$118 16TB SSD on Amazon, 4 star reviews mention cuff links and coffee cups | Hacker News Reader

$118 16TB SSD on Amazon, 4 star reviews mention cuff links and coffee cups

amazon.com

80 pointsnateb202245 comments

It's not new. I've seen this a lot. I guess it's easy enough to just change the item for sale and keep the previous item's reviews. I don't understand why it continues.

Since Amazons sales, profits continue to grow.

They've shown time and again that they don't bother and, apparently, are incompetent enough to fix this shitshow of a bait-and-switch wrt their reviews

If you really want to read some comedy, i'd recommend their seller forums - various sellers report fraudulent listings - Amazons response? crickets

Only way to fix it: vote with your wallet, give your money someone else. It's easier than it seems at first, especially if you notice that the days of Amazon having the lowest prices by default are long gone, next-day delivery is hit or miss (don't even get me started on videogame preorders...) and absolutely useless search results (seriously, when was the last time someone has found what they've been looking for?).

I've even gone as far (sigh) as canceling my Prime membership as of January - biggest use i got out of it was free shipping.... well, i guess, i've to think again and pile up orders until i'm over minimum for free shipping - guess i'll be saving the planet in the process...

There is a good chance that Amazon does care and the fraudsters are able to occasionally get past the countermeasures.

Amazon ships a remarkable number of products. If only 10^-4 of them are fraudulent, there will still be quite a few bad products . We'll generally hear about the bad ones with outsized volume.

Seriously, this situation is so rare that it was posted on HN. If this was a common experience, nobody would give a shit.

This posting is obviously fake and anybody that orders this device kinda deserves to be scammed (not really, nobody deserves that, but still... c'mon).

This situation is very common to the extent it usually goes uncommented.

I don't know why this particular post made it to the top of the page today.

This is hilarious because to sign up as a seller on Amazon, they do this onerous process where amongst other things:

1. You need to upload photo ID and address details that have a funky AI auto-check (which often fails) to ensure what you've entered is what is on the ID docs.

2. They mail (snail mail) you a physical postcard with a printed One-Time Token to enter into your pending seller account.

3. You need to do a video call with one of their staff members to verify your identity, which also involves the pantomime of putting your passport or other ID document next to your face in the webcam so they can "check".

Yet listing re-use, with "Ships from Amazon" and the nice Prime checkmark, for something totally fraudulent, is still trivial to do.

I used to buy everything online from Amazon, and now it's much more of a judicious process which can cause family strife - I had a huge argument about not using a generic China-sold electronic in our kitchen because I was worried about the safety mark validity.

This, like the Twitter bot problem, seems solvable, but it's strange why this doesn't appear to be a focus for them.

Reminds me of their job interview process. So rigorous and must make sure they're hiring the most genius and committed people. Come in office for an 8 hour dog and pony show. You must memorize their cult sayings to make sure you are obsessed with the customer and everything is executed at the highest caliber.

Meanwhile, their UX is atrocious, apps have many things that frustrate the user and their design/UI is a joke.

It's 4 clicks to find out what I actually paid for an item in an order I made. How is that customer obsessed?

If you attempt to write a review now, it warns:

> Amazon has noticed unusual reviewing activity on this product. Due to this activity, we have limited this product to verified purchase reviews.

For batteries, memory/storage, and perhaps many other categories, better to get from a real distributor like Best Buy, Samsung, or WD directly.

Don't buy anything from there unless you're ok with it being probably a counterfeit, or a real product but with fake reviews.

Amazon is AliExpress with faster shipping and higher prices.

At least with AliExpress you kind of know what you are getting!

There was an interesting story about Amazon review hijacking a while ago. Here’s a link: https://www.kleinbottle.com/Amazon_Brand_Hijacking.html

interesting story. It seems his page has been restored...

I also noticed klein tools makes a klein bottle opener :)

16TB SSD and I get free cuff links? SOLD!

My technique to avoid fraudulent products on Amazon: click on the seller ("Sold by mucaoxikeji") which reveals... "No feedback yet - NEW SELLER" Done ! Only took 2 seconds. It's very simple: I never buy from new sellers, or from those with too few reviews (<100). You do this and honestly you avoid 99% of fraudulent products. The 1% that can hit you is cases where for example counterfeit items end up in commingled inventory, which is quite rare in my personal experience. It happened only twice—that I know of—despite spending easily $20-30k/year at Amazon.

Does Amazon have a policy guaranteeing it won't ship items sourced from commingled inventory with its sellers when you purchase "Ships by and Sold by Amazon.com"?

I heard that you can get items from random small sellers (including counterfeit items and used items being packaged as new) even when you think you are purchasing only from Amazon. I haven't bought anything on Amazon since.

I don't know. Some claim that up until 3 years ago, Amazon was still commingling their own inventory, but they have stopped since then. However I can't find any authoritative source to confirm this.

Heh I just ran across this sort of thing yesterday. A 200+ page book on "how to delete a book from your kindle". Written by an apparently very prominent author with over 100 reviews that are all verified purchases. Some of them actually reference the "content" of this supposed book.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094YHXZY6?ref_=cm_sw_r_ud_ts_3DFD...

I reported it yesterday and it's still up, we'll see what happens.

I just went clicking through recommendations shown on that page.

There's a ton of similar fake books like that on Amazon with titles refering in some way to deleting books from Kindle.

What's the point? People confusing the store search on Kindle with Google, searching for general questions like that and unknowingly buying a book that pops up in search results?

This is comedy gold from the reviews.

> I'm a big trump supporter I asked my husband for this for mother's day. I love to add to my coffee cup collection and it's a good keep sake to have for 2020!!

How in the world does Amazon allow this

This has been a problem since 2015 yet it seems amazon does not care

it's the same schemes: fake reviews, hijacked reviews, etc.

I remember this being in the news even as far back as 2019 https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/amazon-listings-wrong-r...

Regulators have been made impotent.

Who’dda thought that regulators maintained order and protected people?

You think there should be order and rule following in society? And laws and regulations should be enforced?

Looks like we’ve got ourselves a white supremacist over here.

Indeed it looks like we have.

It's curious how selective the people who cry "order and rules" the loudest are with which rules they consider valid and which they don't, and which rule-breaking they consider criminal disorder and which they don't.

But more importantly, this comment, and now mine too, are simply off topic and irrelevant, and deserve downvotes for that (and mine also for going personal), not actually the exposed odious political attitude, though I somehow just clairvoiantly divine that you don't believe that is the reason.

What point are you even trying to make with this nonsensical flame bait?

Society seems to be degrading along multiple axes, from non enforcement of regulations against false advertising, rampant street crime that is furthered and facilitated by not prosecuting the offenders, breakdown in the education system teaching stuff far kookier than young earth creationism, the massive ineptness and exploitation in the handling of the virus situation, the virus thing was such a massive clusterf@#k its hard to even describe or see the full extent at present, wrapping cloth around children’s faces for hours and hours at a time for months maybe years on end, injecting them with this mRNA nonsense, damaging their hearts for life, if not worse, this was all utterly despicable and insane given the known facts.

And all that barely scratches the surface.

Some people see all that and they say “hey what the heck is going on? Why don’t we stick to the system of science and the system of laws and governance that have been serving us pretty well for several hundred years?”

Some other people hear that and for some reason respond by hurling epithets that don’t even make sense, have just become all-purpose verbal tar and feathering coinages. “Racist!” “Conspiracy theorist!”

So yeah, lot to unpack there, as they say.

It is so prevalent, the question is: why are people shopping at a company intentionally having a go at misleading them?

Same reasons people use Discord. Convenience, herd mentality, discounting risk that's intangible from an evolutionary biology perspective (fraud and privacy violations don't activate the amygdala the same way a bear charging at you does), illusion of lack of choice (which is really just lack of knowledge of choice), resistance to change, apathy, stockholm syndrome, and basing decisions on emotion rather than rational and critical analysis.

Because the issue of fake reviews and scam products is blown out of proportion. Amazon remains one of the most convenient digital stores to shop on. I have almost never received a product that was different than what I expected. On the rare occasions that it did, it was because of a misjudgment on my part rather than misleading advertising. I have learned from my experiences.

There's a wide spectrum of 'scam' products on Amazon. The obvious scams, like this, are quickly spotted, but there are other less obvious situations where people may get subpar items and most don't even realize it.

Things like: items sold as new which technically aren't, gray market imports, modified items, quality fakes, items that aren't fake but are misrepresentative of another item, etc. These are all over Amazon, and other marketplaces.

How is the FTC not suing Amazon for fraud on a daily basis? A lot of this shit is sold directly by them, not by Marketplace sellers, so Section 230 concerns do not apply.

Can they be held liable because of co-mingling inventory?

This has been going on for so long that the only possible explanation is that Amazon makes money from this kind of fraud and has decided that it is worth it.

They make big money from marketplace sellers, and the size of the roadblock needed to stop creative overseas scammers would be large enough to dissuade most legitimate sellers.

I think the best thing that can happen is a lot people buy it and complain to amazon.

The one time I did buy a fake item Amazon refunded me and didn't even want the item back. That happens enough times and Amazon will start doing something.

Seen that many times, I think sellers somehow re-purpose ASINs

That leaves the ratings and reviews in place while they change the title, description, price, etc.

Amazon obviously needs to make that re-purpose impossible but oddly they never do?

In case there are people who don't know what this is: It's a USB flash drive (say, 4GB) that reports its capacity as 16TB.

Reviews do work :)

Does anybody can share an example of scam item on Amazon with majority reviews looking legit?

This item had even weirder reviews - the reviews are about some locks, pillow cases, etc. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BKJRFZQ8/ref=cm_sw_r_api_i_58ZZZ...

What is the trick here? How do they get these reviews?

You sell a cheap and boring legitimate item, get some easy good reviews, then update the product listing to be something else entirely.

sad to see people are genuinely thrilled to gift it to their loved ones.

They are talking about a different product

Seems to have been airbrushed off the site now.

I'm still seeing it.

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