex, USPS could all offer last step photo verification of packages, as a service. A few more dollars and you get a photo of what is inside and the handler packs the box up.
I had someone buy my cell phone on eBay and then return it as broken by sending back a different nonfunctional phone. They even swapped the serial number sticker inside the battery compartment.
This is not only a waste of time and energy but could potentially be harmful to them since it's usually possible to extract clues from a photograph.
Isn't it possible that the story is rather this:
- bad buyer 1 buys a phone, takes the phone out of the case, replaces it with clay, re-seals the box and returns it, claiming he didn't even open it
- seller restocks the package without verifying it
- good buyer 2 buys what they think is an iPhone and turns out to be a box full of clay, is upset and leaves a review
What's pretty interesting is that it could be both.
Sellers get's a return. Upon receiving returned item they check that packaging is still sealed and when it is, they send it back to amazon's fulfillment center to be sold again.
Amazon receives the item. Amazon's system (obviously) doesn't open boxes. They at the very most check the barcode, visually inspect for sealed box, and check weight.
Now the items are co-mingled with other new items
Now a buyer can receive a box of clay when they buy from an entirely different seller.
Co-mingled items allow for a ton of fraud. They also save Amazon a lot of money on logistics. They make prime shipping possible. For Amazon, the acceptable rate of fraud is very high because everyone wants to be on their marketplace (huge sales volume) and the system they use allows them to offer such value at such a low cost.
If even just one of those sellers is scamming (or just has a bad batch of products) and ships out multiple of these clay boxes, it's not at all surprising that you'd get multiple of these reviews.
It's less likely a scammer will pay for prime - it certainly reduces the profit margins for them.
IMHO Amazon could use this to their advantage - reduce fraud risk for sellers when selling to Prime members and encourage a 2% discount for them or something similar...
It's becoming more and more difficult to figure out who you are buying from, and as a result there are outright scams sitting on Amazon's store at this moment that they continue to do nothing about:
https://www.amazon.ca/ORIGINAL-MACBOOK-Magsafe-ADAPTER-CHARG...
See that? That's the infamous "dangerous" counterfeit Apple Macbook charger that made the rounds[1][2] a while back. Notice how it says "by Apple-Computers"? This is a scam. It's not by Apple. It's a dangerous fire-hazard knockoff. Yet it's tagged in a way that will no doubt mislead people into thinking it's safe and "official". People were pointing this out months ago[3], yet it's still there on Amazon's store, no doubt along with countless other dangerous misleadingly-branded ripoffs.
This is fraud, pure and simple. And Amazon continues to profit from it, right out in the open. It's disgusting.
[1] http://www.righto.com/2016/03/counterfeit-macbook-charger-teardown.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325150
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325464However, it is similar in that Amazon should be exercising more control over their inventory and logistics, not to mention the case I am talking about is arguably much more egregious and much more within Amazon's control to fix. I think that makes it highly relevant as a comment to this story.
(Of course, now that their place as a/the top video site is secured, and now that they've strong-armed everyone into licensing to YouTube, they've stepped up enforcement, so they can pretend to be good citizens. It's like a mobster turning around and using some of his ill-gotten gains for charity.)
This isn't the best article for explaining it, but it's better than nothing. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/9-ways-musicians-act...
Why are songs on the radio played for free? Because copyright in music actually hardly matters. "Real fans" end up buying piles of merchandise or going to concerts anyway.
(Disclosure: I pay for Google Music. I don't pirate music, and don't advocate it. But it can hardly be construed as "hurting artists.")
You must not know much about how the recording industry works. The record companies "pay" artists by giving them lending them money, the payments for which are deducted from their royalty percentage (e.g. the record company take 90% of the cost of the CD, and the artist gets 10%, then the "loan payment" comes out of the artist's 10% royalty).
But again, totally irrelevant to YouTube's massive copyright heist. There's no justification for basing your business model on copyright infringement. No justification for having an asinine takedown system that doesn't change the fact that the top result will be yet another illegal copy of the video you just spent forever trying to get taken down.
This all happened thanks to the Viacom lawsuit[1], which forced youtube to be the most pro-recording industry, and anti-consumer popular site ever. Now, an automated bot trolls everyone's videos for any knid of match, and if flagged the video is automatically taken down unless you file an appeal. In other words, guilty until proven innocent. Unless you are a record label, then it's innocent until proven guilty.
Did you miss the Family Guy fiasco[2], where they used a 7 year old video of Nintendo gameplay footage in the show, the bot saw it as "Fox Owned", and had it removed for copyright infringement.
