Americans Are Receiving Unordered Parcels from E-Criminals
forbes.com
forbes.com
I've spent time thinking about what kind of fraud they're committing, because it doesn't make sense to me why they would send the garbage package with the tracking number from my order -- which screams fraud -- but then also send me the actual thing I ordered. They're sending two packages to the same address, but it doesn't make sense why, since they're obviously not committing the most straightforward kind of fraud ("We shipped the item, you can see the tracking number", which incidentally, only works on eBay and not Amazon).
I always suspected something was going on with the aliexpress ratings. If you look at the reviews it is a lot of one liners like 'i got the item as described!' with a 5 star rating.
Jeez. Honestly, I mostly ignore reviews on Chinese listing sites unless they're low. It's all about two things:
1. Is the price in line with other listings? From both directions?
2. How many people have ordered it in the past 90 days?
Sometimes that does mean taking a risk with specialty items, or foregoing them. But hey, if it's a critical application I'm not going to source it from sketchy international cheap-o listings.
They ordered your package from another dropshipper, and sent you a parcel with a correct tracking number to fool Amazon into thinking that the parcel was already shipped.
Amazon does penalize you for not shipping on time, but it's not quite the same as eBay. While eBay lowers your tank, Amazon closes your listing, and possibly your entire store.
Under that world view, a) there is no reason to include the 'separate shipping' thing; and b) adding it makes your ad copy look complicated, to the point of discouraging a sale. If you say 'free xxx with every purchase!', that looks like a good thing. But if you have to add qualifications to it (and I don't mean legally required fine print that you don't actually want customers to read, I mean something you want the customer to internalize), it becomes a bad thing that confuses your marketing message.
Just my arm-chair speculation - I've wondered about this and similar issues numerous times over the last years though. So many things seem to illogical in that world, yet they must make someone somewhere money somehow.
ePacket is actually one of the faster postal service options from China
It was a small epacket -- a special subsidized shipping option that the USPS offers Chinese merchants, effectively enabling them to ship a parcel from China to the U.S. for less than it costs to send that same parcel domestically
Due to the unbalanced pricing policies of the United Postal Union and subsidies from the U.S. Postal Service, it costs people in China virtually nothing to ship small packages to the U.S.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...
So the postal union made a deal: The USPS decides how much to charge for postage to China, carries the mail to the Chinese border, China Post carries it from there, and the two split the USPS' retail price according to a set formula. Ditto for every other country combination. Simple. Saves a lot of negotiating.
But it means that if, say, the German postal system is able to send mail to the American border much more cheaply than the USPS to the German border, then the USPS will subsidise the Germans. Which is the case: I sent a heavy book from Munich to Seattle this summer for €17. Then the recipient sent it back, which cost a little over $50.
The difference is starker when you compare China and the US, but comparing Germany and the US is fair. Both are high-cost countries. I think the Americans should stop complaining until they have the prices down to German levels (or to an average of rich countries if you will).
So you pay postage from your parcel in country X, and on arrival in the UK, it's held, sometime for customs and/or VAT -- and then the carrier tries to charge you up to £20 for 'handling fee' to deliver it to you.
Basically what they do is try to hold you hostage to pay for the delivery, even tho you have paid postage already AND they are supposed to have an agreement with the oversea mailers about it.
It's really daylight robbery. And they all do it. Royal Mail, DHL, Fedex etc.
1. Pay the courier company to take care of customs.
2. Go to the customs office and do it yourself. I remember discussing with a customs officer what category a Soekris net4501 really was. ;)
3. Return the parcel.
The good news is that Amazon, Ebay, Aliexpress and some others deal with it now. Anyone who sells via Ebay can have the customs stuff processed by Ebay for a much more reasonable fee.
