But a lot of the negative reviews for the linked seller seem to be about a locked or blacklisted phone, or one with the wrong amount of storage. Those customers would presumably have to send back their phones, so what's the buyer-side fraud there?
I'm going to guess this only works with sellers that aren't fulfilled by Amazon? It's an annoyingly effective scam: How can sellers protect themselves?
Some shipper has to provide verified shipment as a service: you packaged will be opened, a photo will be taken of the content and it will be packed and sealed by the shipper.
I believe the OP was implying a shipping service like USPS, FedEx, DHL etc offering the feature. Amazon now has their own logistics delivery team too and offering pickup with picture would be a logical next step to combat this scam.
Fulfilled By Amazon would provide no protection here.
When you send a replenishment shipment to Amazon for a FBA item, they don't open and verify you sent the correct product. You only find out about mistakes after the items have been sold.
For some common FBA items (presumably like an iPhone), you can co-mingle your inventory. This means you send in an identical item (with UPC, etc), and your inventory can be used to fulfill another seller's order (if that warehouse happens to be closer to the customer). They do the same for you.
This means buyers get their order faster, but it also means the item going out the door may not have been yours (opening the door for this clay scam to spread to impact many many sellers).
I would be very surprised if Amazon actually mixed up merchandise from several sellers to the point that they don't know where the items originated.
It's one thing to ship from the closest warehouse and credit the sale to whichever seller offered the price chosen by the customer. It's a totally different thing to not know where the item came from at all.
That's not what I implied. They track inventory internally, but your item may ship from your local FBA warehouse to someone else's customer.
This does leave a door open for many items to ship before any error was realized... (sometimes within a few days, but usually up to a few weeks after it happened).
Actually, these type of scams, which are called refund scams, are extremely widespread with FBA sellers and Amazon directly just by how easy it is to pull off. I mean the clay bar is overkill. If you dealing with amazon customer service and your account is aged and in good standing, simply saying your package never arrived, even if tracking says delivered and even if you signed for it, amazon will almost in every case give you a 100% refund or replacement on the spot. In fact, if the scammer is skilled, he can probably double or triple dip the order, in which they'll say their replacement shipment never showed and get another replacement shipment for the original replacement, so in total get 3 iPhones. Another method is to return the item for a refund, but instead of shipping the item back, you place a block of dry ice equal to the weight of the item, so the tracking details say it weight xx pounds on origin, but by the time it arrives to the destination, it'll be completely evaporated and it'll look like it was stolen in transit.
I can't believe that this works at all. I imagine that between an established seller and a brand new buyer, Amazon would be on the side of the seller. In the cases where the buyer wins, who pays the cost of the device (the seller or Amazon)?
It's difficult to have a policy or heuristic here. If you side with "trusted" sellers, then it all hinges on what your definition of "trusted" is. Scammers will behave themselves until they are considered to be trustworthy, and then start to cash out by shipping clay iPhones.
This would allow sellers to carry out selective scamming: send buyers with longstanding accounts genuine iPhones, send new buyers boxes with clay and pocket the cash. Not so common on mainstream sites because it's hard to get away with currently, but apparently used to be rife on darknet marketplaces.
Amazon should possibly add an ID verification step to the process when folks report such wild claims, or possibly handle these claims via the phone/camera to increase the difficulty of faking it
I remember this being big on ebay days.
How can retailers like Amazon/Ebay verify neither sellers nor buyers are not getting scammed? I cant think of any solution except intercept all packages and make sure the actual product is there.
One of my friends still sells on eBay and has buyers pulling scams regularly. He lists stuff on message boards and other sources first, and uses eBay as a last resort. Personally I haven't been a seller on eBay in close to a decade.
This isn't a solved problem but its certainly solvable because scammers should be pulling the trick repeatedly.
There are a couple hypotheses the author hasn't considered. It's possible the buyer stole the phone, yes, but it's also possible that it was a warehouse company employee, a shipping company employee, or a previous buyer who made a return.
