Why is Amazon selling fake 16TB portable SSD drives?

https://www.reviewgeek.com/142496/why-the-heck-is-amazon-selling-these-fake-16-terabyte-portable-hard-drives/

by blowski • 4 years ago

146 191 4 years ago

p-e-w5• 4 years ago

Because Amazon is an online store that makes money when things are being sold through it. Including fake things.

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.

charlieyu1• 4 years ago

I’m annoyed that this could be sorted by a simple ordering of positive reviews, yet these scams still pop up all the time

p-e-w5• 4 years ago

That would be true if reviews weren't fake themselves. And just like fake products, Amazon has no incentive to fight fake reviews either. To Amazon, these aren't "scams", they're good business.

blowski9• 4 years ago

Some of them are "sponsored", so Amazon is being paid to list them first.

Al-Khwarizmi2• 4 years ago

But is that a good long-term strategy to make money?

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.

p-e-w5• 4 years ago

Amazon is making more money than the entire economy of most countries. Their long term plan, like other tech giants, will be to become a sovereign entity. In some ways, they already are. Then they can effectively outlaw the competition, so outcompeting them won't matter anymore.

flandish• 4 years ago

“Long term” is not a problem when one makes so much profit in so little time and controls so much market/labor share that they are a tacit monopoly.

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.

chengiz• 4 years ago

In the long term everyone is dead. If the term is long enough to drive competitors out, corner the market, make tons of money for stakeholders, that's good enough. It's kinda the opposite of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

taskforcegemini2• 4 years ago

do you get your money back if you send it back? (it is the case where I live, but I think it is not mandatory everywhere) if enough people send it back, the costs for amazon might get high enough to take care of the problem. although I am guilty of not sending back defective 5€ to 10€ items as the hassle was not worth the time at that moment

deng• 4 years ago

Because Amazon is an online store that makes money when things are being sold through it. Including fake things.

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).

herbst9• 4 years ago

Thing is in all places I know that have competition Amazon is basically irrelevant because it's such a poor choice comparingly.

Like all of Asia, Switzerland, Netherlands apparently.

Fnoord2• 4 years ago

Amazon is not irrelevant in The Netherlands. They just are not the dominant #1 because of a previously existing competitor (Bol.com). Which has a large enough company backing it up (Ahold Delhaize) after they got acquired and had a foothold before Amazon had (Bol.com started with books and wasn't profitable for a long time). They're doing the same shit as Amazon (third party sellers, including drop shippers and such), but more fair. See this article about Amazon possibly being accountable for fake articles being sold [1]. Interestingly, the article also describes Bol.com is way more fair about it selling via a third party than Amazon.

[1] https://blog.iusmentis.com/2023/01/10/amazon-mogelijk-aanspr...

fxtentacle• 4 years ago

John Oliver claims that the 2022 antitrust bills are being blocked by Schumer, whose daughters work as Lobbyists for Amazon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXf04bhcjbg

dc3k• 4 years ago

The majority of listings are cheap rebranded junk from brands with random six letter all caps names. Or in this case, cheap fake junk.

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.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

I think the problem is harder than you make out. How do you expect them to combat this while still allowing new sellers to have vast reach.

blowski9• 4 years ago

If I opened a shop on the high street selling fake hard drives I’d be shut down. Why does Amazon get a pass simply because they’re doing it at scale?

viraptor2• 4 years ago

The long tail can be hard to deal with, but let's not talk about the problem being hard until they start dealing with at least the trivial stuff: obvious scams and item swaps. Right now they just ignore the issues.

causality0• 4 years ago

The same way every other site on the internet does: a report button.

manicdee• 4 years ago

It’s the fish John West rejects that makes them the best.

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.

Herbstluft• 4 years ago

allowing new sellers to have vast reach

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.

tjoff• 4 years ago

On top of that they have a horrendous site and shopping experience. That people choose to go to amazon is beyond me. Don't you have other options?

DocTomoe2• 4 years ago

In 20 years of me being a customer with Amazon, I have never once had a problem with them. Returns are quick and easy. Payment systems work.

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)

mavhc• 4 years ago

That's the point, no

davidwritesbugs• 4 years ago

Not to mention the bizarrely bad search engine which is so utterly useless it can only be deliberately bad. This is an example of the consequences of monopoly you've nowhere else to go so they can ignore your dissatisfaction.

petra• 4 years ago

What sites have a significantly better shopping experience?

thrdbndndn2• 4 years ago

I don't have horrendous site and shopping experience using Amazon, to be honest.

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.