The youtube era you describe was for a few months-years. We've been dealing with the bullshit youtube became EVER SINCE. Forgive me if the complaints of a record company insider (in whatever capacity you may be), falls on deaf ears.
This is reminiscent of Lars Ulrich complaining about Napster and the internet in general. Only even he admitted he was wrong about that.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-lawsuit-idUS...
[2] https://consumerist.com/2016/05/20/fox-swipes-youtube-clip-o...
Because you disagree with him, apparently.
The grandparent wasn't opinion, it was correction of an inaccurate statement of fact in the great-grandparent, to wit, the false claim that record companies pay artists salaries, such that you could "steal from record companies" by piracy and hurt their income (and jeopardize the artists "employment" and "salary") separately from directly hurting artists income. Artists aren't salaried employees, they are contractors who receive sales royalties from record companies. Therefore, the scenario presented in the great grandparent is contrary to fact.
Not quite. It's structured as a loan. As far as book-keeping goes, they write it off as a sunk cost, but you still owe them. The contracts usually tie you to them for a period of time (or something like X albums). If you make a single album and it flops, you are still tied to them. If they decide not to give you the money to make more albums your music career is basically over.
Because conventional radio airplay acted as advertising. Wanted to listen to the song when you wanted to? You had two choices - sit by the radio with a cassette recorder, fingers posed over play and record, or buy the record.
Lol what? Have you not experienced the Content ID stuff taking down completely unrelated items and routing ad traffic revenue to the claiming company with little to no appeal process?
There are even groups out there fraudulently claiming to represent a particular copyright owner just to get some money flowing their way (and Google allows it apparently).
Definitely. One of the worst parts is that reviews calling out damaged or fake products don't have any way to look up which seller they bought from.
I thought that when third parties sell on Amazon, they specify the catalog information that shows up there, such as "Apple Computers". Multiple different sellers can then list the same product for sale if they have it. Could there be a few legitimate people actually selling this along with some scammers, or is it entirely scammers?
Things I'm confused about: the product title seems to be misleading. I see "MagSafe" in there, but also "original Oem Apple MacBook Pro" (in caps). The product photo has an Apple logo on it, which is presumably trademarked. So if they sent me a generic adapter that wasn't Apple brand, then that would be false advertising. If they sent a device that wasn't really Apple, it would be counterfeiting.
What will you get when you buy it? I am tempted to buy one and see what happens.
These counterfeit chargers look nearly identical to the originals, including all of Apple's branding. It is absolutely false advertising, infringement on Apple's trademarks, dangerous (these things cause fires), and a scam.
As much as I hate paying full price for these chargers, I would never buy one from anywhere other than an Apple store these days.
Edit: I really hope the MacBook going USB-C charging is a sign of a coming era of non-proprietary charging for Apple laptops. That said, there are obviously counterfeit issues with USB chargers as well, but there is at least more than one legitimate vendor to help with competition a bit.
It is always fun to dissect these scams. There's an interesting e-commerce scam prevalent in India that popped up as the country embraced e-commerce without much credit card infrastructure in place (most online orders are paid to the delivery person in cash) https://simility.com/delivery-fraud:
"The fraudster businesses ordered hundreds of products from the victim’s website to be delivered on a daily basis. Meanwhile, if customers came into their store asking for an out-of-stock product, they were told it would be in stock later that day. Then the fraudsters paid the delivery person in cash for the small fraction of products they had pre-sold to customers, while returning the vast majority of unsold products without paying for them at the cost of the e-commerce company, thus completing the delivery fraud cycle."
My main protection is that my cost-of-goods is about 1/5 of my selling price. Also, it's a niche market product that would probably be hard to re-sell. Because of my healthy mark-up, I can afford to handle practically any dispute by offering a prompt refund.
It's tougher if you're not a retailer, but an individual selling a few items, in which case you don't have a mark-up or the law of averages to fall back on.
If a customer tries to scam that one... then Amazon has found their scammer.
Also... I'm surprised that Amazon just hands out these sorts of refunds on big ticket items. If I were them I'd require some sort of biometric data for the refund.
When you send a replenishment shipment to Amazon for a FBA item, they don't open and verify you sent the correct product. You only find out about mistakes after the items have been sold.
For some common FBA items (presumably like an iPhone), you can co-mingle your inventory. This means you send in an identical item (with UPC, etc), and your inventory can be used to fulfill another seller's order (if that warehouse happens to be closer to the customer). They do the same for you.
