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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me to be a minimum response meant to satisfy vendor outrage and hold off law enforcement investigations.

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.

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The "ramp up" is that they will report all unresolved counterfeit incidents to "the authorities" instead of just some. I don't know to what degree "the authorities" do anything about it.

It seems like permanently freezing counterfeiters out of the marketplace would be the obvious thing to do, and if Amazon lacks the technical capacity to do so or to prevent their return I’d say that’s a pretty fundamental problem.

The article is about reporting counterfeiters to law enforcement after they've been permanently banned.

The bans are much less permanent than amazon makes them seem - next day: new name, same product, same listing. Banning is quite ineffective on actually removing counterfeit items.

What policy do you believe would prevent new sellers from selling counterfeits while still allowing legitimate sellers?

My understanding is that Amazon basically does everything they can short of inspecting every unit, which is infeasible.

Don't sell things from untrusted random individuals. End the marketplace program and commingling.

Getting rid of the entire marketplace, which is more than half their sales, just to stop a relatively small counterfeiting issue seems overkill to me, but you're entitled to your opinion.

Stop commingling inventory. At the very least, stop commingling third party and Amazon inventory so that if I order an item that is "sold by Amazon.com" I can be reasonably sure I'm not going to get a counterfeit item.

That's a way to allow people to pay more for a slightly lower chance of receiving counterfeit products. It's not a way to reduce counterfeit overall.

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.

So your position is that Amazon itself knowingly sells counterfeit items? Otherwise I don't see how stopping commingling gives a "slight" reduction in the chances of receiving a counterfeit item when buying directly from Amazon.

The chances of receiving a counterfeit in general are very low. And there are some who've accused Amazon of selling counterfeits directly, so the odds there aren't 0.

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.

>The chances of receiving a counterfeit in general are very low.

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.

Lawsuits. William Sonoma and Mercedes Benz have both sued Amazon claiming they sold counterfeit. Popsockets recently told Congress that Amazon had sold counterfeits (although as I commented in the recent HN thread on that (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079904), popsockets has been bullying other sellers in ways I view as illegitimate, so I take anything they say with a grain of salt.)

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...

When a merchant account is opened, it should be possible to accurately identify an individual responsible such that civil/criminal charges can be filed against him. Anything short of that will end up with a new account opened the next day, and it doesn't matter the platform.

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.

Right now they require ID when opening new accounts. My understanding (based on talking to sellers) is that it became significantly more difficult to open new accounts when this policy went into effect. Sophisticated criminals willing to fake IDs or commit identity fraud are hard to counter.

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.

I don't think they can bring criminal charges just for opening an account. But if they continue to do business after supplying false information that might be some kind of fraud.

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.

> It seems like permanently freezing counterfeiters out of the marketplace would be the obvious thing to do, and if Amazon lacks the technical capacity to do so or to prevent their return I’d say that’s a pretty fundamental problem.

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.

I reject that entirely - we're talking about giving people access to a selling platform, not a social website which depends on maximum user growth and minimal barrier to participation.

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.

You can reject all you want, but the reality is that it is almost impossible to block people on the internet. You cannot change this fact no matter how much you wish it were so.

This is probably why amazon wants to get law enforcement involved. Those folks can stop the people behind the fraud....

> "is almost impossible to block people on the internet"

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.

Account verification is orthogonal to communication channel. There's nothing about the internet that precludes identity and other KYC checks. Your argument only makes sense if Amazon needs an extremely high throughput and low latency of new vendors coming online. The status quo has certainly been fantastic for their business, but I don't see any reason why they can't afford to add a little friction there.

So what do you do when someone passes KYC and is still a fraudster?

I would think you would report them to the authorities... which seems like what they are doing

You ban them from your platform, and since you know them, they'll have a really hard time getting back on. And yes, report them to the authorities too.

If you think it is that simple, clearly you’ve never worked in the field.

I never said anything about it being simple. But what's the alternative? Just give up, and accept bad behavior?

> it is almost impossible to block people on the internet

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.

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