MattGaiser4• 4 years ago

Which sites do you prefer? At least as a Canadian, I find every non Amazon site pretty terrible. Amazon has the best shoe size searching interface of any site. It has the best kitchen tool search interface.

Amazon outperforms more niche retailers in search in their niches.

mcv6• 4 years ago

I never buy there. There are several Dutch webshops that are vastly superior, and as a result, amazon.nl hasn't been able to get much traction here. I'm surprised other countries don't have superior competitors.

TeMPOraL4• 4 years ago

Obligatory mention of McMaster-Carr. I'd accept both a price premium and a limited selection of goods, if I could use a website like MMC's for generic shopping.

kouteiheika2• 4 years ago

On top of that they have a horrendous site and shopping experience. That people choose to go to amazon is beyond me. Don't you have other options?

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.

gambiting2• 4 years ago

I have absolutely nothing but positive things to say about amazon, frankly. Maybe their service in the UK is better than elsewhere, but at this point they are 10x better than any competition. The selection is great, nearly everything can be delivered the next day(or the same day for some items), and the support and returns process is absolutely fantastic. Try returning an item to Currys or Argos or even a high end store like John Lewis and compare with Amazon - amazon is just better, full stop. I've had 220 orders with them last year and the worst thing that happened was that one order was a day late - they just added a month of prime to my account when I complained. No fakes, no issues.

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.

mihaaly• 4 years ago

It is perfectly ok for buying simple and cheap things. I have cables, nightstand clock, extension lead, bike light, foldback clips and such nicknacks from Amazon. The same crap you'd get elsewhere, in relevant shops in your vicinity or webshops alike. One click and its there next day. Also the return experience is typically good if you run into something you don't like.

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)

ChrisRR3• 4 years ago

The annoying part is they're a necessary evil.

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.

edf13• 4 years ago

Their seller systems are complete garbage too - a real jumbled mess of options scattered through various pages that have been upgraded by different parties over the years!

Traubenfuchs• 4 years ago

It's funny to end up in interfaces/UIs of previous generations. Like today I wanted to stop part of an order I just made and ended up in some old legacy view to select which item order I wanted to revoke.

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.

madaxe_again2• 4 years ago

It isn’t that Amazon don’t care - it’s that this is what consumers demand and are most happy with.

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.

TeMPOraL4• 4 years ago

It isn’t that Amazon don’t care - it’s that this is what consumers demand and are most happy with.

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.

danaris2• 4 years ago

Oh, don't be absurd. Customers obviously don't actually want this. Amazon is a monopoly—not in the sense of "is literally the only vendor", but "is considered the default by at least a plurality of Americans"—and has the money and the clout to just keep doing what they're doing even if it's creating friction, frustration, and money loss to some customers.

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.

herbst9• 4 years ago

AliExpress recently introduced 15 day shipping. You instantly get your money back shouldn't it arrive. Support and mediation being way faster and more customer oriented anyway.

No idea why people use Amazon to buy china trash, when they could buy the trash themself at at least half the price.

nixass2• 4 years ago

No idea why people use Amazon to buy china trash

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

medion• 4 years ago

So… stop using it?

blowski9• 4 years ago

I do now get books from a local bookshop, cables direct from Anker, electronics from a UK high street chain, etc. But sometimes, due to Amazon's monopolistic behaviour, there are times when Amazon is the only choice.

zzleeper• 4 years ago

I've switched away from Amazon. Used it since maybe 2006, and loved it back then, but as you say, garbage.

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.

BMorearty• 4 years ago

I would like to...but when I want to buy some random product and the first thing I need to do is find a store that sells it, and then I add the product to my cart on that store and check out, and then it shows me a shipping price that's MORE than the product I'm buying, and takes 10 days to deliver...I end up heading back to Amazon. :(

KingOfCoders• 4 years ago

Same here, been a user from the beginning, but switched away as I was only getting used hardware (in Germany) when ordering and being sold new Amazon hardware.

whyenot• 4 years ago

Because Amazon makes money whether they are fake or not. If they were held liable for the scam products sold on their platform, things would change.

scovetta• 4 years ago

This is particularly annoying because the "Report incorrect product information" link doesn't work properly, and due to "suspicious activity", only verified customers can submit a review. So you can't tell Amazon about it, and you can't let other prospective customers know about it.

andreagrandi• 4 years ago

"If It’s Too Good to Be True, Don’t Buy It and Check the Reviews"

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.

aflag• 4 years ago

Did you buy the item?

mclightning• 4 years ago

same here. the product had a literal design error, not just a faulty individual item.

hellweaver666• 4 years ago

I received a couple of fakes when ordering Lightning cables for my iPhone (which claimed made by "Appel in Califona" on the box which was a dead give away). Left a review to let people know it was fake and also got the review rejected for policy violations. Like this article says, the Marketplace team clearly sees the sellers as their customers and doesn't care about the people actually buying.

simongr3dal• 4 years ago

I guess it's impossible to report this kind of fraud to law enforcement? I just don't see why.

p-e-w5• 4 years ago

Of course you can report it. I doubt anyone is going to give a fuck though.

