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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

The counterfeit climbing gear with fake safety logos in particular bothers me...

I've started to ask people in the climbing community if they bought anything besides the guide or their pants on Amazon. I'm not climbing with any gear from that store.

I've bought a few other things on Amazon that were counterfeit, which is why I cancelled my prime subscription and now look at other stores first. Never ordered climbing gear, but fake jackets are bad enough.

Some manufacturers do list directly on Amazon. If it's a huge discount I've done this but double check the seller. In general, I'll just use backcountry.com or REI though since I don't have to worry about a fake.

Due to Amazon's co-mingling of products, even if you buy from a reputable seller you might still get a counterfeit.

I ended up buying a pair of replacement snowboarding liner gloves from BackCountry after several Amazon reviews mentioned "sudden decreased quality from the last time I ordered". I doubted Burton quality had suddenly dropped off a cliff, so I suspected the listing was now pointing toward a counterfeit product.

I ordered from BackCountry and loved the gloves just as much as I always had. I don't know if the Amazon listing had truly been hijacked by a counterfeit, but I'm glad I didn't risk it and I tend to try to go to other sites first now.

I needed ballistic glasses for the range that have some shatter resistance. I misplaced a spare set, and needed them sooner than later for a friend. I start looking on Amazon. One of the top results at the time for Z87+[0] was a pack of 3 or 5 glasses for about $8 USD, and it hit me that there is a good chance these small companies are slapping ANSI and MIL-PRF tags onto their products. (Edit: I did the search again today. That listing does not show when searching "Z87+")

In all my years, I've never needed the shatter resistance offered by ballistic glasses. Think about how unfortunate it would be to find out on the range that your safety gear is a pair of $2 plastic lenses.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_eyewear#Performance_...

> The counterfeit climbing gear with fake safety logos in particular bothers me...

Another one is counterfeit tourniquets. It seems like you basically can't order them off Amazon with any confidence that you're getting the genuine article.

All of these examples sound like they should be rather serious crimes. Are people going to prison over this? There's quite a big difference between fake brand clothes or copies of novels, and fake safety/medical gear and badly copied medical books.

You can get fined for selling counterfeit goods, and apparently if you sell through Amazon you can get fined for it even though the goods were put in Amazon's warehouse by some other merchant.

For medical and safety gear, a fine is not good enough. This is intentionally putting people in danger.

The people sit in China, Japan, Malaysia and God knows where else and laugh there ass of at this "stupid money"

Legislation is already weak there. International legislation is none existened..

The problem here is Amazon making it ridiculously easy for people outside of our legislatures reach to commit crimes. So, the logical option is to punish Amazon (and similar companies) for distribution of counterfeits.

Is it legal what Amazon is doing (or rather, not doing)? Well, make it illegal.

No, it's not legal to sell counterfeit goods. Amazon could already be punished if there was the (political) will to do so.

IANAL, but I am not sure if they're legally selling counterfeits, or if they're even (legally speaking) involved with any crime at all. Maybe (to the law) they're victims as well? Common sense tells me: Yeah, what Amazon is doing should be considered criminal activity. But common sense and laws sometimes tend to disagree.

Anyhow, I think generally we agree: Amazon should be punished for this. If the legal framework does not allow for this, it needs to be adjusted accordingly.

IIRC they use the defense of just offering a marketplace where other vendors sell stuff. That did not work for places like Silk Road, and given that Amazon handles the delivery I doubt it holds up - at least not in all legislations Amazon is active in.

They sell illegal goods. Yes, I'd say they're doing something illegal. Now the illegal goods happen to be supplied by other people without Amazon's knowledge, but Amazon is still the one selling them, and they have a duty to know what they're selling. And once they know that some of their suppliers are selling them illegal goods, they have a responsibility to do everything they can to stop that and prevent it from ever happening again. Instead, they choose to describe it as not a big problem.

What do you mean? There was no problem charging Assange, not an US citizen, with crimes.

It took seven years and well over £10 million in police costs to get him, and that's from the territory of one of our strongest allies with an extradition treaty.

We don't even have an extradition treaty with China.

