Amazon Warehouse scam: 16TB HDD swapped for 8TB, returned for full refund

But isn’t the fact that it’s anti-retailers the whole purpose, that it holds retailers more accountable? The whole reason it’s controversial with Uber is that the drivers are more like independent contractors, rather than businesses, and as such is very stressful for them. Whereas with e-commerce, the way the retailers present themselves and operate as is much more like a proper business. Holding them more accountable here isn’t as bad as with Uber.

Outrage drives clicks... link has been up for 5 hours and is on the front page of HN, while other links with (probably) more worthwhile content stagnate and die. It's just how the internet works.

I'd think that it's cheaper not because it's risky (specially since Amazon says it inspects the item), but because it's second hand. Trying to pass the risk to the user is probably not what most people would expect.

You can return things if you don’t like them. A quick search shows the excuses you can give that not only allow you to return them, but get free return shipping too.

I made that mistake too of not using an iPad keyboard once coronavirus began. I can’t remember if I properly used it before then or not. At best I tried it once. A few weeks ago I got around to it again and it didn’t work any more.

That's awful to hear. Did you try to do a chargeback?

In these cases go directly to your bank or payment card provider (Visa, MasterCard, etc.). You usually have ~6 months from the day of the purchase to make chargeback request.

Yup, me too. I set up the iPad, tap recording and then unpack the ordered item. It's zero hassle and potentially saves a lot of discussion.

I once ordered a rail of Atmel Microcontrollers from Digikey. Got four 74HC00's. Called them, sent them back. And then Digikey sent the $28 bill to collections. I complained and they politely told me to fuck off.

Does Amazon really maintain a database of products -> security seals and verify them when they come in?

Now we all wonder if this is actually the same blanket ...

I propose to add some markings to these products to explore how often Amazon will try to sell the same non-product.

lol wow!

Checking weight makes sense, maybe that’s why more than one person received an emergency blanket in an ssd box. Someone discovered it weighed about the same as the ssd.

Could there be a crime ring in the factory?

Lol. I worked there in college and someone had the great idea to put things like hard disks and video cards on the shelf instead of behind the counter to reduce labor costs.

People ran all sorts of scams, most commonly putting a $500 video card in a $20 box. I’d catch them all of the time, but if you reported it you had a chance of losing commissions when loss prevention people interviewed you.

Solution: avoid the aisle.

The other crazy one was what we called the crime bus. A charter bus of Asian people, usually Chinese, would pull up and flood the store with like 30 people on a weekday, pinning down every employee with stupid questions. Another group would loot the aisles of hard disks, various video/other cards and certain inks. I was there for one — it was absolutely insane.

They put that stuff back behind the counter a few months later.

I don't suppose it was a MiniScribe Disk?

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

> In July 1987, Jesse Parker, director of far east operations, told Wiles that something was amiss. In August, Wiles travelled to Hong Kong and Singapore where he found a complete loss of control. The inventory count from that fall showed that the numbers had grown to $15 million, mostly in Colorado. A report was prepared to consider various solutions, but Wiles suggested that they continue hiding the problem, ordering all copies of the report be destroyed. This led to the company's most infamous cover-up; the managers rented a second warehouse in Colorado, where they personally packed 26,000 bricks into hard drive boxes and shipped them to Singapore in order to shore up the inventory count. After the count was complete, they recalled those serial numbers as defective units, but instead of writing them off, they checked them into inventory, along with other failed drives that had been returned.[6]

Maybe one of the bricks made its way to a store :P

> Nobody is going to check inside a "factory sealed" box.

I'm surprised Amazon doesn't X-ray incoming merchandise and then use Computer Vision (i.e. face tagging but for objects) to say whether what's inside the box matches what "should" be in there according to a database of SKU X-ray "fingerprints."

I worked at Best Buy and Sears in the late 90’s. People tried to scam us every day.

Sears didn’t do any checks if anything. You just took your boxed up computer to the back of the store and you got your money back. It was common to pull the RAM and HD from a computer, return it for another, and then you had double the memory and drive space for free.

You couldn’t do that at Best Buy, the Tech bench (before they had the Geek Squad) would inspect your returns. If you wanted to fool us, you’d have to make it look like you never opened the boxes, and put the correct amount of patio bricks in it.

You couldn’t swap video cards or RAM, we checked the model numbers. So you’d have to take the video card over to the appliance department, slice the side of the box with a knife, remove the video card and throw the empty box in a washer or microwave. When the Voodoo 5 came out we found every single one was stolen and the boxes in a freezer that was on display.

We even had a RAM tester that would tell you the speed and size of the chips. We never got one that would do DIMMs, just SIMMs, so as the Pentium II became popular it was less useful.

Now, if you knew someone who worked at the tech bench, you could bring your home PC in for a bullshit service like a $29.99 disk defrag, and you could get it loaded up with memory, disk drives, or hell, you could just stick as many audio CD’s as you could in your tower. Just make sure the case screws are on tight when you leave, or the panel falls off along with whatever you were smuggling out, right in front of the whole store.

Lastly, there was a DEVO area towards the back of the store, basically a dumpster full of returns. I heard they got sold to the lowest bidder, stuff we couldn’t return to the manufacturer for some reason. Memory, hard drives, all kinds of random stuff would end up back there because the computer said so. Anything that could fit in a pocket, people helped themselves to.

Unfortunately I suspect everything on Amazon is unreliable now, we just notice technology item issues first because we know them better.

Interesting. I tore one down recently. It was a gift for my nephew but didn't work out of the box. Well, it did "work", as in, it identified as genuine controller; had all "real stuff" look, but buttons skipped, lagged, or just didn't work.

The insides revealed a mix of genuine components (probably off of scrap?) and an assembly-line quality bodge-work. (I didn't take any pictures, but I still have it -- so I can post some pictures if anyone's interested.)

So what do you think actually happened here? Was the controller a really good counterfeit, or was it real but used? In the latter case, did it show signs of wear?

Does anyone know if "Shipped from and sold by Amazon.com" still guarantees not co-mingled inventory?

That's been my one line of defense against knockoffs after hearing in the past that was the case. Whereas an item that's "Sold by Sony and fulfilled by Amazon.com" will pay Sony for the sale but might actually use co-mingled inventory that came from a fraudulent seller.

I guess neither of them address the problem in the article though which is now a new source of issues I didn't know I needed to be looking out for, of getting a return which may have been tampered with or swapped out instead of a brand new product.

I bought gilette razors from Amazon and really was convinced Gilette was going downhill. Nope. They were probably counterfeits.

Lol what?

But... Why?

I would like to have that problem, which pan is it?

What a terrible problem! What's the pan?

That's probably not a scam, and due to something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285099

> Of course it still had the factory inspected seal though bc amazon drones dgaf.

Given the purported working conditions in their warehouses, is it that much of a surprise?

Honestly I’m not even sure Amazon is a particularly good place to get books anymore. Amazon made it possible for publishers to make out-of-print works widely “available” but when you order such a book you might get one from the original run (printed with offset printing to a generally high standard), or you might get a “print on demand” book with terrible quality with vague, feathered letter shapes and plates which look like they came out of an inkjet printer running low on ink.

Apparently Amazon’s own print on demand service produces high quality books but it is impossible to know what sort of book you are getting until it arrives.

You are probably already aware, but if you want cheap, dependable cables, that's basically Monoprice's primary business.

There are even stories of amazon selling fake books... Their way of acquiring themselves and of course intermingling goods makes the whole of amazon hard to trust.

In Europe a number of companies (most notably shoe company Birkenstock) are refusing to sell on amazon due to them mixing fake and real products and the producer gets the losses AND takes the commercial and reputational hit when things go wrong.

I bought a couple DVDs from Amazon last year and they'd clearly been used before. One was so scratched up I couldn't get it to play.

Stop buying things because a small percentage of them are broken. Makes sense.

There need to be better indexed shopify and big cartel sites. So many great online stores I've bought from use that as a web front.

Out of curiosity, how did a toiletry injure you?

I have probably purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise over a decade from Amazon and I can’t remember ever having a problem with receiving the wrong item or what I could tell was a counterfeit item.

No, this was an Amazon Warehouse deal, in which you purposefully buy a returned item at a discount.

> If the item is (looks) unopened and pristine, Amazon will usually sell it again as new.

This is a big reason I stopped purchasing most goods from Amazon.

I was tired of getting open-box merch sold as brand new.

They could catch it multiples ways. Simple precise weight measurement would catch basic scammers. They could X-ray the package and use cv to determine if the contents have been modified or not.

It's technically both - theft by defrauding.

Possibly both theft and fraud

Theft: dishonestly appropriating something, with the intent of permanently depriving the owner.

He dishonestly took the item. He had no intent of giving it back.

> your theft

> you already

It was their friend, not them.

At least they were doing something about it. In my younger days working retail at CompUSA, I once pointed out that a customer was attempting to return a cheaper video card in a better video card's box.

I got in trouble (not much trouble, but still) for making the customer unhappy :/.

Fry's is the only retailer I have been to where an LP associate insisted on opening up a product I just bought new to inspect it. Yep, its a rice cooker, I should have went over to returns to return it as its condition changed from new to open box before I left the store.

X-ray plus machine learning could probably solve that problem quite effectively.

Or tamper-resistant RFID tags attached directly to the product.

I think it's pretty obvious Amazon has done the math and determined it's not worth their time to do anything about it.

>Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors.

The problem is, it'd be trivial for someone with a sticker printer to slam a new label on the drive, saying 16TB. It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes.

I think the only real solution is this to be fixed at the government level. At the moment it's too expensive and risky to go after customers, even when Amazon can determine they are running this scam. Either you get drawn into a legal battle trying to prove it, or you get labeled as evil Amazon going after the innocent little guy in the media. It's easiest for Amazon to just raise prices 1% and call it a day. Which is what Walmart does for theft/return fraud as well, and likely every company in the U.S.

There needs to be a law that makes it easy for Amazon (and other companies) to go "this account was found to have returned different merchandise 5 times, they need to pay $xxxx fine" and it to be done. But if even if one of these cases go to trial, it'd be at least a $5000 expense to Amazon.

As long as this is impossible in our legal system, these scammers will continue to thrive.

I recall people doing this but just putting a NIC in there and returning it to Best Buy. The Geek Squad employee would open the box to verify a card was in there, but wouldn’t know what it should look like and would accept a $15 NIC in place of a $200 video card.

> There are ways that people can rationalize these gaming of the system behaviors, but it just seems to be a descent to crapitude, where every retailer treats every return as a crime, because often it really is.

I do wonder where the line is, though.

I didn't have a PS3 growing up, but I wanted to play Uncharted and a few other games when I was in High School. Game rentals were long gone by then, much less console rentals—but I realized that Gamestop had a 7-day return policy on used hardware.

So one year, during spring break, I bought a used PS3 and copies of Uncharted 2 and 3. I didn't manage to finish the latter in time, but I still enjoyed myself.

I am to this day convinced I did nothing wrong. The console was used both before and after purchase, and I took good care of the hardware and followed the written return policy. And in the process, I bought multiple non-returnable games from the store.

But I was definitely taking advantage of the return policy, since I had no intention of holding on to the console.

That is so mean.

Meanwhile I got a new Galaxy S9+ (not in USA obv.) which was broken from day 1 and couldn't get it replaced without suing the store and that would take years. I had to get a brand new phone serviced instead (battery, motherboard). And maybe it wasn't water resistant anymore after being opened.

World isn't fair. :(

find better friends

There are some products that are so unreliable that I have zero sympathy for the company that's reaping what they sow with the warranty. I have a personal electric heater that has a two year warranty but refuses to last a winter. Like it just sits in my bedroom living a cushy life as far as heaters go. But I'm on my 3rd replacement and they keep re-upping the warranty and so I'll probably get a new one every year at this point.

I'm not surprised this can be abused - I emailed Amazon a few years ago about a pair of headphones asking if they could do anything as the manufacturer wouldn't honour the warranty (part of the serial number was illegible IIRC), 18 months after purchase (they had a two year warranty). I was expecting them to, at best, send a replacement. They sent me a full refund before I'd even sent the item back, even though the price of the item had dropped in the mean time.

At least Fry's electronics used to TEST memory sticks, motherboards, CPUs in front of customers during the return process. I knew cases where customers tried to return CPUs with bent pins, and their returns were denied.

IIRC, Fry's did not test hard disks, except to match the serial numbers. So, now this scam requires testing of hard drives of their capacity during the return process. And this is a cat-and-mouse game.

On the WD external drives, the serial number on the case matches the serial number on the drive inside. Once you get a couple complaints from either WD corporate returns or customers you sold the returned product to, I'd expect returns to be checked for this --- especially if there looked opened, but it takes a minute to power on and ask the disk for its serial number. You can check the smart pre-failure indicators too and maybe decide not to ship hard drives in a big empty box with three air pillows. (I dunno, I'm never buying a hard drive from amazon until they learn how to ship them)

> So far, no amount of fines, or laws, has actually changed anything as far as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft are concerned.

That seems like hyperbole. E.g. all the three big EU-Google anti-trust cases (Shopping, AdSense, Android) resulted in Google changing their practices on the issues in question.

(Shopping, Android: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google, AdSense: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_...)

I can't speak for all the companies listed, but I know we've spent a lot of SDE time ensuring we're compliant with GDPR and various privacy laws. Building new systems and changing existing systems (on the scale of dozens, probably 100+, of individual teams). It's more likely that it's hard to quickly change the direction of large ships. I've certainly seen my leadership (and engineers) take things like GDPR compliance extremely seriously, to the point that I've seen it as a cultural shift over the last couple of years.

Apples fines were because EU commissioners demanded Ireland charge them higher tax rates. The courts ruled they were wrong in doing so. Not an anti trust issue at all.

Do you really want to live in a world where bureaucrats can issue fines without recourse?

> The same will likely happen to the 2 billion+ fines they gave Google.

> Truth is, they're too big, and at this point, can't be stopped. Laws won't work, fines won't work. They haven't so far, and I doubt they will in the future.

First of all, Google has paid their EU fines. Secondly, I think you misunderstand the nature of what's going on with these fines. A combination of strong trade agreements and savvy tax jurisdiction selection has left most EU countries with little capacity to tax US tech companies, so they have resorted to fines. The play is old hat at this point. Pass a piece of vague legislation that probably applies to the target company's activities, then fine them before clarifying the law to the extent that the company can actually avoid breaking it. Rinse and repeat. The EU fined Google a few billion dollars last year, and the year before, and now this year, and they will surely do it again next year and the year after that. This is just a roundabout means of taxing Google. It will of course never change anything about Google, except that each year once the law is clarified Google's lawyers will make sure that they are scrupulously no longer violating this year's new regulation, but the extent of the regulation and the value of the fines is calibrated to not be so high that it would actually drive Google to extract itself from EU jurisdiction.

Now that it's clear they've lost their tax battle with Apple I expect the EU will begin fining them as well.

The HDD swap isn't unique to Amazon either, this is something that has plagued retail since birth. There was always jokes about "rocks in the box" in the 90's when I worked at an electronics store.

You hit the head of the nail though, it's a calculated loss / cost. With retail they dealt with physical theft way more than this and anticipated up to 10% of inventory loss for a plethora of reasons. It's not surprising the thieves have transitioned here. I would expect that between this and mixed inventory, these issues are far more common that people would think.

While amazon is at fault for passing it back on, I imagine they make it right. They have always fixed issues for me with no hesitation. It sucks, but I wouldn't get out a pitchfork unless they denied it. And like I mentioned above, Amazon isn't unique, any company has this happen.

This practice predates internet shopping; before Amazon, it was the discount retailers like Walmart that were getting seconds.

Thule did this to me as well (open box product).

The victim isn't Amazon, it's the next customer who buys the returned product--which wasn't even necessarily labeled as such.

Now if Amazon included a guide with returned products, instructing customers what to evidence of fraud or tampering to look for? That would be a different story.

At Google, they say "It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission".

I'm reminded of an internet fable

> A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

> The next day the farmer drove up and said: “Sorry son, but I have some bad news. The donkey died.”

> Kenny replied, “Well then, just give me my money back.”

> The farmer said, “Can’t do that. I went and spent it already.”

> Kenny said, “OK, then just unload the donkey.”

> The farmer asked, “What ya gonna do with him?”

> Kenny: “I’m going to raffle him off.”

> Farmer: “You can’t raffle off a dead donkey!”

> Kenny: “Sure I can. Watch me. I just won’t tell anybody he is dead.”

> A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, “What happened with that dead donkey?”

> Kenny: “I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at $2 a piece and made a profit of $998.00.”

> Farmer: “Didn’t anyone complain?”

> Kenny: “Just the guy who won. So I gave him his $2 back.”

> Kenny grew up and eventually became the chairman of [company you want to mock]

Hang on a sec. Mixing in defective product is literally fraud.

Payment for order flow is not only legal, but good for retail investors. It, and practices like it, are the only reason joe schmoes can go buy 2 shares of TSLA in their robinhood account (actual traders deal in round lots - 100 shares. Price levels featuring less than 100 shares aren't even protected price levels!).

There's also the technicality of the wholesalers technically providing a very small (<=1 cent) price improvement, but retail investors don't care about that.

I really object to the frankly callous and irresponsible bandying about of financial stuff like this. It damages trust in what is potentially one of the best-regulated and most efficient systems in the world.

I also want to note that, assuming you're referring to Citadel's 700k fine, 1) the SEC's description of what happened is too vague to really infer what's going on, 2) my guess based on their description is that they essentially had a bug that technically constituted trading ahead of a small, small % of client orders (though it does not seem like it was actually getting an advantage by doing so, since it was a bug) and 3) this is all corroborated by it being only a 700k USD fine, which is comically small for a fine from both the SEC and for a firm as large as Citadel. This was the lightest of slaps on the wrist from a regulator who will absolutely destroy firms with fines when they have hard evidence.

If anyone wants to look deeper into this, Matt Levine has written extensively at this point on the subject of the payment-for-order-flow boogieman.

OTOH, getting 99 cards and 1 bad card for the price of 50 good cards is a good deal for the buyer.

> Another example is retail trade payment for order flow. A major broker-dealer was just sanctioned for front-running its clients.

You can say Robinhood. Their agreement says that they can't do anything to imply that it was incorrect, like threatening to sue people for talking about what got them sanctioned.

You could start taking photos during the inspection of the returned item and before sending it, send a photo to the customer to confirm it’s what they ordered? You could establish a policy where you offer posted discounts (and lose money) if items aren’t as described? You could involve manufacturers in the re-certification process such that for high value items there’s maybe an extra shipping expense and time delay to market but the item’s quality could be verified before resale? You could strictly accept and sell only new items, putting returned or third-party FBA items in less efficient markets but completely isolated from the main market of trusted goods from known validated sources in your supply chain?

It depends on how much the local DA wants to nail you.

It's definitely criminal behavior, some kind of theft or fraud

I learned my lesson with TVs on Amazon a few years ago too. There were a couple reviews noting cracked screens, thought it was probably just rare bad luck. Bought the TV, it arrived cracked.

Had Amazon schedule a UPS pickup for return and bought the TV locally. Poor packaging for TVs on Amazon just seems to be normal.

5% cash back by using an Amazon store card is one reason.

Here in Brazil we have a very popular eBay-like site called Mercado Livre, which I use a lot, and I record the unboxing of every single thing I buy through them and I don't even try to disguise the fact I'm doing it for safety (scams are very common here).

My recordings start from the closed package, showing tracking codes, names, addresses, etc. to the object inside and its serial numbers (when applicable), all in a single take and always keeping the object in frame.

Luckily I never got scammed, but I sure it will happen with the first package I don't record.

> I have literally never had a fake product mailed to me when I do this.

It's possible you're not buying commonly-faked items, or possibly it happened and you just didn't notice. Lots of fakes are of similar reliability for the first 20-50% of normal lifespan.

Because the dirty secret is that "new" does not mean you are the first customer to open the item.

Amazon hasn’t actually been a customer-centric company since they got big enough to run their own in-house delivery service.

If a customer has to physically punch a new hole in a product, I consider that a full refund without return :)

I have had luck having Amazon credit me back part of the purchase price when I need to repair what they sent me. Their chat agents have refunded me 20-30% of purchase price for keeping defective items like yours.

The problem is that cases where you get lucky like this are in the minority. In the majority of cases, the inconvenience caused by a defective/counterfeit/missing product thwarts whatever compensation they give you after the fact.

Due to Brexit this is changing:

https://tamebay.com/2020/07/amazon-fba-brexit-bombshell-efn-...

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888510

I think the Indian one was cheaper, so they probably bought a big batch then sold it in the US for more expensive US prices. Indian model also had dual-SIM, which US phones generally don't have.

If you do that, you'll never have to worry about getting scammed at Amazon again, since they'll probably close your account.

Charging the card and not yet shipping is a scam.

imo it's a bit like an auction where the seller can accept or refuse to honor the outcome, depending on the highest bid.

but is there actually "no deception"? i mean, if i order something i'm usually reasonally sure i'll actually get the product. them not honoring their side of the contract does seem like deception.

It is a scam. It's a sophisticated scam. I thought I was buying an item. I was giving the seller a free options contract, valued at a few hundred dollars.

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

Price jumped up by a $150, and I never got my item. I needed the item and not receiving it resulted in a couple hundred bucks of damages. If price had gone down a hundred bucks, I would have overpaid by that much.

The seller, by the way, did charge my card. It was marked as shipped. The seller issued a refund on the day it was supposed to arrive, claiming it was "lost in trucking." Many other buyers had their orders "lost in trucking" too from reviews of that and other sellers.

My opinion is that Amazon should have made the seller fulfill the orders. At the time I ordered, several items were available at the same price. At the time I was to receive the order, price had gone up $150. It's not like the seller couldn't have fulfilled it; they would have just taken a loss to do so.

I'll mention this isn't the only time I got scammed on Amazon this year; just the most clever scam.

> if you're a seller, you have to pay extra to not have your goods co-mingled

It would be great if Amazon passed that information on to the purchaser. It might even justify paying a higher price to buy from a non-comingled vendor because it would indicate increased accountability.

Wow $5. That’s by far the best I’ve found for a brand name I recognize. Purchased. Thank you from me and the students.

Even worth it with the import duty fees to Canada.

I have no idea why newegg didn’t cross my mind. I guess because I’m not buying desktop computer parts.

Thank you.

sure, but if you are a scammer then selling the 8T for at least 100$ and picking one for basically free would net you more profit. maybe it was somebody that did not think he does something wrong because "amazon is big and will eat the cost"