But just wait for the next protest march in your city. "Law enforcement" is going to show up by the hundreds for sure.

blowski9• 4 years ago

Your local police officer isn't going to march to Seattle and confront Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy. But neither is my prime minister going to care at all about a breach of the trades description act.

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.

viraptor2• 4 years ago

It depends on the local regulations. It's not always the LE in the traditional sense either. For example in Australia ACCC would likely be the right body to deal with it.

nikanj• 4 years ago

Amazon is the new Wish.com

herbst9• 4 years ago

Wish.com has the absolutely most weird model for sellers I've ever seen and is nothing like any other platform. You can not choose the price of products even, just a general direction. Wish decides if some sales are at loss because they take an unspecified fee plus make their own prices. They may add a 200% markup to your price if they want, but that doesn't mean you get that much more.

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.

Hamuko• 4 years ago

The last time I saw one of these drives for sale on Amazon.de, I scrolled down to the review section and the review photos section was full of photos of oil paintings.

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.

FPGAhacker• 4 years ago

If something is small and high volume then it’s a fraud risk.

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.

lnsru• 4 years ago

I buy the SD cards elsewhere. For example from office supplies providers. My time is too precious to waste it on fake SD cards. Amazon is brilliant with their return policy and a huge argument for me buying other things there.

pocketarc• 4 years ago

The best thing to do is buy a brand-name option for electronics, as you mentioned. Don’t try to cheap out, and you won’t get burned.

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.

99_00• 4 years ago

Because the internet is the wild west. Unless you're making powerful politicians look bad.

Then, suddenly, shutting you down is a simple matter.

netfortius• 4 years ago

Same appearance and outside markings as on Amazon Europe sold products [1] , even larger sizes (!), and much cheaper, are to be found on AliExpress [2]. Amazon is simply becoming a "conduit" of Ali and the likes, apparently.

[1] https://amzn.eu/d/iO4oZTJ [2] https://a.aliexpress.com/_mqikae6

Symbiote2• 4 years ago

In the UK the government Trading Standards Office is supposed to investigate.

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...

https://www.nationaltradingstandards.uk/news/archive-2022/

est• 4 years ago

Those Chinese sellers will DDoS any investigation.

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.

Symbiote2• 4 years ago

The legislation should be against Amazon.

If Trading Standards raid Tesco and find an illegal product, they take action against Tesco for selling it.

ChrisRR3• 4 years ago

It's not even necessarily chinese sellers. Often it's UK sellers drop shipping aliexpress items as a get rich quick scheme

underwater• 4 years ago

Amazon's very first stated leadership principle is Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

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.

recuter• 4 years ago

Don't scratch your head too hard you'll get a bold spot.

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.

tsujamin• 4 years ago

Some of those 6 character vendor names do resemble Sumerian…

pas4• 4 years ago

it was important while there was competition... now it gets in the way of profit

red-iron-pine• 4 years ago

Say what you will, they make damn sure you get your pizza

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

Almost like they have collapsed into a cesspool of backstabbing, overwork, turnover, burnout, betrayal, hire-to-fire, stack ranking, inevitable pip, etc.

Even if you survive that, they'll fire you right before you vest.

hef198984• 4 years ago

Amazon is a company focused on efficiency, to the point of being cut-throat, sure. But do you have anything to back your claim? Because as far as I can tell, this is simply not true.

hef198984• 4 years ago

During my time, this principle was followed. With one small exception: Amazon Marketplace. There everybody was extremely hands-off, at best the marketplace sellers were considered Amazon's customers, not the people buying through the marketplace. That being said, if sellers used FBA, things like returns and so on followed the same rules like Amazon's own business. I didn't really agree with that approach, but it does seem to work out quite well for Amazon so far...

MattGaiser4• 4 years ago

Could simply be that Amazon is just very generous about refunds, so either way the customer is happy. Someone gets something they think is a bargain. Others get prompt refunds.