It's true, there are other possibilities. I found the given explanation most likely though: iPhones are all sold by 3rd party sellers on Amazon, so the alternatives you suggest likely wouldn't present as several buyers reporting on a single product that has multiple seller locations.
Also Fulfillment-By-Amazon explains that review that mentions "barcode was covered by fake barcode"... All FBA items must cover up any original barcode with Amazon's FNSKU barcode. Either the sellers do it themselves before shipping to Amazon, or they pay a small fee to Amazon to put the barcodes on.
To be fair, a lot of reviewers don't realize when there are multiple seller locations. Hell, some people don't even realize that there are third-party sellers on Amazon at all.
If even just one of those sellers is scamming (or just has a bad batch of products) and ships out multiple of these clay boxes, it's not at all surprising that you'd get multiple of these reviews.
This isn't an Amazon only problem, same with Ebay etc. I would love to hear how people can sell items online safely (for the time being I only use Craigslist for this exact reason)
I sell my wife's and my old iPhones and Android every couple of years and what I do is take pictures of the serial number and send it to the buyer after they have paid for the device. Sends a message that I have documentation on what the device is and I can report it stolen if they try pull a scam on me. It also helps the buyer because they can check to see if the phone is reported stolen before even taking possession of the device.
You're never going to get a 100% guarantee. You can take steps to help, though. If it's above a couple hundred dollars then require a signature, which gets rid of most issues. If you have a history of selling, and have a signature, there's a chance they'll side with you.
eBay is slightly better for one-off sales: you can refuse returns (if specified in the listing), and cancel sales by buyers without verified paypal accounts or no feedback. Plus they have a sellers guarantee, although I don't know how often they'll actually stick up for the seller.
These might be buyer scammers, or sellers themselves have been scammed upstream. This article is right you'd have to be bonkers to try and pull this on Amazon as a seller. But he's assuming the seller knows there is no iPhone in the sealed box.
Perhaps Amazon Sellers are attempting to buy iPhones on the grey market at a discount, in order to resell them on Amazon at a profit. However the person they're dealing with upstream is actually shipping them clay or similar and plans to disappear when discovered.
Don't get me wrong, buyer scams exist, and that might be what is happening here. But why even post a review at all? The A-Z guidelines don't require it. He's also making the assumption that an Amazon Seller is going to open a sealed phone, or that their channels never get fraud in them.
> Perhaps Amazon Sellers are attempting to buy iPhones on the grey market at a discount, in order to resell them on Amazon at a profit. However the person they're dealing with upstream is actually shipping them clay or similar and plans to disappear when discovered.
I hadn't considered this possibility, but it is definitely possible as well. I see it as less likely, because the Amazon Seller that is the responsible party would probably get flagged for fraud and their account disabled. Additionally - the profiles of the buyers posting the reviews raises suspicion on their part.
> But why even post a review at all? The A-Z guidelines don't require it.
Claims that aren't resolved between buyer and seller involve a customer service individual from Amazon. If the buyer can point to pictures/reviews they posted, it likely strengthens their case and encourages the customer service to resolve in their favor, especially when the seller has no alternative picture evidence.
How exactly are the profiles of the buyers posting the reviews raising suspicions?
You realize that the "buyer profiles" you're mentioning are actually "reviewer profiles" that only list what other reviews that buyer has posted. It does not tell you a buyer's history (unless they post a review for an item), nor does it tell you when they signed up. It's not uncommon for people who have been using Amazon for years to never post any reviews, at least not until they're disappointed by their purchase.
And I'm not so sure that pointing to a review they posted strengthens an A-z Claim, at all. If images played a role, they'd let buyers upload an image when filing a claim, but they don't let that happen. They just let you fill in info about the shipment and then give you 2000 characters to explain the claim.
That said, Amazon definitely sides with the buyer most of the time. Filing a claim makes it so that the seller is automatically guilty unless they can prove otherwise. Auxiliary proof of wrong-doing is not necessary at all, especially since, as you mentioned, most sellers do not have proof that they _didn't_ ship the clay.
