Amazon to ramp up counterfeit reporting to law enforcement
reuters.com
reuters.com
Amazon is making it far too easy for fraudsters to sell their crap, and (from what I hear) repeatedly: products removed because of counterfeit issues get re-added the next day under some other (or new) product code, or seller ID.
I work in the banking industry. It's not very unusual to discover that a client might be doing something that is suspicious enough to notify law enforcement of it (these notices are mandatory).
But that's the last line of defense. You're supposed to attempt to prevent these situations from happening in the first place, hence there are strict AML/KYC procedures.
If a bank were to open a new account for a client they had banned in the past for other reasons, financial supervisory authorities would bring down the hammer on them so fast and so hard, they'd regret it a thousand times more than whatever business they expected to make with that client.
Amazon's claim that they can't do more against counterfeits than they are already doing now is bullshit. There's an entire industry with decades of experience in that matter that they could turn to. But why would they.
Then there is the not new, new items issue, which is like you got a cheeseburger, but someone else got it first, licked the bun, decided they didn’t want it and returned it to the counter.
For all of the billions of dollars Walmart is spending trying to be like Amazon, this is the one area they can nail Amazon directly in the gut. Amazon’s entire cashflow positive low margin growth model falls apart if Amazon was the one that had to try to be like Walmart. Once consumers think of Amazon like eBay or Craigslist, the cost to reverse that view will be massive or impossible. Ironically, I get electronics that are in great shape and undamaged from eBay, not the same experience from Amazon.
Right now Amazon is a giant flea market. It’s on par with Craigslist, and a little worse than eBay. When you buy something on eBay you know who it came from. Amazon, you know nothing. Try ordering 5x of the same thing from Amazon and see the wild variations in quality and condition they are in.
I've had the same experience as you. I'm not sure what the cause is (maybe there's lower volume, so scammers don't use eBay as much), but I've bought things like top-of-the-line noise cancelling headphones refurbished at huge markdowns on eBay and had zero issues, but I've not had great experiences buying similar things from Amazon.
I'd argue eBay is actually safer than Amazon now, because at least the reviews are less sketchy and easier to trust and also buyers can self-select from more legit products by going for higher prices. And can guarantee you're buying from the same seller every time who will ship direct to you.
Whereas for things like makeup on amazon even if you choose higher priced you're still at risk of getting knockoffs due to comingling.
Even if there are no complaints but simply a higher than average return rate, Amazon will shut down a listing, and this is done based on the actual supplier of the stock, not the commingled seller. Source: have gotten such emails from Amazon when I was selling that specifically said "you may not have actually sold the orders these complaints are for but it's your inventory".
Reviews shouldn't be used for describing problems with the seller, anyway. Use seller feedback for that.
"For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit."
It creates a natural "market for lemons" experiment on Amazon. I can't imagine that is healthy for Amazon in the long run.
My orders/year and dollars/year at Amazon are <50% what they were a few years ago.
Amazon is no longer the first place I look for many items; with things like Shopify, high-quality eCom experiences are available to basically every business in a way they were not 10 years ago. For branded products, I’ve started buying direct from the brand websites with mostly good results. I’ll probably cancel Prime next year.
Especially considering how effective they can ban customers for any ol' reason and make damn sure that said customer can't reopen the account, or open an account under a different name.
Amazon will do exactly shit, unless either the hammer of the law crashes down on them, unless it costs real money, or unless the publicity is so damning and visible that it hurts.
Any references or data you have on this? :-)
They do take significant measures to block repeat offenders, but bad actors are sophisticated.
I've heard, for example, that if a new account is selling inventory that's too similar to a banned account, it will get flagged. If accounts ramp up sales too quickly, if too many details match existing accounts (name, address, IP, credit card, etc) it's gone.
Online signups work when risk is low to the point of being non-existent. Regulators aren't worried about students buying Ramen noodles.
Online signups don't work when there are credible risks of malfeasance. When you're a merchant making more than X in revenue, vetting becomes necessary. If banks can do this, then so can Amazon.
If a bank were to say "we're trying our best but people are still heavily abusing our online signup", then I'm all but certain that the regulatory response would be "too bad, then you can no longer offer online signup".
The client is a small wood-working shop somewhere in Ohio, has been registered as business for 30 years, and has a projected volume of 5-10 items sold per day? -> low risk, can be approved online.
