A Business with No End
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Typically this would be very hard to do. If I want to withdraw $5,000 or more in cash in the US, I have to fill out a suspicious activity report (SAR). Transferring even under ten thousand dollars today via SWIFT can be tough (like Venmo for the international banks).
However, what if you set up a company in the US selling 16 oz organic potting soil for $400 a bag? You could place an order for 100x, get your over priced potting soil shipped to Romania, but what you’ve also done is incredibly valuable. You’ve transferred $40,000 USD across continents and essentially outside of the central banking system via the credit card companies.
Money laundering leads to grossly inflated assets (like buying a house that’s 300k over valued because you just want to store the money in a non-cash asset and don’t care about price). This affects us all, and should be studied more.
Though when banks see transactions over $5,000, they will sometimes write SARs. It sounds like you're mixing and matching the concepts and standards of CTRs and SARs, which seems like a reasonable enough mistake.
I also agree that when stuff is this complicated for what seems like no good reason, the answer is often money laundering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report https://www.ffiec.gov/bsa_aml_infobase/pages_manual/OLM_015....
The most bizarre part is Newsweek. I've known for a while that it isn't what it once was. What I didn't know was how much it had fallen. Similar to when I see "Polaroid" branded products, where it's obvious the name is the only thing left of that company.
there was an article i read a while ago (maybe it was on Bloomberg, I couldn't remember) that has a solution for this. if you clicked on the name of an important company/person, it'd show you a short description, along with cross references to them elsewhere in the story.
I have literally no interest in being involved in this insanity just because I shop on Amazon.
I can't be the only one who feels this way.
It's the first seemingly non-third-party listing on Amazon.com for the search term, "iPhone lightning cable." It's the 4th search result. If you hover over the first of "Other sellers" you'll see a store which has a 67% satisfaction rating. If you click through and read the negative reviews, almost all of them list getting a fake product. Amazon lists the brand of the cable as "Apple." The item description says that it comes in "non-retail packaging."
no. the answer is no.
http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...
On a related note, is this an AmazonBasics knock-off? https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Cert... or are they really selling a product that bad (looking at the reviews/photos)?
Same $19.99 price as an Apple original. Amazon lists "Apple" as the brand. But read the reviews--2.5 stars over 379 reviewers. First review: "Fake Apple cable. Doesn't work."
Under "Other sellers," Amazon.com is listed as an alternative, albeit for $5 more. That one is surely authentic, right? But what if the inventory is co-mingled with that of the other sellers for the same product?
For a lot of things I buy on amazon, being authentic or not is irrelevant, being of good quality or not is my only concern. Of course for a lot of brands 'authenticity' and good quality go together, but that's only a signal to me, authentic products can also be crap.
Perhaps that's also why I don't buy most brand stuff on amazon, as it gives me nothing more than the official retailer's site, prices should be the same, and customer service will be on par or better.
To be clear I don't condone selling fakes, I just think it's a fool's errand to look for 'good deals' on amazon or any third party site when it comes products where brand matters over all.
It's bad out there for some products.
I buy photography components off Amazon, buying a B&W UV filter has become impossible on Amazon. The fakes are actually a lot better than bottom-end UV lenses which is fine, but I didn't spend $45 for a knock-off. I spent that money for the real thing. If I could get the fake at a knock-off price I'd even consider it, but the fakes are being sold as the real thing at full price.
After I found out how how to spot the fakes I found that half of the UV lenses I already had were fake. The real ones are made of brass and have better glass coatings. The fakes are made of aluminum and the threads are not as good which is important for lens filters, you don't want one getting jammed on a $1200 lens. They are painted black so the main way to tell them apart is to weigh them.
The amazon review comments for B&W filters have extensive coverage of how to spot the fakes: https://www.amazon.com/77mm-XS-Pro-Clear-Multi-Resistant-Coa...
The fact of the matter is that today China is such an important market for Nike that it's probably easier to get a rare authentic Air Jordan in Shanghai than it is in your local American city. Greater metro Shanghai is larger than any single American city.