It does seem like upstream scamming would be a huge risk for anyone engaging in drop-shipping or multi-sourced buying. There are a lot of places (e.g. Craigslist) where selling clay iPhones could be pretty safe and lucrative, at which point some of the fake phones will hit secondary markets like Amazon where the middle man gets stuck with the costs.
Neither Apple nor Amazon sell iPhones on Amazon as far as I can tell. All the listings you see are third-party sellers. If you click on any of the listings, you'll see the list of sellers in the right-hand column under the checkout buttons.
> Looking on Amazon, I'm not seeing any iPhone 6 sellers other than Apple.
Look for "used" or "refurbished iPhone 5", there are many (many!) sellers like BREED and Vius. Most fulfill through Amazon, so this may be their way of trying to tackle this problem?
For a long time now Amazon has been taking over that part of Ebay's market. (I think of it as the Ebay 'buy it now' market). Its a pretty sweet deal for them, skim off the tasty transactional cost cream off the top, leave the buyer and seller to hold all the liability.
They can't verify counterfeit merchandise but they could take a picture of the contents of the box and turn a device on to verify it works, like a pawn shop. There is no perfect way to solve this but the above solution would help.
Its a control theory textbook for $44 from a 3rd party. Which is a pretty good deal because the "real" book sitting on my desk is somewhat more expensive.
In very tiny letters the cover of the cheap version reads "Circulation of this edition outside the Indian Subcontinent is Unauthorized"
Something I find hilarious is the grey market edition is full of reviews that boil down to "this textbook sux and I hate my prof" but the genuine edition has one review by one guy who probably doesn't exist because if you click thru his reviews all look like stereotypical three word filler material.
I wonder if the postal services could create an additional service which calculates a heat map of the weight distribution for the package. You could then very accurately I imagine determine if there is actually an iPhone in there, and if someone shows a photo of clay it will be obvious they are scamming if the weight distribution passed as an iPhone distribution during transit.
Yep. This also wouldn't protect against the "it was damaged in transit" scam either. Depending on how much time you had, I could see someone swapping just enough of a working handset onto a broken handset to "prove" it is was broken, then returning it.
This is such a complex solution, I'm sure it would be an additional fee, time consuming to implement, and in general, outside the scope of most shipping carriers.
I've had a similar thing happened to me a few years back when I sold a no longer needed but still unopened Windows Vista DVD that I purchased directly from MS Store (on Microsoft campus). The buyer returned the package, but the returned merchandize was clearly counterfeit. The box was of a light material, missing holograms, faded colors etc. The buyer's history was full of similar purchases.
I've been careful about documenting shipments since. Overall, I am reluctant to sell on Amazon these days because of the A-Z guarantee, which is only sustainable for large sellers.
Fraud is a sticky problem at scale. A few bad actors poison the well for everyone. As a buyer I appreciate Amazon's policies, but as an occasional seller I find them completely draconian. There is very little you can do to contest a decision against you.
They're draconian in some other areas, too, which affect regular customers. I was blacklisted from Amazon Payments, which I've only ever used to fund a few Kickstarter Projects. They will not tell me why, will not consider an appeal, and will not respond to further inquiries anymore.
From reading online, this is due to their use of Experian for identity verification. But if you don't have any credit history, as I do not, you do not exist within Experian's system and are automatically considered by Amazon to be a fraud threat and so are effectively cut out of the system and blacklisted without recourse, even if you're a longstanding good customer with other Amazon products.
I hate to say this but you basically have to trust these types of authorities when it comes to this type of "trust." You wouldn't believe how many people are out to scam. It's endemic in anything that involves money. I'd say "few bad eggs" but it's mostly shit eggs amongst a few good eggs.
I think I kind of get this. Sounds like Steam accounts. Cheaters galore with family accounts? Rust (game) nailed this by recently deciding to nuke the hen and its eggs.
So for those of us who simply don't meet their definition for an identifiable individual (e.g. someone who borrows money and allows their borrowing history to be monitored by commercial and government entities), what, we're just shit out of luck? Credit history being a requirement for identity verification is becoming more and more pervasive, and I am increasingly locked out of participating in both private and government services because of this shit.