The client is some LLC or similar that sells USB cables and USB flash drives, and that has been registered as a business only days or months ago, and the client is somewhere in a jurisdiction associated with exceptionally high reports of counterfeiting? -> high risk, no online approval. Visit some office.
Again: banks have been doing this for decades.
I don't think they've internalised the extent of this problem yet. I agree with the previous post that in some cases it's worse than ebay.
Maybe scorched earth is the best answer here and built up a new resilient system slowly. The current system is demonstrably broken.
1. The same thing that any of the millions of businesses that operate storefronts do. They've figured this out, somehow.
2. Alternatively: I don't know, and I don't care. They are a logistics company. It's their job to figure this out, not mine. If they want to pay me, though, I'll be happy to consult.
> commercially viable for Amazon
why does it have to be? What if the business that Amazon chose to engage in simply isn't commercially viable? I personally think there is a way to make it viable but I am almost certain that'd significantly bite into the crazy profit margins Amazon is reaping. And maybe that's the explanation, maybe Amazon's huge profits are largely coming from ignoring market rules that everyone else needs to abide by and, when the market is made fair, they'll still be profitable, but forced by competition to survive on much thinner margins.
All Amazon needs to do is just use their own site. It's so laughably obvious, like 1TB flash drives.
Buying counterfeit items unintentionally can create huge problems for the consumer (eg [1]). Why is the onus on the consumer to look at a listing and decide if it's counterfeit or not?
Amazon is probably taking the stand they're no different to a search engine and Google isn't (mostly) responsible for search results. But that analogy is not apt.
The comparison to banking is far better. Banks can be held responsible is they fail due diligence with customers. Amazon should be held to the same standard.
Like how drop shipping fraud can even exist on Amazon is amazing. This should be so easy to detect (ie lots of shipments to one address or cluster of addresses).
No one should be able to sell branded products on Amazon without being verified. Period. And Amazon should be wholly responsible for any counterfeit that occurs as a result.
[1]: https://www.racked.com/2018/1/8/16849298/amazon-counterfeits...
We could probably even pile on the health risks associated with products like cosmetics and otc medicine.
Every time I buy on Amazon I have to use Fakespot to get something decent. For some things that's the best way to go, but it's a huge PITA, and I'm to the point where going to the local mall/outlet is actually less work now.
I wonder if we might actually take some insight from white-labeling in how to handle this... how is President's Choice held to account when a can contains contaminated food? Do they get to defer any liability on the original manufacturer or by white labeling have they accepted all the liability where the customer is concerned?
You work in the banking industry. This is not the banking industry. Money laundering laws as they are written make bankers (and other financial service industry workers) criminally liable for criminal acts even if there was no criminal intent on the part of the bankers. That is not the case in retail, and I shudder even at the thought.
> You're supposed to attempt to prevent these situations from happening in the first place
You're not "supposed" to -- you are legally required to play police officer, and can be criminally liable if your organization allows this activity if there is any sort of way to detect it, even if that detection is not part of the legal mandate. Filing too many SARs can get you in as much trouble as actively money laundering.
These AML laws are horrific, and create a ton of bureaucratic burden on companies and force them to deliberately cut off customers who are using their facilities for totally legitimate reasons because they match a pattern also used by criminals. This, of course, it part of the reason for these laws; to starve sectors (for example, legal marijuana dispensaries) that can't be explicitly made illegal and have to be made "uncomfortable" instead.
Amazon shouldn't play cop; they should let law enforcement prosecute real cases of fraud, rather than trying to preemptively prevent fraud and in the process add burdensome requirements that restrict access to their marketplace and allow well-capitalized rent-seeking incumbents to further consolidate their market power over small shops that rely on equal access to the marketplace.
No, it's not, because:
1. These laws were in place long before half the country legalized marijuana.
2. The dispensaries just pass the costs of being shut out of the banking sector to the customer, and if we know anything about drugs, cost and a bit of inconvenience are not going to stop people from using them.
The issue, IMO, is that Amazon isn't getting more than a slap on the wrists so there is no motivation for them to fix the issue.
This is the true injustice of our system. Bezos can just play the Amazon Exceptionalism card.
I stumbled upon the latest Amazon scam this past week. I was searching through my Amazon order history to find a wallet I had ordered years ago in the past. Imagine my surprise when my query for "wallet" returned an order with the wallet's name as the title, an image of a 5 pack of Lightning cables as the picture, and a 3 pack of Lightning cables when I actually clicked through.
