Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit
blog.aboutamazon.com
blog.aboutamazon.com
Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And it really gaslights consumers; it took me forever to actually accept that I was eating an off-brand imitation of my favorite cereals.
I do still buy from Amazon. The ease of returns still gives me confidence that I can decide after receiving an item whether the price:quality ratio is worth it.
But not if I absolutely need it to conform to certain standards and I don't have the skills/tools to validate the performance myself (like HEPA filters). Then I tend to buy from somewhere with a more curated supply chain (Home Depot, direct from manufacturers website, etc).
A water slide. The type that bolts down into concrete for use with pools. If the first thing in your mind is...isn’t that something from the 70’s/80’s...yes it is.
So the counterfeiter must have molded the entire slide (complete with the company logo that was embossed into the slide itself) thing is that company was dissolved back in the 80’s.
So purchaser’s kid cuts their leg open on the slide and they sue for defective product. Of course the investigation leads to suing this Dissolved manufacturer. As I recall the dissolved entity actually defended (sort of rare from a dissolved Corp that dissolved so long ago) and it was only during expensive phase of discovery they learned they didn’t manufacture the slide In question, and that it was completely counterfeited.
One day Amazon is going to get smacked with such a lawsuit resulting in billions in punitive damages, then and only then will you see real effort on their part to curb this behavior.
IIRC at least one person (probably more) has died already from counterfeits on Amazon. I read one where I guy died in a motorcycle crash, it was found that his helmet (which he bought off Amazon) was a fraud and wasn't/didn't meet DOT standards, even though it had the DOT sticker.
The negative reviews for some of the cheap climbing harnesses on Amazon are frightening...stitching coming undone, buckles that don’t work, obviously fake safety certification labels, and more. These are critical life safety devices that are impossible for individuals to evaluate for effectiveness on their own. To sell (or to allow to be sold on your platform) these kinds of products to which people trust their lives, with forged safety certifications, is unconscionable.
Well, that's not quite true. Just take a big fall where you really need your harness not to break and see what happens. You (or the person who scrapes you off the ground) will quickly find out whether your harness is effective.
This testing procedure is prohibitively expensive and best avoided.
As I understand it Amazon isn’t liable which to me makes no sense as it relates to defective products (everyone in the supply chain of a defective product should be jointly and severely liable).
I don’t care if it’s a 3rd party seller, Amazon should be liable as it hosts the product for sale, connects buyer/seller, processes payments, typically stores (and commingled) the products, and probably delivers the product.
The thing about punitive damages is they are a punishment, so eventually there will be a case where The jury hears how Amazon knowingly and willfully continued selling 3rd party items it knew were fake and dangerous (Fake DOT helmets; expired baby formula; fake baby car seats; exploding electronics; etc...)and the jury is going to drop the hammer. Even billions In punitive damages wouldn’t be a surprise, Amazon will appeal and it will come down to 10’s or 100’s of millions, but that’s when they will take real action to stop this. But it’s going to take time for this to happen.
Today since the build of consumers are on Amazon if you are a retailer you need to be one Amazon, and if you want access to Prime Customer you need to use Fulfillment by amazon, Where now you loose control over your supply chain due to co-mingled inventory
So even if I have a stellar reputation as A+AcmeMerchant, and customers look for my store on amazon they are not guaranteed to get the product that I sent to amazon, no they could get JoeBobScammers Product even though it was sold "by me" and fulfilled by amazon
So I will not go as far as to say amazon should be liable for ALL sales, but I do agree that any Sale that is shipped from an Amazon Warehouse they should be liable for. They choose to comingle all of their inventory they should face the liability
Amazon is being promiscuous. They don't appear to care where the product came from, as long as its cheap. There are almost no categories where a 'too good to be true' price doesn't mean something illegal was going on. Either those aren't real products, they were stolen (how is it we never talk about that scenario), or someone made a huge mistake and is reselling them at a loss.
Only one of those is good for news for consumers, and it's still predatory.
I can’t wait for that day. What they’re doing is criminal in my opinion.
But unwind hold my breath. The story about electric Skateboards burning someone’s house down resulted in amazon being „only a reseller“ with „no responsibility“ wrt the resulting property damage from them selling a battery powered scooter that didn’t meet safety standards.
https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/civil-procedure/civil-pr...