See also: voice interfaces. Your nifty paid version that's entirely local? Good luck competing against free, cloudy, and data-stealing, especially when the data-stealing helps the competing services get better. There's a reason local voice-to-text seemed to be getting really good for a while then suddenly dropped into obscurity.
See also also: any paid (or even free and volunteer-based!) website or service that might compete with ad-paid and/or information-harvesting and free. Uphill battle to gain user-share. You'll almost certainly fail, because information-harvesting is a possible business model and no matter how much people hate it they can't organize to stop it, realistically, because game theory (ahem, which is we have governments, in the short-short version)
Incidentally, I'd pick map & navigation data as the one big Web thing that really ought to be handled by government. Up-to-date, freely (or very cheaply) available map data should be considered infrastructure, and government(s) ought to already be generating/collecting it. Let the private market get it to consumers, but governments ought to be providing good-enough data that there's no need for private collection of it, in the general case. Leave street view and business reviews and such to Google and friends, but enough data to build a pretty damn good navigation app should just exist for anyone to use. It's a huge waste of effort to have multiple organizations trying to put all that together and it's something governments should to already have the data to provide, given some coordination—great candidate for a government service, or at least one of those government-coordinated public-private shared-cost-shared-benefit projects, post-war Japan style.
2.I'm not sure that this works: Amazon sellers can choose not to co-mingle. You got higher chances that brand's own Amazon store will prefer to be on the safe side.
I hesitate to say it's impossible to scale this way, but all of the forms of editorial control we're looking for the Amazons and Facebooks of the world directly impact their ability to scale.
You may say "that's fine", but of course they won't win on price against the thing that DOES scale, so there needs to be some outside force acting on it. Regulation, or every single consumer deciding they prefer X level of service over Y level of discount, or similar.
But that's partly because they do a dang good job in selecting good stuff.
You can walk into Costco, buy anything there and know that you got a pretty good thing for a pretty good price. (Not the best thing, or the best price, but pretty good.) And if you didn't, there's always the ridiculously good return/warranty policies.
They're a little challenging for us New Yorkers though, all those massive sizes and so on.
I've already moved basically all my electronics purchasing to B&H. Maybe I should just stop expecting Amazon to be something that it isn't.
* Clearly state if the seller is an OEM, An OEM authorized 3rd party, or 'other'.
* NOT co-mingle products*
* * Unless authorized and then enumerate with which other sellers the co-mingling is authorized.
* Allow filtering by all of the above.Amazon's nonchalance about counterfeiting and fake reviews looks increasingly like willful ignorance. Bezos could probably buy Fakespot.com or equivalent with loose change from his sofa, but no, they only pay lip service to cracking down on fake reviews and thus the search results in Amazon are highly questionable.
I don't think this will change until someone is electrocuted by a fake iPhone charger sold by Amazon from stickerless commingled inventory, and they are sued for billions.
Reviews has nothing to do with authenticity.
Note that Amazon lists the brand as Apple, and the default seller is a third party.
I'd prefer to buy a cheaper off brand cable from Anker or Amazon basics though, there's no reason to pay an extra $10-15 just because it's Apple branded. Some of the off brands are cheaper and higher quality than the Apple ones.
Edit: https://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Original-OEM-Apple-Lightning-To... $8.99 in retail packaging on eBay, almost certainly fake.
* Clearly indicate who the OEM of the product is.
* Clearly indicate the exact mode number(s) the product might be (including revision number).
I'm saying the actual manufacturer should be required, as in, whichever factory made the parts, not the fly by night name so many rebranded products have.
There are a couple different approaches, and no reason you'd need to stick with only one. Consumer transparency is the only true requirement (Be SPECIFIC, Never Lie or lie by omission, also only allow things like "non-ecc" in ways that exclude the text from normal searches).
For example:
Iphone Model (specific year model/type), By Apple, Built in Apple Approved factories (external link).
Example licensed cosmetic product "brand name" Shampoo, Brand, Co-mingled (sold by X), Manufactured in one or more of (exhaustive list)
Example licensed cosmetic product "brand name" Shampoo, Brand, Sold by Y (no shared inventory), Manufactured in (short list of pharmaceutical labs in a few US states).