The reviews [0] were clearly for a bunch of different items: the wallet I had purchased in the past, a laser pointer/clicker for pets, socks, etc. But the current item being sold was a set of generic Lightning cables. It amazes me that Amazon would let sellers so blatantly apply reviews from a bunch of older and wholly unrelated items to a completely new (and also unrelated) item.
>They are really durable because they have just arrived, they are good price, they are exactly the length I want, they arrive very quickly and they look good quality.What else do I want?I can only think that the product is really good!
Also looks like the non-charger reviews are hidden on the mobile site?
The headline is very misleading and makes me wonder if it came from an Amazon press release: any crack-down on counterfeiters on Amazon, no matter how slight, would statistically qualify as a "significant ramp-up" compared to their previous habit of doing nothing until being threatened with a law suit by vendors.
My understanding is that Amazon basically does everything they can short of inspecting every unit, which is infeasible.
As I pointed out elsewhere in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107150, commingling doesn't significantly affect counterfeiting.
My question above was "What policy do you believe would prevent new sellers from selling counterfeits while still allowing legitimate sellers?". Abolishing the commingling program doesn't do that.
The relative reduction is probably large, but if it's something like one in 100k instead of one in 10k, that's a slight reduction on an absolute level.
Well, that's open for debate, and the concrete data is so scarce that it's hard to have any meaningful debate, but I thin we disagree here.
>And there are some who've accused Amazon of selling counterfeits directly...
Got a link for such an accusation? I've only ever seen them accused of commingling third party inventory with their own, which sometimes results in receiving a counterfeit item when buying directly from Amazon, but that's a very different thing from Amazon procuring and selling counterfeits.
This is nothing unique to Amazon, by the way. I could show you lawsuits against Walmart and Costco for selling counterfeits. Every massive retail company that doesn't buy 100% from the manufacturer is going to eventually have some leaks. You buy from the grey market, vast majority of the time you get legitimate cheaper product, occasionally someone scams you.
Oh, and Apple famously sued Mobile Star LLC claiming that they had sold Amazon counterfeit products through Vendor, which was "sold and shipped by Amazon.com".
Links to all above cases:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6173730/daimler-ag-v-am...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4495986/apple-inc-v-mob...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8418854/williams-sonoma...
I actually prefer the current chaos to something like Youtube where they have given rights owners an (practically) unappealable veto over everyone's content. Yes, I know that 98% of the strikes are probably correct, but some are completely bogus and others are exploiting fair use correctly.
One of the first things we would lose with a Youtube style agreement is the doctrine of first sale.
I do think they could enforce an insurance requirement which would help pay out civil judgements, at least.
By the way, YouTube claims are easily disputed in almost all cases, with the exception of UMG which has a contractual right to veto counternotices. Otherwise, YouTube responds to disputes reasonably, in my understanding. This wasn't always the case, many of the favorable policies are only a few years old, such as holding revenue in escrow until a dispute is resolved.
But they could also just enforce stricter rules around reviewing and approving sellers. While not having the threat of legal action it is something they have much more control around.
If it was that easy to "permanently freezing counterfeiters out of the marketplace", they would have done it already. Blocking somebody, especially somebody with a strong financial motive, from doing something on the internet is incredibly challenging. They'll go to great lengths to route around your block using all kinds of fun exciting methods. Methods might include creating a new account with a different business & address, taking over the account of a dormant but reputable seller, and probably a huge list of other things I can't even think of right now.
But seriously. Blocking or banning people on the internet is almost impossible. If they have the will, they'll find a way back onto your site.
Amazon has prioritized growing the number of sellers, but they're in complete control of who they allow to sell on their platform, and what they require from sellers prior to beginning. You seem to be accepting, uncritically, the argument of "platforms" everywhere who don't want to be held responsible for what their "users" do. I don't agree with that perspective generally, and I think it's especially silly with respect to a web commerce company like Amazon.
This is probably why amazon wants to get law enforcement involved. Those folks can stop the people behind the fraud....
That doesn't actually mean anything though; the modern internet isn't some homogeneous medium people choose how to interact with, it's a federation of privately managed networks and services. Amazon can control exactly what is required for people to become sellers on their network, and it sounds like they may actually be starting to do just that.