Here, the issue was whether the defendant manufacturer could amend their pleading to deny manufacturing the defective water slide after they had initially admitted it. The court found that they could. Subsequently, a special jury found that the defendant did not manufacture the water slide and the judge granted summary judgment for the defendant.
If I recall correctly, it was the installer that had gone out of business or was otherwise unreachable and the water slide was unmarked as to the true manufacturer, which left the plaintiffs (or their insurers) out of luck.
Very similar factually...someone bought a aquaslide, slide was delivered and installed (but what was delivered wasn’t an aquaslide, but unlike the case I reference the aquaslide and actually delivered slide had no markings/branding. IIRC in that case multiple insurers examined the slide and as you say admitted the slide was an aquaslide, but after being examined by an aquaslide employee they reversed course.
The details are slim, but I have a feeling the slide actually wasn’t theirs as confirmed by testing the plastic (but this I really don’t know).
Amazon has been sued many times over similar things. The precedent is very strong. They win every case because they are not the seller. Unless the law changes, there is little hope of this happening like you expect.
I don't think that's always the case:
> Such pirated titles are being sold directly by Amazon, not through third-party Marketplace sellers.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo...
Yes, Amazon could setup shell corporations, but if they got tracked back to Amazon, that would be the end of the company. Why not just setup a bunch of side businesses producing and selling legal things (like their batteries, clothes, etc. brands) and collect all the profit there, while allowing others to setup shell corporations and sell the illegal things? That way they collect some profit from the latter, but without any risk to the company. And, in fact, that’s what they do.
And then, of course, Amazon should turn around and sue whoever provided them the counterfeit product. But the first level of culpability is still with Amazon.
It's like if I'm driving, waiting at a red light, and someone rear-ends me, causing me to rear-end the car in front of me. The person I hit sues me, wins, and I turn around and sue the person behind me for both the damage to my car and whatever I lost in the first lawsuit (probably all via insurance).
New angle for the next trial: Amazon started taking double digits percentages of every sale and doing FBA in the past few years.
For physical products (consider thin margins after manufacturing costs), that means Amazon earns more money than the seller, thus they are the primary beneficiary of the sale.
> So the counterfeiter must have molded the entire slide (complete with the company logo that was embossed into the slide itself) thing is that company was dissolved back in the 80’s.
I have a simpler explanation for that. Someone bought the tooling (injection moulds?), in an auction maybe, didn't bother to change the brand and is out there manufacturing slides.
It's not "counterfeit" per se they just didn't give a f. (to use the technical term) and are selling it. Maybe outside branding is theirs but not the plastic one.
But the company never sold them, so even they from the beginning reasonably believed they had in fact manufactured the slide. Had they sold the molds (which I don’t think a company would do bearing their mark without selling the actual mark as well) it would have actually helped their defense and helped them consider/discover they were not the manufacturer of this particular slide.
They could have assumed (at the start of the process) that it could have been a pre-dissolution built slide.
But if they admit that, during the dissolution process their machinery wasn't sold that definitely goes against my theory.
I asked my colleague similar questions when hearing about the case.
welcome to Kleptocracy.
I realise this may sound critical, but I’m not American and I’m genuinely interested to know if this defence wouldn’t work for Amazon.
That defense could have worked if counterfeit products were a minority and they tried to fight them off, however as time is passing by, I see more and more Amazon as a marketplace almost primarily dedicated to counterfeit products due to their very high share on the platform... Search for basically everything and there's guaranteed counterfeit on the top (and that's only what you can see, I wonder what's the real share of counterfeit there...)
In my opinion it’s even more odd they defended (in at least some jurisdictions a dissolved entity has no standing to bring or defend lawsuits), but even if you could defend, why, time, costs, no ability to pay/collect. Something I always wondered to myself but literally as I wrote the last sentence it hit me...I’m guessing they were insured At the time they were in business selling the slides, so if the plaintiff sued and got a default then they could in theory move to join the insurer and collect against the insurer, so likely it was the insurer behind the scenes paying to represent the dissolved company.
On the flip side I had another colleague work on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill case at the time it finally ended, let’s just estimate the litigation being over 10 years. During the litigation many of the damaged businesses were dissolved while the litigation was pending and apparently many of those that were dissolved may not have been able to collect as a result.
