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Comment by blago | Hacker News Reader

You know what Amazon did to me? They delisted my product claiming it was counterfeit. Then they started to directly promote and sell my own inventory.

I know it was mine because I contacted the brand to check if Amazon had bought from them. They hadn't. Also, I was the only one selling this item on Amazon so they couldn't have stolen from someone else. What's more, I was the only one importing it to the US. I know because I'm acquainted with the brand owners.

When I finally managed to get my stuff out of their warehouses, which took almost a year, they admitted that some of the inventory had been "lost" and compensated me pennies on the dollar.

It was a surreal, Kafkaesque, experience that still brings back painful memories. I avoid thinking about it but I hope that one day Amazon will crash, burn, and hopefully never recover.

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This is fraud. If it's trivially provable the product is not counterfeit, then what they did is criminal. Not civil.

If so, it should be documented. All the evidence with relevant vendor contact information, accounts, dates, events. Each state has their own consumer protection laws, so as this involves interstate commerce who to report it to will vary, but you can start by calling local police. They can tell you about jurisdiction, and escalate to stat consumer protection division. And states work together with the FTC on such cases as well.

I doubt my local police would've been eager to take on Amazon. I think I've had enough after more than a year of misery exchanging close to a 1,000 emails and 2 appeals with Amazon, writing my congressmen and senator (stock reply lauding their achievements with the CARES act), and reporting to FTC (no reply). At some point you have to move on and continue living your life.

Keep trying some of the other 3 letter agencies for stuff at Amazon scale. Surely some bureaucrat would love to take on FAANG.

In some areas, small claims court might have been a reasonable avenue.

It may be worth contacting the federal prosecutor with jurisdiction in your area. There are a whole lot of government lawyers who would love to make a name for themselves by bringing charges or winning a settlement against Amazon

At least you got replies from your representatives. I faced an issue with rights violations and I couldn't even get responses. Unfortunately, the experience was similar to what you described. The system is fundamentally broken.

The magic ingredient you lacked was Lawyers. Letters from lawyers are rarely ignored. Of course this costs money, that why Amazon is not afraid to hurt small guys.

FWIW there are not many HN users for whom it would be cheaper to personally write 1000 emails than hire a lawyer to write one or two letters.

A quick question. How do you find manufacturers for a particular brand? I want to dabble in becoming a supplier (not for Amazon nor US) but so far I can't figure out the suppliers for brands you would find at Walmart, etc.

Alibaba

it surprises me every time a reverse image search turns up the same stock photo of the product on alibaba, so I second this and recommend pasting the products’ photo URL to tineye.com

import yeti will allow you to search for atleast imported goods (and if its made in usa, then atleast it lets you fetch records of its sourced parts) , https://www.importyeti.com

This lets you search through the entire import records, and find out suppliers for various brands, note: some companies intentionally use a different name under which it imports the products (rare), but still is be a good place to start looking.

Good luck with your business !

How is this site free? The ladings data is quite expensive and there are a bunch of vendors charging a hefty fee for it.

Glad this site is free though :) I hope they stick around for a long time

Great site, thanks! wonder if we have something similar in Europe

That's the site! Unfortunately I don't see Covergirl, Maybelline, etc. I will keep looking

They are probably importing under a different name, keep looking

Search up where their product facilities are, is it outside or inside usa , if so then depending on that you’ll need to look up parts of the product.

If you need help looking through it, Ping me on “me at teitoklien . com” (klien is not a typo)

I’ll try to help you, search for it.

> Ping me on “me at teitoklien . com” (klien is not a typo)

If confusion is common enough to warrant the preemption, then why not just get teitokline.com as well? Seems to be available.

I own both teitoklein.com and teitoklien.com Due to that typo issue

people dont mistake it with kline, its usually with klein

Appreciate the suggestion tho :)

Why didn’t you sue?

Forced arbitration and for the sake of my own mental health. I just don't want anything to do with this company anymore.

Forced arbitration that manages to paper over something like theft?

Yeah if the post here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297139 ) is correct, I don't see how criminal fraud could be fall under forced arbitration. Criminal prosecution isn't even up to the private parties.

That said, I could certainly see why someone might want to avoid devoting their life to fighting Amazon over something like this.

Sue a 500-pound gorilla?

Open a ticket on the gorilla.

Sure. There are lawyers who would take a case like this on contingency.

Pretty sure when you sell on Amazon you commit to binding arbitration. Like amazons not gonna stack that deck.

There are also plenty of lawyers who would take a binding arb case on contingency. Amazon wrote the contract, but that doesn’t mean the arbitrator is in the bag for them.

What are their names?

If you’re in Texas I know a few.

Not a lawyer but I don’t think arbitration would apply to criminal fraud charges.

Do you really think this is practical? My employer is suing a tiny operation for 50k USD that he owes them. We have all the paperwork etc. already spent 4K in lawyer fees, just for step one. This is after trying to get in touch with him for months. He doesn’t give a shit.

If it is this difficult to fight a tiny business, how does anyone take on Amazon? There are rare people who are willing to lose their shirts on principle, but most people are just trying to take care of their families.

Best long term solution is to not use Amazon at all. That is also very difficult. So we are all stuck with not much choice

If it's a fairly simple case, there are probably many lawyers who would happily take on the risk of losing the case.

Easy statement, why did don't you find a good lawyer that will take the case for free and send them a referral?

They’d take $20-30k if they worked on contingency. Spending $5k to obtain a default judgment is a better investment. (A default judgment would be the outcome if this person has disappeared, but has assets in the same country, and the owed amount is documented.)

It's much easier, and much likely to be worth spending time on, to fight a bigco than the tiny business that doesn't care.

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