I would think you would report them to the authorities... which seems like what they are doing
This isn't just "people on the internet", though. These are people who have some sort of physical presence that they ship goods from, and have some interaction with the financial system so they can accept payment. There are finite ways that they can do this, and that provides a way to actually identify the person across account signups in order to keep them blocked.
No, it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than, say, trying to block someone from HN who is determined to keep creating new accounts using VPNs, proxies, whatever.
It's not like Mr. FBI Guy is going to knock on the door of a counterfeit factory in China and say, "Can you pretty please stop making garbage that looks like quality merchandise? KTHXBAI"
It's my understanding that stopping counterfeits are usually the province of Customs. But that department is already overwhelmed by dealing with the existing flow of counterfeit items and only stops a very small percent of them getting into the country as it is.
This move by Amazon feels like a PR stunt, or offloading its responsibility to its customers onto the government, and will not actually have a material impact.
I might occasionally but something from Amazon, but only stuff that is basically "uncounterfeitable" such as a bunch of simple, metal bookends or plastic cord management sheathing. I also usually wait for them to offer me yet another free month of Prime so they eat the shipping cost too.
Even stuff I thought would definitely be fake (electrical components) was legit.
Anecdote time. Last year I bought an Anker power brick via Amazon, using the link on Anker's own website. When it arrived, instead of Anker's normal well-designed retail packaging, the brick was simply wrapped in bubble wrap, with a printed label stating that it was "new" and thrown into its shipping box. I inquired with Anker support about this, but they could only say that all their products they send to Amazon for distribution are in retail packaging. I did confirm that the item was purchased through the AnkerDirect seller, so I can only guess that it was either a returned item or that the retail packaging had been damaged, and someone at the Amazon warehouse repackaged it and put it back in the "new" bin. I ended up returning it for a refund. My trust of Amazon as a retail platform has been steadily eroding over the past few years, and this was just another reason to shop elsewhere.
The thing is, the commingled stickerless inventory program is only supposed to apply to items sold by Amazon, not to third parties like AnkerDirect, so the hypothesis it's fulfilled-by-Amazon that screwed the pooch is more likely.
That would cut down on the number of shitty dangerous power suppliers they're selling.
Certifications from UL or similar labs are much better, but many producers don't hesitate to also fake the UL logo on their fake products.
The only problem is that Fakespot will only update it's product review analyses on demand, and some of them are years old.
This product was SHIPED AND SOLD BY AMAZON.
It's not a 3rd party seller problem. Amazon might be using 3rd party suppliers too.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2AHKXNOEL585S/re...
I didn't even know it was counterfeit until I saw the identical one at Home Depot. Surprised that HD would sell something so non-functional, I took it apart and noticed it was assembled entirely differently - excluding the screw on the bottom that caused the Amazon one to leak. Both were completely identical on the outside.
Imagine what else we're buying if something as banal as a hummingbird feeder is counterfeited and sold via Amazon.
At least when you go to the faux-product markets in real life on the streets of NYC and SF you know you're getting a "Kate Slade" bag not a Kate Spade bag etc. But on Amazon you're just fish in the barrel and not even getting a good deal for buying the sketchy or off-label item.
It's a bummer and I wish Amazon would deal with it.
It's because Amazon co-mingles stock between sellers for the same SKUs. As in, they add all of the same SKU to one one big inventory and no matter who sells the product, they pull randomly from that inventory. So while it was shipped and sold by them, they most likely didnt supply the product.
Reminds me of the PR attack on lawyers and the plaintiff and the McDonald's coffee. Sure its easy to spin a case that awarded millions for spilling hot coffee and victim/lawyer blaming...then come to find out the McDonald's systematically heated their coffee above safety and industry standards, had already been warned, and lid was not fasten properly, and the woman had 3rd degree burns through her jeans on her privates/thighs requiring skin grafts. The "millions" was punitive for McDonald's willfully disregarding prior warnings about their coffee and calculated as 1 day of coffee sales (seems pretty reasonable).
I can't wait until someone sues Amazon and all the documents and communications leak revealing what Amazon executives knew about the counterfeits and how they willfully refused to make changes to curb counterfeits, and rather took actions to facilitate and cover up the source of counterfeits (co-mingling products).