I'm also extremely cautious about electronics, but there are still certain categories (such as memory cards) that I won't even consider. Usually the only benefit from Amazon vs anywhere else is shipping, and saving $shipping is simply not worth the risk of using a fake card.
This is a step in the right direction to fixing the problem, but I'm not sure I'd trust anything -- even stuff sold by Amazon itself -- so long as they co-mingle inventory.
When Amazon receives the stock, it adds the sequence # to the set of sequence #s used/acknowledged for that shipper. If there’s a collision, the shipper gets a strike against it (because it’s their responsibility to protect their sticker roll from copying) and the item itself is returned-to-sender as undeliverable (because it was very likely a counterfeit.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should be more thoughtful and substantive, not less.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
I've seen you post this reply several times lately (even today alone). Maybe you should attempt to contribute more to the conversation yourself rather than being a 6 month old account playing hall monitor.
Even Walmart is getting hard to shop online and filter out products that are sold by "marketplace" sellers.
If the counterfeiters are willing to produce anything to make a buck, and amazon is willing to sell counterfeit goods as legitimate, it makes sense we'd eventually have counterfeit brand name cereal or canned goods.
A while ago my fiancee was having trouble finding some Eagle Brand Medicated Oil (it's this traditional asian stuff her mom rubbed on her), and I saw it was on amazon. It's possible they have changed their manufacturing processes slightly since her previous bottle, or it was different because it wasn't as old, but it just kept being every so slightly different in subtle ways, such as the feel of the bottle and even cap, the texture of the oil, the smell was a bit different, the box was a bit bigger, etc.
I honestly still am not sure if it's counterfeit or not, but that's just the issue, I don't have the means to check. My only choice is to buy from sources with trusted supply chains.
It's ironic, I was the first of all my friends to start using amazon excessively, and got them into it, but nowadays my fiancee remarks she found her workout supplement on there for a few dollars cheaper and I reflexively reply "Hell no! We don't put things from amazon in our body.
At this point I only trust them with things that can fail on their own without causing damage, or for products so complicated no one has made a knock-off yet (I'm waiting on knock-off brand name monitors). They went from this amazing cheaper alternative to big-box stores, to AliExpress with 2 day shipping.
On the cover was the book we had ordered, about control theory. The printed pages were a veterinary textbook by a different publisher.
We concluded that they probably run some kind of big automated print-on-demand counterfeiting operation, and have a database of textbook PDFs from several publishers. They probably had the wrong entry in their database for this title, and linked it up with the wrong contents. Perhaps next time you order a small-animal veterinary handbook from Amazon, you'll find it full of block diagrams and transfer functions.
I imagine that if they had printed the correct PDF, I never would have noticed. The book was printed on high-quality paper and well bound.
For what it's worth, this wasn't a cheap purchase.
As far as I can tell, someone printed and hardbound a PDF of the actual book, which is otherwise I guess out of print. It's about the best I could hope to get under the circumstances. So ... there we are.
nearly 700 pages of knots, nice!
Weird.
Even in the US a textbook costs ~$10 to manufacture. The reason prices are so high is that there's a high fixed cost up front to write/edit/typeset/design/market the book, and a small, capped number of readers over which you can hope to amortize those costs.
If publishers need to sell for $200 to break even, you can sell your counterfeit copy as "used" for $50-100/u, and get a 4-900% gross margin because you don't have to waste money on things like developing or marketing the content or paying royalties.
VendorA sells a good product with decent margin using FBA as their fulfillment mechanism.
VendorFakeA claims to sell same product with discount and sends seemingly valid inventory to FBA - which co-mingles the inventory and throws away the receipts.
Customer buys something from VendorA but gets VendorFakeA product instead.
It's like a supply-chain joe-job but VendorFakeA profits.
The time and labor spent refunding is well worth spending an extra few dollars at a competing vendor where I don’t have to worry about commingling nonsense.
If you told me 12 years ago that I would be choosing to patronize Best Buy over Amazon, I would have told you Best Buy will be out of business. Lo and behold, I now pay Best Buy (or manufacturer website) whatever they want since I can’t trust Amazon to not send me some AliExpress garbage.
Anything else I figure if it's counterfeit but still works it's not the end of the world (although I'm pretty cautious about which electronics I get).
People will actually go out of their way to say things like "I don't mind being defrauded, I don't mind having my time wasted, I don't being fucking GASTLIGHTED, because I can just return the item(s) with ease."