Politics has certainly shown that honesty isn't really related to trust.

pmontra2• 4 years ago

I returned a laptop battery that didn't match the description recently and I'm not happy. I don't have what I wanted to buy, I maybe already got back my money (didn't check yet), I lost time to fill forms, print a label, etc. I have to spend time again to find another battery and hope for the best.

number6• 4 years ago

Well, who is the Customer?

t0suj4• 4 years ago

When a company motto becomes a joke it's time to move on

RileyJames• 4 years ago

Couldn’t this be solved with some vigilantly style justice. (Since Amazon are not dealing with it proactively)

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.

pyrolistical• 4 years ago

Except non techies never get close to the real capacity and never realizes they got scammed

Tempest19812• 4 years ago

I could imagine a subreddit for this, similar to the investor groups. Target 1 fake product each week. Would it make a dent?

mcv6• 4 years ago

Expecting a large group of customers to test these things thoroughly enough to discover how fake they are is unreasonable. With blatantly intentional fakes like these, a single one should be enough to indict and imprison the seller and fine Amazon.

boomboomsubban• 4 years ago

Are you willing to spend several hundred dollars buying hard drives hoping to someday get it back? Then will you spend the time testing them, refunding them, and making a bad review? And how many new scammers can pop up over the time it takes you to ruin one scammers ratings?

mrweasel3• 4 years ago

I'd imagine that the sellers have a number of accounts and only sell a small amount of products through each.

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?

Moissanite• 4 years ago

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.

addandsubtract2• 4 years ago

The issue is, that would require Amazon to withhold payment to sells for 30 - 60 days

Wait, that's not the case already? Isn't that how all marketplaces work? How else do you pay out refunds?

ChrisRR3• 4 years ago

So that might make a difference fir this 1 product, but Amazon is absolutely full of Aliexpress tat. It's more aliexpress than genuine CE marked products nowadays

MobiusHorizons• 4 years ago

As I understand it, the seller creates new accounts if that happens. That’s why the same product shows up under a lot of stores.

starbugs4• 4 years ago

This is probably not a smart question, but why isn't Amazon sued or otherwise held accountable if this happens repeatedly?

andrewinardeer• 4 years ago

Who wants to face Amazon lawyers?

diffeomorphism• 4 years ago

A state agency? It seems quite unreasonable to expect individual customers to face such risk and that is exactly why consumer protection agencies (not sure about the English translation of Verbraucherzentrale) exist. For instance, when the emission scandal by VW happened such an agency sued and won:

https://www.vzbv.de/vw-klage

ninth_ant3• 4 years ago

Because you get your money back in full if you ask?

starbugs4• 4 years ago

Not sure if you are joking? I think we all know that the nature of the scam makes it very unlikely for most people to detect that they were defrauded within the 30 days money back guarantee time frame.

mouse_• 4 years ago

Why is Amazon doing thing? Cash, of course!

quijoteuniv2• 4 years ago

Because is a money making super mega corporation with no values. Best is to stay away from it and find alternatives. Yes it will cost you more, but not under the expense of someone else. And yes, it is possible have not bought anything there for 5 years or so.

omgwtf1000• 4 years ago

I buy from Amazon, although much, much less than I used to a couple years ago. Bullshit reviews are mostly easy to spot, and real reviews stand out too. If I get something I don’t like, or is crap quality, whatever, I return it. I return around 25% of purchases. Without that return policy I would never shop at Amazon, not a chance.

flyrain• 4 years ago

This best seller is a fake one. I wrote a review and called them to invest 6 month ago. It is still there. Amazon doesn't care. https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Charger-Power-Bank-36800mAh-Bui...

NavinF3• 4 years ago

Buy it, measure capacity, and return it. If they don't make you ship it back you get a free power bank.

Tempest19812• 4 years ago

Just hope it's safe, and doesn't overheat and catch on fire.

throwaway378037• 4 years ago

Don’t buy from Amazon, simples

ps• 4 years ago

That's funny especially when one is constantly harassed by the Amazon to prove you are not selling counterfeits ("hey, this Nike sneakers tons of others are selling are infringing some IP, fix it!"), dealing with products named "XYZ Winter Life Jacket" which Amazon immediately bans, because they think it is lifejacket and not jacket, filling forms for developers full of absurd questions, impossibility to prove identity of your employees if they do not have recent utility bill with their name (wifes in Europe often don't) etc. And don't even get me started about customers keeping ordered items, claiming they never received them and Amazon ignoring DHL shipment tracking data - one of my clients got account suspended for this and Amazon demanded us to provide plan for preventing these situations...

mcv6• 4 years ago

Are you saying amazon punishes legitimate sellers but accommodates scammers?

stonogo• 4 years ago

Yes. It costs next to nothing to illicitly register hundreds of fake seller accounts. Legitimate sellers who get caught in the bureaucracy stay banned because they are too law-abiding to circumvent, while scammers just play statistics to keep ahead of the lockouts.