Remember Amazons response to the counterfeit eclipse sunglasses? They knew if something serious happened then they would be up a creek on it.
But if someone buys a fake purse or SD card, how much damage is going to happen.
There might be a class action with certain products and I could see damages from SD cards that were defective.
We're talking about counterfeits. You don't believe you've ever had this issue, but why would you be certain?
But yeah, I have never even had a hint of any suspicion that anything I've bought on Amazon was a fake.
It's good practice to run all your new memory cards through a storage test application to confirm it can store what it says. Doesn't mean it's not counterfeit, or that it will continue to accept writes to the full disk, but it's probably ok (and you may have sequential write/read stats as a result)
I thought that was a very clever fraud. Can't find the article now...
I thought that was a very clever fraud. Can't find the article now but I'll check on desktop later and share if I can...
Both of these things can and do happen with items at B&M stores and other vendors.
Think about the whole cable modem backdoor that was recently discovered...
Or the various cases of food poisoning that happen seemingly regularly...
You aren't safe just because you purchase items thru a different "trusted" source. This is the outsourced world we live in today. When everything is outsourced, the possibility for counterfeiting, tampering, and maliciousness rises - because nobody can be held accountable (diffusion of responsibility).
At one time, it was possible to trace things back far enough to find the original culprit and prosecute them. Today, if you're lucky, you might find a reasonable suspicion of a company - who will instantly (sometimes with a literal click of a button) close up shop, move everything, and re-open the next day under a new name. Furthermore, even if you ask around about them, nobody knows nuthin'.
Food poisoning is an interesting case to bring up. If you know that a neighborhood restaurant has food poisoned you or someone you know, then you stop buying food there.
And if you buy something from a physical store like Best Buy or Safeway, you also know there's someone you can sue and somewhere you can go if the product is recalled by the manufacturer. Those companies have a brand to protect and will take steps to do so.
So no, the brand isn't dead and it is still a good proxy for quality of service or quality of merchandise. I forgot that for about 8 years until Amazon reminded me.
There's still a major harm.
I returned them for a full refund, even after 1.5 years, but I can't shake the belief they knew about it. Furthermore, when they find out something is a counterfeit, they should be required to notify all known past purchasers and offer them the option of a refund or exchange.
It's a pain, but so far it's worked, and every time I'm looking for things I see more horror stories: "Huggies" diapers that have no branding on them and break all the time, electronics sold as new that would be considered in poor quality if sold as used, etc.
Nobody links to any examples when they say they're everywhere.
And this is the second most recommended product on Amazon for that search.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Compute...
Reviews can be "bought" - sometimes literally, sometimes "under the table" (reviewers are supposed to disclose things like "I was sent this item by the seller for feedback and review" or similar - but do you think all reviewers are honest?).
What also happens (far more often than you'd believe - but if you look close, you can find it) is a product will be sold and gain a large number of great reviews, then the seller will turn around, and mark the item's cost up to some insane amount (an item normal selling for $5.00 will be marked up to $99999.99), only to later put a different item (description, pictures, etc) in it's place (keeping the SKU the same), drop the price back down to something reasonable, and now "new item" has "old item" 5-star reviews.
I see this all the time on Amazon when I look at my purchase history over a year or more time-frame. I purchase a lot of stuff on Amazon, and I mostly see this kind of thing on the hobby electronics and stuff I purchase, but I have seen it also on regular products. I'll look at my past purchases, and the name and picture of a purchase I made will be changed to something I know for a fact I didn't purchase (because it was something I'd never purchase, due to non-interest, my purchasing patterns, or not marketed for my demographic or such).
Of course, this is with "hobby electronics" - a lot of which are drop-shipped out of China/Hong Kong, or were imported to the USA for "Amazon Fulfillment" purposes. But I have no doubt this same thing happens with other, more general products. If the seller doing this plays their cards right (like selling RAM sticks with the reviews for flash memory cards), it can sometimes be very difficult to tell that a swap was made, without reading every review very carefully. Imagine this being done with products like clothing or fashion accessories...!
Has it not happened to you, or has it not happened to you yet?
On the other hand, take a category like pet toys. Cheap plastic things where I'm not concerned with getting the genuine article, like a collapsible dog bowl. There are dozens of identical "brands" with thrown-together phonetic names for an entirely identical product with slight price differences. How do I began to choose? And who's to say any of them are produced with safe materials?