Nothing against you personally.
But fuck that!
How long until we see Amazon Edition Fruit Loops, specially engineered to deliver consistent taste and texture under extreme and long term storage conditions, at a price that can't be beat?
It was somehow both immediately obvious and also subtle. My girlfriend eventually confirmed that something didn't seem right with it, so we started buying back-to-back orders alternating from grocery stores vs. amazon. Every once in awhile we'd get non-counterfeit cereal from Amazon but mostly it was "fake". Or at least diverted from another global region where the recipe/ingredients are somewhat different.
I always wanted to do some quantitative analysis like density or fill size or precise box dimensions or spectrometry of the ink on the boxes. But at the time I was just trying to convince myself that I wasn't crazy, and eventually I was 100% sure so I stopped experimenting before bothering to collect quantitative data.
I think you might be right in your theory that it was made by the correct company but intended for a different market and was made with a different formulation. Perhaps there's some arbitrage opportunity there.
I guess I don't understand why someone would try to counterfeit something like cereal. Seems like it would be hard to get enough scale to make it worth the effort, given the low per-unit profit.
I completely agree with all your sentiments and part of why it took me so long to come to my conclusion.
Cereal is cheap, like really cheap, and name brand cereals like Raisin Bran go for nearly $9 a box.
If you've ever been in a discount store, or a liquidator with a consumer facing outlet, tons of counterfeit food, toiletries, etc flood their shelves.
Both the counterfeiter and the retailer benefit from selling counterfeit goods, and sometimes consumers either don't care or don't have enough information to tell the difference.
When I was living in Manhattan boxes of cereal were regularly north of $7, but I know that doesn't reflect most of the market.
Anyone in my family can tell the difference between Kellogg's raisin bran and M-o-m, so I think it is safe say some people would notice a counterfeit cereal.
Now I'm hungry...
Did you happen to check for differences in the packaging?
I'd be highly suspicious that this was, in fact, food counterfeiting in any way. I've never heard of a food brand being counterfeited on Amazon (with actual evidence). Food "counterfeiting" is generally a "legitimate" manufacturer themselves falsely representing their ingredients (e.g. diluting their olive oil with canola oil).
Amazon used to be known for keeping boxed foods for much longer than a grocery store -- so if cereal takes 2 years to expire, at the grocery store you're always buying cereal that was made last month, while from Amazon it might have been made a year and a half ago.
If it wasn't the expiration date, then it was probably kept in a very hot environment for an extended time, which also breaks down flavor and texture. If kept on pallets under plastic in the blazing sun for days, it could cook them like an oven, flavor goodbye. (Might not have even been Amazon, but a wholesaler or similar.)
Everything you've said is far more consistent with time/heat than the notion that you were getting "counterfeit" cereal.
It doesn't help that Amazon doesn't give you a clear option to report fraud in your return of a purchase.
They reuse product photos from higher quality products to sell you a lower quality product.
Nope. There aren't many countries that allow foreigners who've never set foot in their country to sell product there without local representation.
(Mind you, using them is pretty much explicitly waiving your protection in exchange for much lower prices)
There's a nontrivial possibility this is a transportation and/or storage issue. Most food items have some sort of temperature threshhold during transit and storage. We've had food products incorrectly commingled during shipment and storage over the years which ruined thousands of saleable products. Amazon's gotten a lot better about this by placing better ship/store standards from a subcategory level but it's a known issue.
This just seems like a problem I can sidestep entirely by just going to Target or Walmart or whatever.
As someone who purchases things from Amazon and only care about if they work or not, I haven't had much an issue. If I've been loading up on counterfeits, it doesn't seem to have been a problem.
I emailed Bose. They asked for the serial number and photos. They said "Yep, it's fake." That was all. They didn't even want to know who sold it to me. Amazon support also did not seem to care. They just told me to send it back.
Amazon does have a brand registry which manufacturers can opt into and then actual proactive counterfeit enforcement will happen specifically for that brand. Some but not all items in the program have unique per-unit barcodes that Amazon verifies and customers can too through an app called Transparency. But as a customer you have no way to tell which brands are enrolled in the program unless you receive the item and see the Transparency barcode on it.
Yes, because Amazon co-mingles item of the same SKU. A legit item could be shipped to someone who buys from a scammer, and a counterfeit could be shipped to someone who buys from a legit seller.
* Seller A creates Listing Q with Sku U (real)
* Seller B creates Listing W with Sku U (counterfeit)
* Amazon organizes stock by Sku
* Ordering from Listing Q or W will pay to the appropriate Seller A or B, but get a random product with Sku U
first of all, transportation is not the same. food transportation to grocery stores is most of the time if not always different. in fact, some brands insist on having their own trucks.
i feel like with amazon, even with the prime trucks, everything is thrown together with everything else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should be more thoughtful and substantive, not less.
However, I will absolutely take the opportunity to plug a food-by-mail company that is very near and dear to my heart:
https://www.zingermans.com/OnlineCatalog.aspx
Prices are obviously a bit high, but the quality is amazing. They treat staff incredibly well. They do lots of employee training so people really can work their way up from Janitor to whatever they want. Pay has always been above average. All finances are essentially open-book to employees and they go through each businesses (it's a conglomerate now) monthly/quarterly finances on a whiteboard with the team members so that everyone understands where they're at.
Sometimes ordering food by mail is awesome.
In person this becomes even more obvious. I don’t see this being a good way to shop for food by mail.
Anything on there you particularly enjoy/suggest?
Take a look on what is going in China for a fast forward look into the future.
What you see in China now is exactly that. Pro counterfeiters mostly make money on rarely contested, or completely uncontested, hard to trace, abandoned, or obscure niches. Nobody nowadays buys into Abibas, but quite a few seekers of highly hyped boutique stuff often buy into exotic goods fakes.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there are fake foods, and fake daily use goods, things few people would even mind being fake, or bothering to check for that.
For me it doesn't work to say "who would do that??", I'd rather focus on "Why has Amazon let the problem get this insanely bad?"
Simply ending inventory co-mingling would likely handle a substantial portion of counterfeits since Amazon is sourcing their stock through standard channels.
Amazon knows this. There's probably cost models somewhere in HQ. But ending this would mean: slower delivery times, and Amazon would have to carry the inventory on their books. I'd gladly wait an extra day or two if I know the item I get is legit (just like pre FBA/3rd party days). Instead, Amazon is burning goodwill and cash on efforts like this one.
If anything, Covid-19 has forced other retailers to up their online game. Its accelerated my spending shift away from Amazon as I'm tired of fraud. Fraudulent items can injure, poison, or even kill people. Thanks, but no thanks. I'll wait another day for that delivery.
This just isn't true. There's been plenty of lawsuits alleging that Amazon themselves sourced counterfeit product. Their supply chain for many products is not necessarily better than third party sellers.
It wasn't counterfeit (I don't think anyone is ripping off high-end TI calculators, and it also came with a license key for the computer software), but I believe it was intentionally incorrectly sold. It came in a blister pack and the paper insert inside plastic indicated it was the CAS model, but the calculator itself was the non-CAS model - in other words, aside from having the non-CAS calculator in the box, it was exactly identical to the CAS model as you would buy from a store.
Maybe TI mixed up their stuff but I doubt that; by that time I had already heard of Amazon selling counterfeit items and as you said there have apparently been lawsuits for this.
About a year later I had the exact same issue occur with another item - sold by Amazon, but fake, but got the right one after a return. Can't remember what it was though.
Everything is tracked by barcode. If it doesn't have a barcode matching what's expected, it doesn't exist anymore. Scratch a barcode the wrong way or mark it wrong, it loses it's ability to be scanned. It gets found, but what is it, inventory-wise?
The folks solving these problems, they're trained but some are better than others and it's not easy. There's 100s of millions of different ASINs. So they search by name and brand and say "looks like that's it" and voila, you have virtual inventory tracking this item as ASIN X, while it's actually ASIN Y.
No maliciousness needed. Just a complex system failing on the edge cases.
(Bias note: I work for another branch of Amazon. I do not speak for the company in any way. These are my own opinions.)
Right, and for the reasons you listed, they simple do not care. They care only about appearing to care.
As someone else linked in this thread, they announce some bullshit "investigative team" like this every 6 months or so.
The problem is just that even a tiny percentage of bad-actors still make up millions of sales at Amazon's scale.
Since they do not do the above, they obviously do not care. Retail profit margins are tiny, and they make far more on a third party sale while shouldering none of the risk. Therefore, Amazon's best strategy is to appear to care, as long as people continue to shop. And the more third party sellers people use, the better for Amazon, as they simply skim some percentage off of total sales.
*1P = first-party manufacturer, 3P = third-party (not original manufacturer) seller
Also Amazon buys from many distributors just like every other retailer. Even their own inventory for the same item could come from many different suppliers. Many of those distributors/suppliers are now sellers themselves and all that’s changed is who sets the price and who decides when to send in more inventory (and who takes on the working capital risk.)
As for sellers coming back overnignt, one of the largest complaints on the seller forums is how onorous the KYC process is for new sellers. (Bank documents, passports, business license, etc).
Also you a manufacturer can become a brand owner which prevents commingling and other sellers from listing on their items. Notice that Ankara highest volume power banks pretty much only have offers from Anker and amazon warehouse / woot (an amazon subsidiary).
Tell this to my buddy who had his card game counterfeited about 3 years ago.
He was getting a lot of complaints about counterfeit products, so he ordered a few and got a few duds.
He ended up having to recall all of his inventory from Amazon, and he found out that a fairly sizable percentage was counterfeit (~20%... can't remember the exact number). According to him, Amazon was literally "tossing all of the same item into a random bin and [didn't] know whose [was] whose".
The solution he ended up going with was paying Amazon extra to separate his items from other potential sellers of his own product. IIRC, he also set up (paid for?) the right to be the sole distributor for new items. I can't remember if he took those actions concurrently or sequentially, but he decided it was cheaper to do both rather than deal with counterfeits.
I think the main difference is who shoulders greater risk/impact of a counterfeit. Under normal models, the store (Amazon) is hit harder (returns, supply chain management). Under Amazon's model, the customer and potentially manufacturer bears a heavier burden.
As a customer, why should I care about the brand owner feature? Additionally, Amazon does not clearly mark products as such. These things just look like any other FBA product.
As a product creator, why should I have to register myself with Amazon? Should I have to police Amazon listings (which seems likely based on the brand ownership service feature list)? Or can I just work with my trusted distributors like the standard model?
I don't have an answer to these questions especially on the sell side. However, this all seems more like Amazon's way of shifting risk and cost to external parties.
Commingling is the sole reason I canceled Amazon prime and don’t shop there.
I am spending my money to receive a certain product, and in order to do that I have to trust the vendor. If I can’t trust the vendor, why should I buy from them?
I don't envy Amazon's position right now. They should have thought about this issue before opening 3rd party sellers but now they're dealing with the consequence in a huge scale
It's not a hard problem to fix. It's an unprofitable problem to fix. See the tiny profit margins at the above listed actual retail companies. The juicy profit margins lie in being a platform and taking a cut of all sales.
Politicians are tough on crime unless it's corporate crime I guess.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106305
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19091852
It’s just platitudes so long as their interests are served by pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
I write a 1-star review explaining the above, and saying that the anxious parents are now in an unbearable situation after applied a fake, potentially harmful and untraceable product to their newborn bottom.
The review does not respect community guidelines and won't be published.
Amazon used to be great. Nowadays it's full of fake reviews and dodgy secondhand stuff being sold as new.
Amazon has refused to publish every one of my reviews, which, as you said in your situation, clearly met their guidelines.
My experiences indicate to me that they have no interest in improving. They're far more interested in protecting shady sellers from buyers than they are in protecting buyers from shady sellers, counterfeit products, etc.
I imagine a lot of Attorneys General would jump at the chance to stand up to Amazon in defense of poor little baby bottoms and a media-friendly fact pattern like this could help bring about much-needed change at Amazon across all product categories.
The major hurdle is that you do not even know and cannot know. Maybe the product is actually legit and the visual difference comes from temperature or whatever, and the rash appeared for a different reason. One avenue may be to contact the manufacturer with the lot number.
If you try a new product and baby develops rashes or allergies, you know not to buy this product again. With Amazon you can't even conclude anything about the official product because you might have used a knockoff.
You can just conclude to stay away from Amazon for baby care products.
You have enough evidence to form a reasonable suspicion that you were sold a counterfeit item, and that it harmed your child. At this point, it would be the AG's job to figure out whether or not the product is fake, and whether or not follow up on your report.
Contact the manufacturers consumer helpline.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Aquaphor-Healing-Ointment-Advanced-Pr...
Edit: Searching with "yellow" or "fake" brings more reviews with the same issue. In the mean time parents keep receiving it and applying it on their newborn.
Anyone have experience? Even if a law firm would do 100% of the work & charge on contingency, I bet it still takes 100+ hours for the average joe to research and find the firm to do that.
If you don't have a lawyer friend, find a friend who does.
Assign every vendor some risk category based on their profile, for example: projected annual revenue, country of incorporation, products sold.
A mom-and-pop store located somewhere in Iowa selling pillow cases would probably be low-risk, there's not much you need to do.
A vendor selling USB cables out of China is probably very-high-risk. These need deep vetting. As in: show up in an office, bring along your lawyer, show us documentation on the working conditions in your factory, sign an agreement to let us audit your factory, etc.
Now, banks don't do this (at least, as far as I'm aware), but to play the devil's advocate: just imagine if Amazon asked very-high-risk vendors to post collateral before selling. If they get caught, the collateral is used to compensate victims.
That would take out the incentive to sell counterfeits in the first place.
Requiring merchants to be bonded for entry into high-risk categories sounds like a great idea! I know they already have hurdles for entry into protected categories like vitamins but adding a financial hurdle seems sensible for certain categories or volume.
> A vendor selling USB cables out of China
Funny thing is, these two stereotypes tend to be less and less representative in my opinion.
Mom and pop store perhaps care less about what they sell on the internet ? Amazon was blocked in France during shelter in place and we had to go through other vendors. We got a surprising amount of mislabelled, slightly unfit (ex: wrong size, wrong color) or completely different stuff sent from small european vendors.
In comparison AliExpress is relatively accurate on descriptions, if color is random you know it at purchase, packaging was piss poor but we always got exactly what we ordered, and we had one issue for 40+ orders.
I would have better faith in a chinese vendor to send me the right USB cable than a Mom and Pop store to send the right size and color of pillow cases.
Amazon's success at being "the everything store" is fundamentally opposed to vetting their suppliers like this.
Because they have a massive counterfeiting problem, as evident by this submission.
To reiterate, what I suggested would only be onerous for the highest-risk suppliers.
> Amazon's success at being "the everything store" is fundamentally opposed to vetting their suppliers like this.
Certainly, Amazon is also fundamentally opposed to customers becoming victims of counterfeiters on a platform they provide them with.
You can't even select "This item is a counterfeit/I suspect this item is a counterfeit" when filing for a return.
Surely if they cared about their customers becoming victims of counterfeiters, they'd give the customers who did become victims of counterfeiters on Amazon's marketplace the ability to return and report such items accordingly.
During my last return of a counterfeit item, I had to lie about the reason for the return during the return process. I had to choose between the vaguely related, but Amazon-approved, platitudes of "Wrong item was sent", "Inaccurate website description" or "Item defective or doesn't work".
I fully agree that in practice, we're seeing something completely different.
Counterfeit items likely get Amazon more customers than it loses. The cheapness of counterfeit is attractive to new customers, and the ease of returns retains customers. Besides, everybody can't be a conesieur in everything they buy, so it's feasible to still be successful at high rates of counterfeit goods on the site. Some econ student could probably share some good studies on this kind of economy for us.
Maybe Amazon can try the pirate Bay argument that they just host the content they're not responsible for it respecting copyright?
Many years ago their review system was one of their businesses advantages. Many users and fairly honest reviews.
Now it's rife with fake and bought reviews, rendering it useless.
I ended up driving to Wal-Mart for a Bell helmet that cost the same.
Google started something similar last year when they sued someone who was abusing YouTube's DMCA system. https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/15/20915688/youtube-copyrig...
But despite widespread abuse of Amazon's IP reporting system, to date Amazon has not sued anyone for that as far as I know.
I think electronics and luxury items have a higher chance of being counterfeit. Obviously most people are getting legitimate goods, otherwise Amazon wouldn't exist.
I read reviews before I purchase anything expensive though, if I see several people claiming the same product from the same vendor is a counterfeit, I find another vendor or another item.
The very first pack I got was clearly counterfeit. The cans were subtly different both in appearance and etching. A brave volunteer who tried some also reported it tasted off.
If they're counterfeiting energy drinks, I fully believe they're doing cereal too.
- the majority of brand name items on Amazon aren't counterfeits. It's a big problem, but it's also a big platform, with plenty of real stock and genuine sellers.
- not all items have counterfeits. Some brands and types of products are under enough control or aren't popular/visible/profitable enough to be counterfeited. And some are just just brands anyway - nobody is counterfeiting the no-name junk brand USB cables that Amazon sells from fly-by-night operations. Plenty of people actually buy this stuff and while they might or might not get a poor quality product that might or might not adhere to environmental or consumer protection laws, it isn't a counterfeit and they might be happy.
- some counterfeits are good enough. For exampel, you're unlikely to ever notice you got a counterfeit book unless they do a bad job (apparently pretty common - I've only gotten a couple I was suspicious of, but I am very careful about buying books, but there are really low-effort garbage counterfeits produced out there that are clearly fake, up to Wikipedia printouts.) Even when they make the book out of cheaper paper or the book is badly printed, you may not have the familiarity with the publisher to know that it's a counterfeit and not just that the publisher doesn't suck.
After a bit of research I found a new waffle maker to buy. The place I found it had an Amazon affiliate link so I clicked through to price check — $94. Then I checked the manufacturer’s site — $69.99. Ordered it on Monday and it’ll get here tomorrow, free shipping.
This is a pretty common story for me. I almost always check Amazon out of curiosity and most of the time it’s more expensive then other options even when factoring in free shipping. I really don’t get what the upside is supposed to be.
Isn’t this going to be true of any “pure” retailer? The nature of FBA and third-party sellers just means there will always be at least some percentage of fraud and so on that’s higher than “trick various people in the retailer to sell fake goods”.
Particularly as it’s much easier for insiders at a retailer to steal from their employer (and then resell via whatever means), I think the utility for “put fake goods on the shelf” at a retail shop is basically zero. I dunno, maybe you can trick/bribe the person near the start of the supply chain, but it wouldn’t take long for returns to pile up and an investigation to find “Jim and Sally colluded to sell fake gym shorts”.
No. First-party retailers don't generally commingle stock with other third-party retailers. They typically have few suppliers, often one supplier, for each good. That's for many reasons, but it also makes it easy for them to identify who sent them counterfeits.
Amazon is discovering what old-fashioned retailers learned long ago: customers do not give a fuck who, ultimately, has injected the counterfeit. They will blame the retailer.
If I was Wal-Mart I would be absolutely hammering this point to customers. I'd be running ads about "Shamazon". Tearful mothers whose child got sick. Teens who saved up for a game system or phone and got a block of wood. Grandparents who bought medical equipment and got a faulty knockoff. Everything dangerous, disgusting, outrageous or even just annoying. I'd be carpet-bombing every channel with ads amplifying the message that Amazon can't guarantee what you get. Wal-Mart aren't saints, but their historical success has rested heavily on an incredibly tight grip of their supply chain and logistics. They do actually know what they have on the shelf.
(Also: is it Walmart or Wal-Mart?)
I just go to the brand's official website nowadays and pay whatever they ask so I don't have to research what channel it's coming from.
I knew things were going bad, when rock climbing gear was being counterfeited. (2011).
https://www.petzl.com/US/en/Sport/recalls/2011-2-21/Informat...
https://www.reddit.com/r/climbing/comments/b685vi/new_climbe...
I wasn't very good at it. But I learned a lot.
The tradeoff is selection and probably price--although for some large specialist retailers like B&H Photo you largely do get both price and a pretty good selection of products.
Amazon should at least better separate the products it largely has control over the provenance of and everything else. But a third party marketplace is always to be hit or miss in terms of what you get.
A wide random selection is still wide I guess.
Unfortunately they also completely ignored counterfeit issues which has sabotaged their reputation. I think this is just damage control because I'd they're selling coungerfeit goods with some knowledge of the issue they mm at have some Liabity.
It's not in Amazon's interests to reduce business by eliminating counterfeit products, fake reviews, etc..
Real solution is for government to hold platform responsible for peddling fakes and fraud to customers.
Too many incentives are aligned within Amazon to continue to ignore counterfeits sold on their marketplace, and the only way I'll believe that such a unit is effective against such incentives is with independent audits.
If this was an honest attempt to clean house, surely Amazon would welcome audits with open arms.