This means buyers get their order faster, but it also means the item going out the door may not have been yours (opening the door for this clay scam to spread to impact many many sellers).
It's one thing to ship from the closest warehouse and credit the sale to whichever seller offered the price chosen by the customer. It's a totally different thing to not know where the item came from at all.
This does leave a door open for many items to ship before any error was realized... (sometimes within a few days, but usually up to a few weeks after it happened).
Almost everything i buy that is not books i have to return once or twice until i receive the item from a seller that is not trying to fence a couterfeit version. This happens with $100 pro SD cards down to $15 arduinos clones (which i think amazon still do not carry the original, but all ads show the original in the picture)
If I wanted to play the eBay "buy it now" roulette, I'd buy off eBay.
Looking on Amazon, I'm not seeing any iPhone 6 sellers other than Apple.
Ex: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00NQGP3L6/ref=dp_ol...
The "by Apple" under each listing in search results identifies the manufacturer/brand, not who is selling the product or fulfilling the order.
Look for "used" or "refurbished iPhone 5", there are many (many!) sellers like BREED and Vius. Most fulfill through Amazon, so this may be their way of trying to tackle this problem?
If there is a problem, buyer can send the item back to the seller, and once seller confirms (re-)receipt, they each get back their original contributions. However, if buyer claims the item wasn't received and seller claims to have sent it, the money remains in escrow. So the side that's lying doesn't benefit. They actually lose 20%. And therefore there's no rational reason to attempt this scam.
However, in the real world there are several problems. The person being "scammed" would be out 120% of the value (whether they're the buyer or the seller), which wouldn't fly with most people, even if the scam is theoretically unlikely. It would also require significantly greater trust of Amazon. Something like this might work with hyper-rational actors using something like a bitcoin multi-sig address, but not for Amazon.
Which means I'm back to not seeing any perfect solution to this kind of problem.
No one has been able to improve upon this online. Sure, it can be more convenient to sell online, and for people who sell at volume the cost of fraud may be worth it, but for individuals who occasionally sell desirable items that are likely targets of fraud, selling online is too fraught with risk.
This isn't a solved problem but its certainly solvable because scammers should be pulling the trick repeatedly.
Throughout my time there, we switched back and forth, but ultimately decided happy sellers brought in more revenue that happy buyers (but maybe that changed again).
Apparently Amazon has decided to be pro buyer right now, which fits with their general model of making happy customers.
Buyers with a history of claims should generally not be trusted when opening a new claim, and likewise, sellers with a history of claims should not be trusted.
New buyers and new sellers (no history) require some more scrutiny, but the default should probably be to be skeptical as well.
When new, how hard is it to link an IP address (or some other fingerprint) as likely to be from other accounts? Eg: new buyer/seller opens dispute, has no history, but IP is linked to a no-longer active account that has a trail of disputes... that's pretty fishy. I'd probably say that accounts from shared addresses (internet cafes, coffee shops, etc) are probably also treated a suspicious by default... an unfortunate side effect if nothing else.
Fraud is exactly the reason just let old electronics sit in my closet. I'd rather let them rot than risk having to pay to give them to somebody else.
You'll just have to take my word for it that eBay and Amazon, companies that have been dealing with fraud since 1995, have implemented all of the cheap and easy solutions. :)
That one was easy to spot after a few times, but it's always a cat and mouse game. As soon as they figure out what the inputs are into the system, they game it to their advantage.
At the end of the day you have to have policies that aren't tied to the reputation to make things fair and that is where the debate about pro-seller vs pro-buyer comes in.
Why doesn't Amazon have a policy against this?
This took some work to find, but I found it:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HT4BF4U
Its a control theory textbook for $44 from a 3rd party. Which is a pretty good deal because the "real" book sitting on my desk is somewhat more expensive.
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Control-Systems-13th-Richard/d...
In very tiny letters the cover of the cheap version reads "Circulation of this edition outside the Indian Subcontinent is Unauthorized"
Something I find hilarious is the grey market edition is full of reviews that boil down to "this textbook sux and I hate my prof" but the genuine edition has one review by one guy who probably doesn't exist because if you click thru his reviews all look like stereotypical three word filler material.
eBay is slightly better for one-off sales: you can refuse returns (if specified in the listing), and cancel sales by buyers without verified paypal accounts or no feedback. Plus they have a sellers guarantee, although I don't know how often they'll actually stick up for the seller.