I'd really like to know how well Amazon's "put anything on the digital shelf" strategy works over a curated product inventory. Exceedingly well, I suspect, but it seems like the blowback over poor product will continue increasing.
Are you sure that you're not feeding your dog some lead in the process?
It may be in the coating.
For many product categories, almost every single result flunks Fakespot.com with a D or worse, so it's too much work to keep going in the hope of finding some wheat in the chaff, and easier to just buy somewhere else like B&H Photo or Target.com. Two recent examples: Ethernet cables and sleep masks for airplane travel.
Then there are bizarre things like how when you select "Sort by price, low to high", the results aren't actually sorted by price, and half the results you saw in the default view don't appear in the sorted by price view.
I bought a car part on Amazon that, when I opened it, was a chunk of blue clay in a box that was poorly-printed to look like the box of the correct part. I never bothered to return it because the cost of shipping and my time would have been more than the cost of the part.
I'm sure this seller was eventually discovered to be selling obvious fraudulent goods, but I never received any notification saying as much.
I ordered a car part, I received a block of clay. This isn't a problem that is solved by any return policy.
You became a sucker and helped contribute to others being suckers by doing absolutely nothing after very obviously getting scammed.
The truth is, returns would be irrelevant if Amazon had done their job.
In many (most?) cases time=money is a false equivalence because time spent doing something isn't necessarily always time you would be spending working, but the local postal services are only open during hours I would be working, so it's not a false equivalence in my case.
Receiving the item you ordered and paid for is easy and free. Returns are not.
Why are we even having this conversation? They sent me a box of clay when I ordered a car part. This isn't an ambiguous situation.
Also, I see your rationale and think you are really missing the point. You may have a small hourly rate of $60 and use that as justification but its complete garbage. I do better than that and I work with guys who literally make 10's of millions a year. Taking a preventable loss that only requires a phone call or a chat is foolish, even if it is $7.00.
1. Order item from Amazon, discover item is a block of clay, go through the Amazon returns process, reorder item, which may be a block of clay again.
2. Order item from a site that ships me the item I order instead of a block of clay.
So again, why are we talking about this? We can argue as much as we want about Amazon's return policies, but the return policy would be irrelevant if they had sent me the item I ordered instead of a block of clay.
My fiancee had to ship a $20.00 dress that wasn't even the right color or anything like the picture back, costing $40.00, before Amazon would even refund her. And worse, the package actually bounced because the seller had folded at some point in the return period, so the package arrived right back on her doorstep. Because Amazon didn't have confirmation from the non-existent seller that the package had arrived at their non-existent company, she had to spend several hours on the phone with CSRs and different people haggling over what was essentially $60.00.
So no it isn't easy.
This math is infuriating. Do you actually bill for every waking hour of your day? If not, this calculation is nonsense. My hourly rate is similar, but I only work 8 hours per day. I have plenty of time after work to do things like spend 7 minutes returning a cheap item. I have absolutely no desire to work 16 hour days even if I was paid overtime, so it's totally disingenuous to pretend that my time after work is worth the same exact rate as my "hourly" rate at work. (I'm actually salaried so if I did want to work more it would just decrease my hourly rate.)
My wife returned it and Amazon sent a replacement the next day. All my wife has to do for the return is drop it of at Kohls next time shes out running errands. Pretty painless really.
Your experience is completely irrelevant. If Amazon didn't send out obvious counterfeits, you wouldn't have to return them, which is inherently easier than returning them no matter what the return process is.
And this isn't even touching on being nice to other people. That counterfeiter can keep on sending blocks of clay to other unsuspecting people and you did nothing to help stop them.
Best bet is to just not buy anything from Amazon.
Especially with dust masks I feel like there might be departments in OSHA or the FDA that would help out here, but I don't know what they are or if they've been declawed.
Where is the FTC? How is this not the most clear situation where government action against a corporation (Amazon) is needed? I've been called a libertarian and even I think this the kind of situation we need government for.
Reviews have to be about the product. Amazon likely interpreted your review as "I received an incorrect product" which is a seller issue and has to be in seller feedback, not product review (which are shared between multiple sellers).
Only to go back to the reviews later and see the "Most Helpful" review reports that their item was counterfeit as well.
Anyone care to elaborate how this is possible? Surely Amazon is not doing this intentionally, are they just getting ripped off by their suppliers?