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.

mcv6• 4 years ago

I notice this article talks a lot about hope, but not about returning the item, getting your money back, or fining the seller or Amazon. Does the US not have any consumer protection laws? This is blatant false advertising. There should be fines for both the seller and for Amazon, and all money paid by customers who bought this, should be paid back. Make it automatic for obvious frauds so the scammers also get punished for their review scam.

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.

MattGaiser4• 4 years ago

Amazon has the most generous refunds I have ever experienced. I once had a return and complained to customer service that their chosen delivery provider was a bit far, so they just let me keep it.

pasc1878• 4 years ago

But it still costs tyhe customer. In time which is more precious than anything else.

NavinF3• 4 years ago

Dude, Amazon will refund you for any reason including "I no longer need this product" without charging a restocking fee. All large retailers (Costco, Walmart, Target, etc) are like like this in the US.

Every wondered why Americans roll their eyes when Europeans brag about consumer protection laws?

rwmj• 4 years ago

The return policies you've described are guaranteed by law in Europe. I'd rather had the law cover guaranteed minimum return policies across all shops.

pas4• 4 years ago

free market requires competition, otherwise it stops optimizing for providing better and better value propositions

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.)

impulser_• 4 years ago

I think Walmart is selling the same ones.

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.

mjg59• 4 years ago

You can't easily tell because it's out of stock, but other Petmoto branded items on walmart.com are actually being sold by non-Walmart sellers. There's no indication that Walmart are involved other than being a shopfront.

shapefrog4• 4 years ago

Walmart to ban Chinese suppliers

That is probably 99% of their products.

herbst9• 4 years ago

Amazon is now AliExpress with a 300% markup. It has been that for a while.

jbm• 4 years ago

This is not an exaggeration, although it is still better than local retail that has a 1000% markup.

I went to buy some velcro at a local store and that project got delayed 6 weeks for the shipment to arrive from Aliexpress.

herbst9• 4 years ago

I am also thinking small electronic components the whole thread. Once you see the pricing on Ali compared to whatever local distributor is there it's easy to regularly delay projects for a single $0.2 part.

1000% markup is by far not the worst I've seen.

npteljes• 4 years ago

Etsy too. Lots of stuff from Ali, shipped from China, just orders of magnitudes more expensive.

herbst9• 4 years ago

So true. And Etsy doesn't care at all. Even thought some categories are completely overrun by now.

Diapason• 4 years ago

Well a couple years ago eBay was full of 2TB usb sticks LOL

chx• 4 years ago

Some notes:

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.

MattGaiser4• 4 years ago

He misses what (I would guess) is a major source of strong reviews. In numerous products from Amazon, I have received a card offering a refund on the item for a 5* review.

ggm• 4 years ago

Amazon selling vs Amazon permitting to be sold. If any of these are sold and fulfilled by Amazon, their breach as seller is worse than if they just enable the sell. I believe it's delivery direct from offshore. It's bad but there are degrees of badness and risk to Amazon here.

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.

jimrandomh• 4 years ago

I found a few Amazon listings for fake 16TB SSDs. Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/WIOTA-External-Hard-Drive-Portable/dp... (https://web.archive.org/web/20230117092329/https://www.amazo...). It has 46 reviews and an average star rating of 4.8. Here are some of the reviews of this listing, which is definitely supposed to be an SSD:

"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.

chucksta• 4 years ago

I've gone out of my way to report this manipulation before, it amounted to "tough shit"

Fnoord2• 4 years ago

We are lacking accountability here. I wonder if 'tough shit' is gonna hold up in court.

abirch• 4 years ago

I hate Amazon but they are so convenient. So much like college I find myself doing the walk of shame . Is there something out there that's better?

sershe• 4 years ago

Lol, I tried to "report a product issue" and the submit button is greyed out. Reviews are limited to verified purchases due to "unusual activity". What the actual fuck?

addandsubtract2• 4 years ago

The author complains about buying products on Amazon, but then has an ad directing people to buy said products on Amazon. Pot, meet kettle.

Merrill• 4 years ago

If it is not "Ships from amazon.com" and "Sold by amazon.com", I don't usually buy it.

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.

fomine33• 4 years ago

I wonder is there any Amazon (.uk/.de/whatever) that is superior about banning frauds, maybe thanks to regulation.

blowski9• 4 years ago

It's hard to say "UK is equally bad as US" when all I have is anecdotes. But there are plenty of anecdotes that it's pretty bad in the UK.

nipperkinfeet2• 4 years ago

Now that there are so many phony reviews, I've switched to looking at store ratings rather of actual product ratings.

Why is Amazon selling fake 16TB portable SSD drives?

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