An Amazon Scam: The Mofut Key Lock Box [video] | Hacker News Reader

An Amazon Scam: The Mofut Key Lock Box [video]

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94 pointsdak125 comments

An aside: The Lockpocking Lawyer is a thoughtfully humorous and (somewhat) informative channel. Really recommend watching some other videos of his.

"Humorous" and "somewhat" informative? Dude is barely funny at all and you can tell the security of a lock by the length of the video. He has mad, mad lock-picking skills.

Recently, the YT algos decided to show me a video where he cuts open a consumer safe using a nothing-special circular saw in 2 minutes. It was basically thin sheet metal, foam, and plastic.

To give credit where credit is due: I'd consider LPL and BosnianBill extremely informative.

You obviously haven't played around with his wife's beaver

Before you downvote, this is from one of his actual videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRozAbaKs9M

Oh my! I literally snorted out my coffee over this. This is hilarious. I have followed LPL for a while, but never seen this before. Thank you!

I've seen that video, and to clarify: the product in question appears to have been designed to protect against fire, but is ostensibly marketed as protecting against theft.

Seems like Amazon has directly removed the product after this video went viral.

A simple google search would reveal otherwise

https://www.amazon.com/MOFUT-4-Digit-Combination-Weatherproo...

https://www.amazon.com/Combination-Weatherproof-Resettable-B...

Or was it a specific merchant/product ?

You don't need all that crap in the URL before /dp/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PB1TKDN

also, this works too:

https://amzn.com/B07PB1TKDN

I love how two other items use the identical photo... One at $20 and the other at $100.

Merchants will create new items on the site and assign them randomly-increased prices to test pricing strategies. The reason is there are plenty of suckers who will buy things at any price who don't know what things cost. Often, I'll find items on Amazon at 100%-300% of prices elsewhere. Heck, I just found an old, out-of-print book for an obsolete technology going for $800.

It’s called “price discovery”. Consider it a form of pricing A/B testing.

This is a common tactic on Amazon. But if Amazon finds out it’s over. They are pretty strict with any seller to customer communication even without the scam part. Just asking customer to visit your website is a violation.

As a side note, there are all the "as seen on TV" things.

Typically they are US $3-8 worth (price) i.e. US$ 1.5-4 worth (value/cost), advertised on TV as the "ultimate whatever" with a "shop price" of 50 $ but - only for tonight - 29.99 and sometimes (big offer) we will send you two of them for only 39.99.

Then a few months later you can find them on e-bay (or similar) for anything between 3 and 8 $.

For some strange reasons I am fascinated by some of this crap and tend to buy it (when I can find it at the lowered 3-8 $ price), and - surprisingly - it is actually IMHO good for the 3 or 8 $ you pay.

I just got $300 something in refunds from Amazon because the three automatic dropout handgun safes (with fingerprint sensor) I bought had a bullshit cylinder lock even a child could defeat.

If you can figure out any resources for good handgun safes... I would appreciate them as would probably many others. Even the name-brands seem to produce pretty poor quality products and it's hard to figure out what's decent without consuming hours of YouTube reviews (many of them from LPL!), reading forums, etc.

I'd start collating this stuff but I guess I don't want to be that one nut with four hundred gun safes and a website about them.

@ryanmarsh - any chance of a link for this? in the market and I can't tell the wheat from the chaff on Amazon.

If it’s on Amazon, it’s chaff.

The product is no longer listed, obviously. It was an Amazon Basics.

This practice is not new. I had a online furniture site call me and say they will send a free gift, if I give a good review to a recent I bought on their site.

Yes, this is a violation and they'll get canned.

I wouldn't be so confident on getting canned... I've found this to be an extremely common practice with new consumer electronics from no-name brands on Amazon. I would say more than 50% of such items I buy on Amazon come with an offer for a partial refund if you leave a 5 star review. This is actually the lame deal, typically if you establish a relationship with one of these companies (e.g. by leaving a 5* review for one of those offers) they'll start emailing you offering a 100% refund on certain items they're trying to get the score up on. I know someone who does this kind of thing on a pretty large-scale basis for multiple items per day and then resells them... she seems to make okay returns on it considering the low effort. I imagine you could even resell them right back on Amazon although I don't think she's tried that.

It's definitely against Amazon's policies, but clearly enforcement is not exactly bulletproof.

Will they though? I often hear stories of people reporting this to Amazon, being assured they'll look into it and the same seller still being up 6 months later.

... and they'll not get canned?

I misread this "An Amazing Scam." A youtube channel talking about old timey and modern scams. The ol' "Mofut Key Lock Box."

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