Edit: well thanks for the downvotes... anyone want to me what I did wrong?
Serves me right, I'll keep it to myself rather; might as well have made a troll comment about Trump or something, didn't expect that at HN.
You know I didn't even presuppose it, I dared to wonder out loud if it might be related since I'd seen an example of this Amazon counterfeiting just the other day from a somewhat well-known guy called John Carmack. Maybe there would have been some interesting discussion, I dunno; but it looks like no one is selling any bridges, just downvoting questions.
You're probably right, and I never disagreed with you; thanks for the snark.
That and burning your house down with fake or bad wiring from faulty electronics. Or a bestselling novel with the last 100 pages missing. Or a flash drive with only 1% of its labelled capacity.
Of all the things for the counterfeiter to fail to replicate--
It is also bad for the company whose product is being counterfeited because their brand is associated with the poor quality knock off.
This is also the reason I hate print on demand and think the seller should have to specify how a book was printed.
Maybe you think counterfeits are equal in quality to the genuine articles. In that case I think the argument is different. But I don’t believe that is the case.
I mean, if you are really willing to buy an original product, a minimal check can be the price asked for it.
Any good today is made of materials+manufacturing+marketing, it has some costs and a corresponding selling price with a given markup.
Once said that a number of branded items can have a selling price that seem completely disconnected from the relative costs, there are limits.
If you can find an item on the manufacturer site at US$ 100, do you really believe that you can find the SAME item on Amazon for US$ 10?
If you find it at say US$ 80 or 75 or even US$ 50[1] and it comes out as being counterfeited, you may have some valid expectations ruined by Amazon, but if you ordered it for 19.95, free shipping, did you really believe it was "original"?
[1] it is one of my per peeves, if you look at the price of many electronic goods, let's say printers or TV on the official site of the manufacturer they are often double their "street price", either online or at the nearest large shop chain. I often wonder how many printers Brother (say) sells from their site.
Only on Hacker News is this a question people have.
The fact that you even asked that is pretty sad, though...
It's literally life or death purchases, and climbing forums have to warn people to avoid Amazon because the risks are so high.
My concern is more on the fraud side. When you buy something usually you can follow up with the seller if the product is defective or damaged, when people fraudulently report themselves then that follow up is impossible. Additionally, legitimately imported goods should adhere to certain domestic safety regulations, the enforcement of this is complicated, imperfect and not always effective, but enforcing safety standards on smuggled items is a fool's errand so if there are unsafe materials that are significantly cheaper then you're more likely to find them in counterfeits.
So, without even touching the question of brand name entitlement and the defense of intellectual property... I think there are some significant reasons that counterfeiting is, indeed, really bad.
Is this not usually the case, are scammers out there charging full price?
For better or worse, I like having the option, as long as I am getting a discount and know what I am getting into.
Easily detectable fakes, typos, misspellings, etc. that aren't on genuine items.
I kinda agree with you there - sometimes I want the cheapest thing possible, and I know I may get junk, but it's my money to spend.
Recently on Ebay I purchased a welder. This welder was supposed to be a multi-process switch-mode DC mig/tig wire feed welder, somewhat similar to the mid-range models Harbor Freight sells.
Now - this is the thing - similar welders on Ebay were selling for around $200.00. But I spotted one listing, that was being drop-shipped out of Hong Kong, posted for "buy it now, free shipping" for $20.00!
I thought "well, I'm not going to pass this up - let's see what happens" and I put an order in. I figure it's either going to be rejected by the seller (that they would see they forgot to enter an extra zero), or it's going to take the slow-boat well past the return period, and if I'm lucky I'll receive a "DIY" put it together yourself box-o-junk.
Amazingly, it supposedly "shipped" - now, I didn't even get a simple China Post "tracking" number - but it said it cleared customs in Hong Kong and was on its way. I guess I'll see if and when it gets here.
I'll be shocked, though, if it's a full and working welder. If it looks anything like an actual welder, I'll probably take it over to my friend's house (he has a full metal working shop) to try it out and see if it catches on fire or something.
That's the kind of thing I like to see - sometimes, I get surprised by sellers; maybe it was counterfeit, or maybe they made a mistake, but they still honor it. Heck, I've had sellers in the past send me the wrong item, tell me to keep it, and then send me two of the right item for free. Yeah - they get a good review for that kind of service.