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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Not just that but there's also a method where the product name and photo is edited later. So they ship one dollar items and later edit it to be something much more valuable on amazon.

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There are so many items that have reviews for obviously different items right now. I’ve seen it on a lot of COVID related items like no contact thermometers.

Should be easy to catch these.

The other issue I'm seeing with thermometers is that they are saying "FDA Certified." The FDA doesn't certify anything. They provide Pre-Market Approval in a letter.

A lot of these thermometers also aren't approved. They haven't done a 510k submittal to market these products in the US. Please check that any thermometer you buy on Amazon has a 510k approval letter logged by the FDA, or it may not provide accurate temperature information.

That's a longstanding Amazon bug. As I understand it, a seller can "hijack" the reviews of another product that's no longer available by registering their product as a variant of the existing one.

Is there any way to report these?

I found one obvious one the other day, but after about 15 minutes of searching couldn't work out how to report it without a seller account..

I had a similar experience trying to report a product that extremely misrepresented itself and yet had ~5 stars from reviews that were obviously assigned from an unrelated product.

My impression is that Amazon doesn't want to know: good reviews, fake or not, drive more transactions in the short term.

That seems very short sighed of Amazon. The viability of Amazon's open marketplace depends on the review system. Once all trust in reviews is gone people will increasingly shop somewhere else (whether that's a shop with more reliable reviews or one that carefully selects what they sell)

One person's bug is another person's feature.

Jeffs feature

People take a good listing and rename everything for some fake piece of shit product.

It's incredibly despicable people are finding a way to risk people's lives over covid for a dollar in profit

This is the part that doesn't make sense: these items don't have Delivery Confirmation. They're untracked. I even entered in a few from the Facebook link below where people posted their own screenshots, and yep, UJ.........CN tracking numbers aren't tracked once they reach USA.

So what's the point of sending out anything at all?

Just include any old tracking number for any other legit purchase as proof of sending something on an illegit purchase.

Dunno how China works but in the UK you can obtain proof you posted an untracked item, it would verify the address you sent it to

Ya can’t tell me Bezos doesn’t know this.

How isn’t this enabling fraud?

Shouldn’t be able to completely change the listing. Versión bumps might be ok maybe?

I've bumped into this when I went back to buy more.

This was a "Ultralight Backpacking Canister Camp Stove with Piezo Ignition 3.9oz!" for about $8. Now it is some sort of headphone jack. Several things like that, where the product that was previously ordered... changed. Most of the comments for this one are still about the stove.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004U8CP88

A headphone adapter that has "PIEZO ignition" and "Adjustable flame"... I've come across things like that but assumed they were weird database glitches. Didn't think they were deliberate.

I wonder if that's also what happened to this one, although it's only the picture that's out of place (but also amusingly relevant): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FLGZD46

Are 400GB micro SD cards actually a thing? Am I out of touch.

Someone should weaponise the ability to change the product description to embarrass Amazon in to fixing the problem.

Yep, they now exist in capacities of up to 1 TB. Also, SanDisk were the first (and probably only) company to sell 200/400 GB microSD cards, supposedly so that they could lay claim to having the highest capacity micro SD card.

https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/this-1tb-microsd-card-high...

If you make noise they will cut you off and disregard you as a bad actor on their marketplace

Yes you'd want to get a journalist to pick up the story for it to have some impact.

You’d want to do as a collaboration with a journalist, make sure they’re documenting all the details and guiding the narrative.

That’s egregious. Why is so hard to find any kind of report button on the page (on mobile)? I’d like to at least tick some box saying something is amiss but I can’t find anything.

Amazon does not care, and various reports have shown them actively suggesting it at times.

All Amazon cares about is sales. Nothing else.

>Does not include gas base

But...how do I get the gas base for my headphone jack adapter then? Well, at least it has an adjustable flame.

They didn’t even change the description, lol

I believe completely changing the listing can sometimes trigger a review. But most of the times, they change it slowly in separate revisions so it is impossible to detect.

It shouldn’t be impossible. Diff the latest revision with the first. If it’s simply a revision of an existing product, things don’t change that much. If it’s substantially different, it’s simply a new product. Even small revisions of products usually get entirely new product names and numbers. It’s weird to let one product hang around for 10 years and go through several changes.

Hell, don’t let the product name change. Have a base name and an extension that can be appended and edited, with a text requirement for each (eg 12 characters minimum for the product name and 30 characters max for revision extension.) Do something similar with the description content and have a space for product changes/enhancements following an uneditable and mandatory product description.

You’re trying to solve a social problem with a technological solution. The social problem is that Amazon doesn’t want to fix this. What Amazon wants is more sales, and as long as this kind of thing does not impact what they want, it would be a waste of money to do something which would not benefit them. Meanwhile, Amazon is a huge market for lemons¹ which drives out all sellers except the cheap junk ones, while simultaneously being so absolutely huge that nobody can realistically stop selling on Amazon or stop buying from Amazon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

It’s not that hard to do text similarity tests, but they also don’t need to: simply having a survey or report button would make this scam harder to pull off. You could even toss in a bounty like they do for choosing slower shipping.

Amazon doesn’t because they don’t care. It must not be costing them much money because we know they’re watching the numbers closely.

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