Real Cane Sugar Cola, SodaCola Brand, Bottled in List X (short list of pharmaceutical labs in a few US states, only specific manufacturers could be picked as well, shipping time would vary).
I have no hope of Amazon improving.
[1] https://www.manhattanda.org/da-vance-announces-indictment-of...
I wonder how they can afford rent, but as long as they can pay salaries then the laundering cycle becomes complete
This reminds of nothing more than Rev. Moon's wacky Unification Church, which eventually founded the Washington Times and bought the UPI wire service to appear legitimate (and, at least in the case of the Washington Times, curry favor with conservative politicians).
Any group has to own its bad eggs as well as its good.
Writing of the author has been featured here before, also in line with her interests in obscure business schemes, about gratis watches and dropshipping that for me personally went into modern themes of brands and identity:"Museum of Capitalism - There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch".
First, here's my attempt at a synopsis of the article. I only read it once, and admittedly found it hard to follow, so I'm sure a few details are off.
- There are a bunch of fake-seeming storefronts on Amazon selling various products in unrelated categories at high markup. The business model seems to be basically massively automated Alibaba drop-shipping. Rather than providing a material or marketing value-add, the sellers are banking on buyers not doing any comparison shopping.
- A lot of these storefronts are connected with a shady Christian university chancellor who had profiteered off of content farming via a journalism company called IBTimes, a business that acquired Newsweek in 2013 and ran WaPo-style tactics to ramp up the clickbait.
- Separately of that, the chancellor has covertly supported the entrepreneurial ventures of his university's graduates. This usually takes the form of either 1) acquiring fledgling existing businesses, ramping up the prices, setting up Shopify online storefronts and profiteering off unscrupulous consumers, 2) creating brick-and-mortar storefronts that sell a mix of marked-up retail goods and returned items from these Amazon storefronts, or 3) some mix of 1 and 2.
- It's not clear how approach #2 makes money, since some of these brick-and-mortar storefronts are in extremely high-rent areas, e.g. Manhattan and San Francisco.
- Also, many of the businesses connected to this organization are currently under investigation for commercial fraud.
So why doesn't this article "work?" Well, to extract the above synopsis, we have to wade through:
1. A non-linear narrative about the author's acquaintance getting some goods from one of these storefronts returned to their parents' house. This has no connection to the rest of the piece. Seems like it was just a mistake.
2. A labyrinth, Pepe Silvia-style thumbtack-and-yarn exposition on a bunch of overly precise yet insignificant investigation details (storefront names, suppliers, warehouses, products) and recurring literary devices to match (e.g. "warehouse foo sells unrelated items x, y, and z")
3. An anecdote about buying some lipstick from one of these places, then returning it.
4. Some anecdotes about visiting some of the storefronts and observing that they're kind of weird and empty.
5. Some excerpts from email transaction with some of the "players" involved in this whole scheme, which don't amount to much - PR fluff basically, which could have been made up. We don't know.
6. Lots, and lots, and lots of exposition about the "journey" to figuring all this stuff out - I reverse image searched this pic, which lead me to this business page, which was connected to this trademark, etc. etc. (none of which exceeds the standard Google-fu any reader of this piece is probably capable of doing themselves, or needs to read about at length)
7. Half-baked, Baudrillardian navel-gazing divergences about how weird and dreamy and postmodern all this is.
I felt myself a little ripped off by the time I got to the bottom of the article and learned that, in fact, we have _no idea_ what the answer is to some of the core questions prompted by this piece. How do these ritsy storefronts make money? If they don't, are they just laundering money? If so, for what illegal activities? Is it connected to the IBTimes fraud? Whom exactly are they defrauding? What exactly is the relationship of the university to the IBTimes and these stores? And so on, and so on.
I feel like if the author had simply made a PDF providing a simple, linear narrative - similar to her watch story - it wouldn't have mattered that these questions went unanswered. The mechanics of the drop-shipping operation are sufficiently compelling. But the platform (a newspaper) and the piece's pretense (long-form, old school investigative journalism) demand unwieldy narrative inflation that isn't really merited by the meat of the story, and that ultimately makes it feel that much less satisfying.
[1] http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf