Why is Amazon selling fake 16TB portable SSD drives?
reviewgeek.com
reviewgeek.com
> "These are fantastic slap bracelets. We use them as prizes at our school, and the kiddos love them! I wish there were more “boy” colors/themes, but our youngest students love them all! Great product for a great price!"
> "I hung this beautiful portrait in my kitchen. My family and I love looking at it everyday it is made well. Overall great product!"
> "This camera is really good and the mic on it works great too. Exactly what I needed. Great price aswell."
What happens is that sellers take listings for cheap, low-margin items, and build up reviews for awhile. Then they edit the listing to describe something expensive, and ship fakes. People assume it's legitimate because they see the high star rating.
Amazon makes it very difficult to report fake listings like this one, even when it's very obvious that it's fake. They also don't let users see the edit history of listings. I suspect that they're avoiding knowledge, so that if a fake item turns out to be dangerous, they can claim ignorance in court.
each time you need to buy something online, find it on the manufacturer's site or some other direct distributor, pay the shipping costs, and deduct that cost from the 'shipping fund' if the item is actually available on amazon (not a knockoff or replacement)
after a year, you may be surprised (i was)
for electronics I am happy there is a solution like geizhals.at (aka skinflint.co.uk), allthough even that often just leads back to ordering from amazon
And since Amazon has no real competition and lawmakers are asleep at the wheel (if not outright bought), there is zero incentive for Amazon to do anything about this.
After being bitten by crap products (one of which literally broke in 5 minutes), I don't buy electronics in Amazon anymore. They would get more money from me if they hadn't turned into a flea market of bad products.
They seem to be doing pretty well at enforcing their norms in the good ole United States of Amazon.
Bezos’s primary goal is Bezos. Amazon’s is “shareholders”. Meteoric rise in profit is great and a hedge against “long term”/eventual downfall is easily done when that rise is part of an industry so dependent on amazon’s existence.
IE: before amazon “falls” there will be a lot of “community loses x thousand jobs if we don't keep amazon her discussion to serve as the hedge.
Yep, and it uses this money to pay reviewgeek.com for their affiliate links on this article, and the circle is closed (to be fair, at least they did not post an affiliate link to one of these fake drives).
Like all of Asia, Switzerland, Netherlands apparently.
[1] https://blog.iusmentis.com/2023/01/10/amazon-mogelijk-aanspr...
This, and the myriad of other stories about Amazon, leave me scratching my head. They aggressively filter candidates based on questions designed around these principals. Either they're completely failing on a cultural front, or the values and their hiring process are a weird in-joke.
It is nothing but a sort of well intentioned sounding yet ultimately meaningless corporate speak instituted a long time ago by Bezos - kind-of sort-of true for a while and then the headcount gets huge.
Now it something you might hear at Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza HQ.
Even if you survive that, they'll fire you right before you vest.
Lately so, a much as I disagree with stack ranking and so on, I came to realize that the oposite of handling those things (pretending to be ultra-nice and so on) just moves the backstabbing to a different room, one without any rules. So yeah, in a sense Amazon is doing a lot of things right, as hard as it is for individuals.
Edit: Amazon did have stack ranking while I was there, no idea if still do, but I assume yes.
Dunno. I think that's just how most companies do it, because HR is a shitshow all over the world. (Because it's hard and concentrating it into a department staffed with skilled HR professionals just seems to "solve it" even if the cost is enormous, and one management fix for this deficiency is "stack ranking" in the US. Diffuses legal responsibility, easier to defend, mechanical, etc.)
"Managing out" people works, but that would mean taking responsibility for the decision.
And it's possible - even in the so-called socialist hellscape of Europe - to agree upfront with the employee that the employer can terminate the employment without any wrongdoing. (Even if there's a union, the employer has to agree on this with the union, but employers don't do this, because it would mean taking responsibility for performance, and that would raise a lot of annoying questions throughout the whole hierarcy.)
Everywhere I have worked had this stupid system.
- Sold $10mil on your target of $1mil, bottom of your team because Jane and the other 8 members sold $11mil, culled as one of the bottom 5%. Other department where they all missed their targets, bottom 5% fired and the rest stay.
Politics has certainly shown that honesty isn't really related to trust.
If a large group of individuals buy these hard drives (~1-3k) and then all file for refunds on the basis that the product is a scam / not as advertised (providing the evidence from the blog post).
Isn’t the result that everyone gets a refund. The seller loses the sales. They get 1-3k bad reviews. And they lose the merchandise (unless they’re sent back, but it seems like lower value products like this don’t require a return).
Surely that would quite quickly make this an unprofitable venture for the scammers.
In cases like these, Amazon should take note that a product is a scam, automatically refund all customers and remove the product and account. The issue is, that would require Amazon to withhold payment to sells for 30 - 60 days, which is going to absolutely suck for small honest sellers.
I don't think Amazon really care what happens on their platform, as long as it make a profit... or are they still losing money on the e-commerce side of business?
It isn't entirely clear to me if the losses Amazon reports are accounting magic (invest rather than profit, keeping taxes low and growth high), or a genuine failure, or a mix of both.
If AWS was split from Amazon so the latter was forced to operate without its cash cow, I think we'd all be better off. I'm sure lots of us would also be willing to trade a smaller product selection for better quality guarantees; the Alibaba-reseller model sucks.
Wait, that's not the case already? Isn't that how all marketplaces work? How else do you pay out refunds?
Ah, good luck with that! I once left a 1 star review for a fake product and Amazon didn't publish it because they said it didn't respect their policy.
After a few years of this, what do you imagine the amazon marketplace looks like? I don't think amazon deliberately rewards scammers or punishes legit sellers, but the system they have built has that result.
However, they fine and imprison small businesses and individuals, but just publish "warnings" when it's Amazon or Ebay.
https://www.nationaltradingstandards.uk/news/online-shoppers...
It only costs a few bucks to register as a seller, they bulk register thousands of sellers under different names. They will exploit any loophole under environment filter pressure.
If Trading Standards raid Tesco and find an illegal product, they take action against Tesco for selling it.
(/s, in case it wasn't obvious)
Hustler's University 2.0 by The Top G - Andrew Tate ... Drop shipping is lesson #1, how to buy lambo with all the drop shipping $$$s is lesson #2.
It's ridiculous that this is allowed to exist. This is exactly why a free market requires some regulation; you've got to know what you're buying.
Every wondered why Americans roll their eyes when Europeans brag about consumer protection laws?
each market is an optimization algorithm, but if the search space is too big, it gets into a pathological state (market failure), and any economic surplus resulting from optimization goes into keeping it in this state (which is likely profit maximizing for a small subset of participants, sellers or buyers, depending on monopoly or monopsony situation of course)
Amazon spends its profit on crushing competition instead of providing a better marketplace.
Regulations are ineffective if they can't move the market out of this failure mode. (I.e. fines have to be big enough and the actual compliance has to affect a large enough part of the market.)
As long as it takes a few months (or less) to set up a new established seller of things, and as long as the advantage of having a non-fraudelent business is less than doing these scams, the scamming will continue.
Fundamental dilemma of Amazon is that they want fungibility. A book is a book, even if it's new, mint condition, used, dusty, hardcover, paperback, large font, high quality, cheap paper, fancy cover, etc.
But this works well only for books, where it's obvious to check. (Are every page readable and present? yes, great. no? refund.)
But this breaks down almost immediately where fakes and knockoffs and cheap shit is much cheaper to produce (so the price is very competitive), works kind of okayish initially (so hard to check for non-experts). For example any appliance and furniture (see the endless variations on office and "gaming" chairs, tablets, powerbanks, USB hubs, cables, gadgets, mouses, keyboards, monitors, dietary supplements, fitness machines, car addons, etc.)
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Petmoto-M-2-0-Mini-Solid-State-Dr...
Different branding, but the same exact case. So I'm guessing they are buying them from the same Chinese supplier.
Maybe it time for Amazon and Walmart to ban Chinese suppliers.
That is probably 99% of their products.
I'm in sort of a need for a microSD card and Amazon.de has some viable brand-name options, but I'm still hesitant to buy any from there since it's so hard to know what on Amazon is real and what isn't.
I haven’t done the math but I do nearly all of my shopping on Amazon. I do this because I know I won’t have any problems with returns or refunds with Amazon.
I tend to avoid the random all caps six letter companies when I can though.
I also don’t pay much attention to positive reviews. I’m interested in the people that had bad experiences. So I go to the 1 and 2 star reviews and see if anything looks like a problem I would care about.
microSD? Just buy Sandisk or some other brand with “dispatches from Amazon, sold by Amazon”, and save yourself wasting time worrying about reviews and fake products.
Amazon doesn't care.
They don't care about the flood of fake reviews They don't care that sellers get a pile of 5-star reviews, then re-use the same listing to sell something completely different
They also don't seem to care what the words "free", "two-day", and "guaranteed" mean either, because I am constantly given the option of "FREE two-day shipping" that 1) I am paying for and 2) has a delivery date 9 days in the future. The "guaranteed delivery date" changes between when I order and when the thing ships _every time_ and I complain to support chat and get $5 off my order _every time_
It's garbage all the way down.
so who's doing the shutting down?
Are these fake items also accessible from the EU? I'd expect the EU wouldn't take kindly to these sort of scams.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mobile-External-Portable-Storage-La...
Amazon is paid to list it (they're "sponsored listings"), store it, deliver it, and profits from the sale. I think we can hold them accountable for the sale. It's somewhat akin to how "handling stolen goods" is just as much a crime as stealing them in the first place. If Amazon can't guarantee what they're selling, they shouldn't be selling it.
I expect Amazon to control quality so that new sellers will have vast reach instead of Amazon becoming a toxic swamp that nobody goes near.
Right now new sellers do not stand a chance unless they work in a niche (and even then you can't find anything on Amazon anymore unless you already know brand name + model name).
These fake/spam sellers are clogging up everything.
Amazon could easily combat this, maybe not 100%, but 1-2 quality well trained human moderators (nothing outsourced, only focused on this single job, no other support roles) would probably be enough to signicantly improve the situation.
I am going to make the claim that I could clean up a product category by myself in a few hours.
I can't say the same for other stores. And thus, other stores successively lost my business (with the exception of some seriously fringe stuff, like speciality tea, electronics components ... and computer parts)
The only reason to shop at Amazon anymore is selection. There are a ton of products and books I cannot buy locally. Amazon is often the only company that will sell and ship to Denmark.
The reality is 90% of the shit on Amazon is straight out of China. There is no reason other than lazyness to not import it yourself.
Now, if I see something on Aliexpress, I’ll check to see if it’s just as cheap or slightly cheaper on Amazon. Much of Aliexpress has inflated away the deep savings that were there in the 2014-2019 era.
The search result is average but I mostly just buy branded items, so not a big deal.
Shipping experience is getting worse and worse (in term of speed), but still ahead of others.
Amazon shipping is free after $25 even if you're not a prime member, which already better than most. And if you're prime you got free 2-day shipping (which nowadays often goes to 3 or 4 days, but this isn't my biggest concern). The only online shop I've used that has better shipping is Apple.
Not to mention, their return policy is very generous.
Amazon outperforms more niche retailers in search in their niches.
They also have actual support. Something that Amazon missed the boat on long ago
Oh boy, be glad you don't have to shop online in Japan. Compared to that Amazon is the pinnacle of user experience.
Recently I wanted to buy an 4090 from a Japanese shop, and I had to go through *six* online shops to buy one. And it's not because it was out of stock, oh no, but because of various bullshit reasons which prevented me from buying one.
Some of the issues that are common in Japanese e-commerce (I've experienced all of these myself, and I don't shop much):
- A lot of shops don't accept debit/credit cards.
- Shops that accept a debit/credit card often will accept your order, reserve the money (so it's not a technical limitation), but the very next day cancel your order with a message "sorry, your card was issued overseas; your order is now cancelled, try again with a Japanese issued card"
- Shops that require you to verify through your phone to make an account (which is required to buy anything). You give them your phone, and they *call* you. You then have to pick it up, the call disconnects, then they send you an SMS with a code, which you type into the website to register the account. If you miss the initial automated call you have to wait 15 minutes.
- You get automatically subscribed to a spammy newsletter (up to THREE EMAILS A DAY) once you register an account.
- There's no "unsubscibe" link in the spammy newsletter emails.
- You need to fill out a form to unsubscribe from it, and it's not automatic.
- Even if you fill out a form it might not unsubscribe you anyway. (It's possible they're doing the unsubscribing manually.)
- If you delete an account the spammy newsletter still keeps on coming, but now there's no way to unsubscribe from it.
- If the name on your account doesn't exactly match the name on your card they won't accept it (because the name on the card includes your middle name, and that's too long to even type it into the form on the site).
- Cancelling an order doesn't actually unreserve/unblock the money they reserved, so if you tried to buy something expensive (say, an 4090 for $2000) and your order got cancelled then you need to wait for a month before that money is automatically unblocked and you can actually use it again. (Although I'm sure you could probably call the CC company's support to get it fixed on your side.)
So, no, even though I really don't want to give any extra money to Bezos the thing is that shopping through Amazon just works. I click on the item I want, I click order, and that's it. I get charged and a day or two later it comes to my doorstep. No bullshit.
I've encountered all the things you said (for "don't accept cards" though, I haven't seen one since forever. Could you name one?), but it's in the minority.
I have like 90% success rate even when I was buying from the US using a US credit card. And I buy from Japan a lot. I don't blame them for not allowing oversea cards, either: credit card fraud is really rampant.
I don't really remember, but basically I just went on Kakaku, searched for the 4090, and just went through the list trying to order an 4090 going through each shop and moving on to the next when it proved impossible to actually make an order.
A nice hack for some of the shops from which it's normally impossible to buy from but which support Amazon Pay is to just use Amazon Pay; if you pay through that none of the usual card-related bullshit applies (suddenly you can use a card that was issued overseas, the name doesn't have to match exactly, etc.).
Also cheapest kakaku shops may be nervous about avoiding cc fraud, and 4090 is very expensive and easy to exchange to cash, so it would be worst experience. I've never had received phone calls from shop, but it looks reasonable to verify 300kJPY bought from newcomer.
The credit-card thing though makes some sense as others have said. If you live in Japan, you really should have a Japanese-issued credit card. It makes life a lot easier.
Like seriously, what other options would you even consider at this point? Overpriced high street stores? Other tech giants who have awful return policies and/or customer support? I really don't see any alternative.
For important and quality stuff yes, people should go elsewhere.
(Ok, I had 2 pieces of important items from reliable brands from Amazon last year - e.g. Samsung SSD, not dozens of TBs though of course : ) -, but that is an exception to the rule)
I was recently looking for a music book. I could have it delivered next day for included with Prime, and would cost me nothing.
Ordering from one of the UK's most popular music stores on the other hand was more expensive, charged £5 for delivery and said 3-5 days delivery.
It would probably be little work to renew this page, at least adapt it visually to the current design. But they just don't care. That wouldn't create value I suppose.
There are parts of Amazon that have a ton of legacy code and ownership between those systems can be a real mess.
Most people will never realise they’ve em been defrauded - they'll just be happy with the deal they got on their 16TB SSD. Heck, if you opened it up and showed them that they had been defrauded, they would likely be angry with you, not Amazon.
I mean, if this isn’t the case, explain politics to me.
No, it's not. Customers don't have a say in this; they choose out of what's available, accepting what they can get, because they're not able to communicate their preferences, and are easily duped by the vendors who understand the space better than them.
> I mean, if this isn’t the case, explain politics to me.
People don't have a say in this; they choose out of what's available, accepting what they can get, because they're not able to communicate their preferences, and are easily duped by the politicians who understand the space better than them.
The general population has very little agency on the mass market and in the political process.
The answer is by deceiving the consumer. The only variable is by what degree, and in some categories, the degree can be egregious. In others, it’s smaller (“100% juice!”, “full self driving”, “unlimited data!”).
This is why I say it’s what consumers want - as the market demonstrates it to be so, otherwise this would not exist.
It’s the same in politics. How much can you get away with before they squeak? Turns out, an awful lot.
Consumers "getting what they want" implies their actual preferences are being fulfilled. But they're not. Instead of getting what they want, the consumers get worst possible things the sellers can get away with ("what the market can bear", I guess) - and they can get away with quite a lot, thanks to deception you mention.
My objection is with saying consumers "get what they want", because it has opposite connotations to what really happens.
You seem to be mistaking the theory of an ideal free market with the messy reality of markets with incomplete and asymmetric information, high price sensitivity, and a lack of time and mental energy to shop around and otherwise gain more information and other options.
No idea why people use Amazon to buy china trash, when they could buy the trash themself at at least half the price.
No idea why people buy trash at all. Also I've no idea how are people unable to browse, filter products and read "sold by" information. I personally don't buy anything that's not "sold by Amazon" or at least "fulfilled by Amazon". If such product doesn't exist there I go elsewhere. Simple
Even some Amazon branded products are just obvious rebranded China trash.
In contrast, most other online stores (the ones I use, selling their own good quality products, not wish/ali) are now a pleasure to use, with fast and very cheap shipping.
I went to buy some velcro at a local store and that project got delayed 6 weeks for the shipment to arrive from Aliexpress.
1000% markup is by far not the worst I've seen.
> But the sub $100 brands claim to be M.2 SSD, one of the most expensive and fastest formats out of there.
Well, no, M.2 is nothing special, it's a physical format and the SSD can be cheap or fast and speed usually will correlate.
Also, when Amazon actually bothered to crack down on some companies which operate with fake reviews then they have thrown out some of the most reliable USB C charger companies and yet left all the fake Chinese crap. Aukey, for example. Dell sells them, Amazon Japan sells them but Amazon USA has banned them, what madness. And to see how customers "benefit" from this: to this day there's no lighter weight 100W charger than the Aukey PA-B5 and it's like three years old.
Then, suddenly, shutting you down is a simple matter.
Are there lots of examples of people who were defrauded by a completely fake product like this, called amazon 31 days later, and were denied a refund? I've not seen any discussions of this.
My understanding of the scam is that the victims wouldn't notice for a long time, or even fully understand that they were scammed. Given they are buying from a product category that doesn't actually exist, they are not tech-savvy and would just use it in the inferior capacity or throw it away assuming they did something wrong.
I was answering a question that someone posed — that people aren’t suing amazon because then ones who care enough to sue are instead getting their money back. What damages would they sue for?
If I’m wrong and at 31 days amazon refuses to give money back for a fraudulent product like this, then perhaps there’d be basis for a lawsuit. But I’ve not heard of that happening, and I’ve read a decent number of articles about this issue.
I think now I understand where you're coming from. Wouldn't competitors have a good reason to sue? The damages appear obvious.
But just wait for the next protest march in your city. "Law enforcement" is going to show up by the hundreds for sure.
So Amazon operates in this space in the middle with almost zero enforcement.
The only real opportunity for recourse we have is to moan on social media, and hope we discourage future sales enough to make a dent in their profits.
[1] https://amzn.eu/d/iO4oZTJ [2] https://a.aliexpress.com/_mqikae6
I would personally love to see FDA authority take down an Amazon warehouse if they found e.g. specious drugs, or mislabelling which breaches consumer safety law.
Sometimes I'll buy a "Ships from amazon.com" and "Sold by XYZ Corp", but only if I recognize "XYZ Corp" as a reputable firm.
Customer ratings and reviews as a crowdsourced reputation mechanism is pretty unreliable. The Q&As are sometimes more informative.
They however also have a very strict way with returns. Basically if you receive something without tracking you'll get your money back each time if you want.