From one and only reason - because Ecuador helped him. The minute he left the embassy, he was taken, and that would've happened 7 years ago if it wasn't for Ecuador. The average Joe is not going to have help from foreign governments and their diplomats.

It's even worse if you're trying to get a Chinese national out of China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_China

> China does not allow for the extradition of its own nationals.

Confining a person to China is a punishment by itself

Until he was kicked out, Assange was technically in Ecuador's territory, not UK.

Sorry, but on. The people responsible sit in Seattle, Washington. I didn't ordered anything from a random guy in China, Japan, Malaysia or God knows where else. I have ordered a thing from a respectable looking, USA business.

Well, but in some cases you did. Many, many items on Amazon are not sold by Amazon. Quite a lot of Amazon's business these days is just acting as a marketplace for independent sellers. This is how they keep an arm's length ("plausible deniability") from the problem. I agree, however, that it doesn't absolve them of responsibility.

But the issue here seems to be that even if you order directly from Amazon or a reputable seller, you could still end up with a product coming from a less reputable seller if it has the same barcode.

This is the same bullshit companies like Airbnb and Uber try to pull.

No, the people sit in the Amazon offices. If you sell stolen goods you're lucky if you aren't charged with fencing but you can bet you won't be reimbursed if those goods get claimed. If you sell fake products, you should be held accountable just the same.

Sure, pass the buck up the chain but this should never allow the consumer to be knowingly harmed by an intermediary knowingly enabling the sale of counterfeit items with no accountability.´

Amazon is knowingly allowing fraud to happen. It's a risk they're willing to take and they can get away with it because there's no legal accountability. They could try to curb it but that would impact the bottom line. The only way to fix this is regulation (i.e. laws) and more consistent application of it.

The market can't fix it because there's no market incentive to fix it.

Yes, Amazon has had ample opportunity to self-regulate, and they are passing on it because--contrary to outdated theories--it's been more profitable to ignore the problem.

I'm probably too much of an adult to be quoting Fight Club but this reminds me of that infamous monologue about car companies comparing the cost of a recall vs the cost of lawsuits from faulty cars that kill their customers.

I'm not sure what you're calling outdated but it's been like this at least since whenever that book was written. The only thing that has changed is that consumer rights have been eroded in the US over decades, reducing the financial risk of inaction.

People may do something out of the kindness of their hearts. Corporations only do what is either directly profitable or inevitable. Expecting a corporation to do something because it is "right" is absurd. Corporations -- contrary to US legal opinion -- aren't people.

Let me check I understand this correctly: You could be a seller of genuine articles, but could be fined if Amazon substitutes a fake supplied by someone else?

It reminds me of the case where someone got in trouble with customs because Amazon substituted a counterfeit for the genuine article he ordered and paid for.

Yep. Amazon offers a service where items with the same SKU from multiple vendors are intermingled at their warehouses. This is no problem as long as they are really the same item.

But clearly when they mix up real items with fake ones, it's Amazon and the fake vendor that are at fault and need to be held responsible, not the real vendor or the customer.

It's bizarro world.

All the investigator sees is that someone went to a website with your name on it, bought product X, and received a counterfeit of product X instead. It doesn't matter how that happened; all that matters is that your business enables counterfeit goods to find a market. Of course if you run a business that sells via Amazon you have to specifically opt out of this inventory mixing, even though it increases your costs. Either that or you shouldn't do business via Amazon at all, or you should gang together with other businesses and force Amazon to change it's operations. But no matter what you do it's likely to increase your costs.

It's not clear to me whether this problem is present in the EU, where consumer law generally works a lot better. A poster below mentions fake CE logos?

A little while ago I was trying to get into Airsoft (paintball with plastic bullets as opposed to color) to have a reason to spend more time with my brother. The little bullets have quite decent momentum and can penetrate normal low-grade safety glasses, and so I was browsing around for glasses with a certain rating. Found the exact pair I wanted for a good price on amazon, but I just couldn't run the risk of getting fakes from China. Needless to say, I haven't played any Airsoft yet..

This seems to imply that Amazon is literally the only place that you can buy these glasses. Has it got that bad?

> This seems to imply that Amazon is literally the only place that you can buy these glasses. Has it got that bad?

They're everywhere. Amazon is just convenient.

If you want to see for yourself, well...

http://www.google.com/search?q=z87+glasses

I face this conundrum quite often. Amazon has such a vast selection of stuff you can't commonly get in other places, but I just don't trust them.

If nobody goes to retail stores to _ask_ for a specific type of security glasses, how will they ever know to stock it? We, the consumers making Amazon's monopoly.

While security glasses are something that you will hardly find in a typical mall retail shop, it is something, that shops with tactical gear do stock. They also haveh a clerk, who can give you an advice for your specific needs.

I can't remember the specifics, but with the certain model I wanted, at a reasonable price, and with shipping to Sweden I'd like to remember that Amazon was the best option. Regardless, although my last sentence might've been a bit dramatic, the point of the anecdote was to share how Amazon lost me as a customer because of their counterfeit problem.

In Sweden, which has a very limited market, German or UK Amazon is often the only easy way to browse niche goods you want to buy.

The first search result for "airsoft safety glasses" is [1], which shows me Danish prices and a delivery cost to Denmark.

Amazon might be easy, but knowing their products may be counterfeit, the company pays next to no tax, and has underpaid staff on awful contracts, I've not bought anything from them for years.

[1] https://www.patrolbase.co.uk/dk/airsoft-glasses-and-goggles

I must qualify what I said by saying that I've found this much harder the more specific I need to be. I could find 0 results for short M3 screws when I searched domestic sellers a few weeks ago. No hardware- or electronic stores carried them. One had them listed with a 3 month delivery and at about $3 each. After that hour+ you Amazon it, without putting hours into finding it in other countries who's languages you don't speak.

Airsoft glasses is something I can find in any mall here.

We're pretty well of the beaten path of Amazon here, but I had a similar need (#1 slotted flat-head brass wood screws) that McMaster-Carr didn't sell a little while ago and found them on microfasteners.com. It looks like they stock metric machine screws as well.

They have secured a place in the minds of people as being the only place you can get anything - or, get anything conveniently, I guess. I hope there's still physical stores out there that do e.g. airsoft goods. The real "problem" is of course that consumers are then faced with real consumer prices, where they have to pay $15 for a good pair of safety glasses instead of $1.50.

Doesn't Walmart carry that airsoft stuff?

In the handful of nanny-states you're reduced to buying online for that kind of thing.

You can't even buy a slingshot at Walmart in my state.

This is true unfortunately.

I'm unaware of a state where Walmart can not sell safety glasses, they're used for a lot more than airsoft/paintball.

The comment I replied to said airsoft stuff, not safety glasses specifically and that's what I'm addressing. Stop being obtuse.

They've gotten good enough at SEO that it's honestly hard to Google for alternative or niche vendors.

Unless you're plugged into the community for the activity enough to know the reputations of big online vendors, you've got the same problem of low quality, counterfeits, poor fulfillment, payment processing, etc.

I don't climb, but oh yeah, that's a no brainer all right. Unless they can fix this then buying direct from the manufacturer has to be the only safe way. Otherwise you have to trust a retailer who even if trustworthy, has to trust a wholesaler.

Any climbing/outdoors shop is fine; they're selling the products directly and are liable for problems — so they make sure there's no problems.

That sounds extremely terrifying. Got a source, please?

A quick search resulted only in less safety critical gear like maps, clothing etc.. Not saying that this isn't dangerous, too, but are their fake carabiners, ropes and helmets?

The things I've heard of have been harnesses and carabiners.

Here is a warning that has been put up in our local climbing center: https://imgur.com/a/R0PGiGI

https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/online_budget_g...

Which talks about fake safety logos and https://www.outsideonline.com/2073311/dangerous-climbing-har... which is about eBay rather than Amazon. My personal experience is that Amazon suggests obviously sketchy, NON-UIAA / CE gear rather than established brands. I've bought a lot of caving, climbing, and mountaineering equipment on Amazon and haven't had a problem yet buying Petzl, Elderid, BD etc.

Also, I just came across https://www.climbing.com/gear/counterfeited-how-illegal-knoc... in the links to the UK article. Reading now.

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