This may still be true, if you're talking about some kind of broad categories of countries. But from your example, the US is then clearly a much-higher-cost country than Germany. There's a lot of crazy expensive stuff in the US, that wouldn't fly like that in Northwest Europe. Go grocery shopping. Get a cellular plan. Conversely, get a job. You'll see the differences. Everything is so freakin' inflated in the US, it's not even funny anymore (as if it'd ever be). (I grew up close to the German border.)
http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese...
onzi received a letter from a company in Spain asking about the advertising catalog. Inside the envelope was an international reply coupon (IRC), something which he had never seen before. He asked about the IRC and found a weakness in the system which would, in theory, allow him to make money.
The purpose of the postal reply coupon was to allow someone in one country to send it to a correspondent in another country, who could use it to pay the postage of a reply. IRCs were priced at the cost of postage in the country of purchase, but could be exchanged for stamps to cover the cost of postage in the country where redeemed; if these values were different, there was a potential profit. Inflation after World War I had greatly decreased the cost of postage in Italy expressed in U.S. dollars, so that an IRC could be bought cheaply in Italy and exchanged for U.S. stamps of higher value, which could then be sold. Ponzi claimed that the net profit on these transactions, after expenses and exchange rates, was in excess of 400%. This was a form of arbitrage, or profiting by buying an asset at a lower price in one market and immediately selling it in a market where the price is higher, which is completely legal.[8]
edit: hmm, seems like they need a tracking number to show so it is not flagged and that is what's needed for this thing.
If you want to send a 1oz 'package' to, for example, France, it will cost $13.50. It used to cost closer to $3.40, and then they doubled it overnight to $7, and now it is freakishly high.
Why is this? Because the USPS has a monopoly and is allowed to rob us!
What monopoly? There are a number of private carriers providing international service; the USPS has no special market power. (Indeed, it's at a competitive disadvantage, because it's legally mandated to provide service to all domestic addresses, including remote ones that private carriers can refuse to serve.)
*I'm Canadian.
I ordered two of these [1] from China on the 7th. Showed up on the 28th. Only 3 weeks! ($1.32 for two, shipped)
If I wanted to send one to Canada, it would cost $2.29 for postage (because is it a 'flat', so it is cheaper. If it was bulkier, it would cost $9.50).
And Canada also called ePacket. It’s faster-ish.
It’s the Canada Post int’l processing plant and customs that have decided to be slow.
EDIT: Never mind, there are apparently price floors enforced on both USPS and private postal companies.
I bet the email spam problem could be solved at a stroke if senders were charged $.01 per email.
I wish mail could operate on a similar method
The real solution is to allow residents to whitelist or blacklist mail. Or better yet tie mail to people and organizations, not places, and allow people to route whatever mail wherever they want.
As it is, the postal service is paid to deliver all of that spam—but maybe it would no longer be cost-effective if everyone just said “nope, send it back” whenever possible. As it is, I just recycle all of it, but it still probably represents a sizable environmental impact in terms of materials, printing, delivery, recycling, and landfills, which we could entirely do away with.
I'm sure most of them cost several dollars in postage to get back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...
The statement "In 2012, USPS was paid only 94 cents on average for each piece of Chinese ePacket mail, according to a February report from the Postal Service’s inspector general’s office." is probably 100% accurate, in the same sense that "Rahim is the best dad ever, according to his son" is true, could be 100% accurate. You could stand by either statement. And both could be accurate. But it doesn't mean they're not misleading (in that the fact being discussed might not be true).
If you look for it, you'll see similar patterns scattered all over newspapers. One of the most common examples: '{company} reported 4th quarter earnings of {amount}'. There's a reason they don't simply say ''{company} earned {amount} in Q4'.
Fraudulent sellers will also use a similar method in certain countries where the delivery address is not tracked but weight and delivery status are. They can send a nonsense package to the right country/state, have it appear in China post tracking as delivered, but the fake package was actually went to a random address with a roughly expected weight. If customers try to file claims on sites like aliexpress they'll likely rule in the favor of the seller unless you can somehow get your local post office to provide proof it was never delivered to your specific address.
so which retailers are they skimming for addresses?
There are many cases of people getting shipped drugs and then having the police called on them once the package arrives. It could happen to anyone really. It is also fairly common that people ship drugs to anti-drug politicians.
Source?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439532/us-postal-servi...