Amazon's was especially bad because it allegedly had an appeal process that allowed submitting other forms of identity documents to bypass Experian's failure, but it never functioned correctly and attempting to verify my identity would fail because I had not yet verified my identity, and then the fact that I wouldn't verify my identity manually sent up a bigger red flag that permanently blacklisted me from the service with zero recourse now, even as I explained that I was unable to because their system wouldn't let me. Their customer support people would just say "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You are not allowed to participate in this service anymore." I lost a lot of respect for Amazon at that point.
I leaned a long time ago that hating the game and trying to fight it doesn't do much to change the game; the choice personally was more "play and figure out how to win" or "lose and be bitter about it". I now have great credit and don't pay any interest on things but receive a cut of the reward from their ridiculous merchant CC processing fees.
Yes, you're shit out of luck. You can post paragraphs onto the Internet until you're blue in the face but this is their reality, not mine.
Pro life tip: just get a credit card or two and nurture your credit score. Don't fuck over your utilities and make sure your payments are on time. Voila. You're a real boy. Not my rules or something I endorse but hey someone here had to say it.
And get fucked by credit card fees. AFAIK credit cards cost something like a few hundred dollars per year in just maintenance fees, so requiring one just to be a real person is a really shitty racket.
Unprovable people are a liability to Amazon. They're minimizing liability to their business. In their eyes, a broken appeals process might be a benefit. If a would-be customer is enough of an outlier to need a special process, it makes sense to handle them quickly, and less sense to handle them correctly.
In my area, it's almost impossible to even rent an apartment without good credit history, and it's absolutely impossible to rent a non-crappy apartment. Why? Because there are enough people with solid credit histories to fill the buildings, and because of the lower risk, there's no reason not to rely on credit checks.
The same could be said for eBay. Buyer of my MBP opened a claim against me cause I didn't include the OS install disks (which Apple stopped shipping years earlier). Had to bend over backwards to prevent this con artist from keeping the laptop and money. Now I don't sell shit on eBay.
I read that when it was posted, and I got the I pressing the conman was pulling some trick to claim he had informed the other party, but hadn't actually done so. If that's the case then you'd need ESP to avoid being scammed.
Even so, there's a good possibility of old-school fraud, with fake cashier's checks, or getting mugged. A recent trend has been for police departments to allow CL transactions to take place in their parking lots.
I do all of my Craigslist transactions in the lobby of my bank. They have cameras and a security guard, and as an added bonus I can deposit the cash right away.
1. Craigslist is slow. On eBay, you're done in 7 days. It can be pretty hard to get full market value on Craigslist in anywhere near that amount of time, if at all, especially if you're in a smaller city.
2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
3. People on Craigslist are needy. On eBay, I list and then I sell. I am selling two items on Craigslist right now. You should see my phone's messaging app. It's full of the unknown numbers of un-serious buyers asking pointless questions they'll never follow up on.
4. People on Craigslist are, well, people. That means I have to meet them somewhere. Arranging that always ends up being more difficult than a trip to the post office.
I view the tradeoff like this:
eBay = simple, easy, fast, but with a nonzero likelihood of total loss
Craigslist = nearly guaranteed to be difficult, slow, and annoying, but with a very low chance of total loss
I don't think it's an easy decision. They are definitely not interchangeable.
> 2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
I was beginning to think that buyers on Craigslist are instructed to act this way. :P
> 2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
I was moving and had to sell a lot of stuff fast. I scheduled around 6 people to come look at a futon. 0 showed. Even after I offered to give it away for free. Huge waste of time.
What if there was an EBay like action site where you couldn't just sign up, and rather someone had to "vouch" for you? When fraud starts happening, you can see who vouched them in and shut down the network. If people start selling vouches online, then you suspend both them and the person who had the bad judgment to vouch them in originally. (maybe they can keep using the site, but not vouch, etc.)
The site would also collect identifying information about everyone who transacts while using it. Maybe phone number, or driver license photo. You are not allowed to have more than one account, although you can have multiple "personas" if you wish, each with their own ratings. (but creating multiple personas cannot fool site anti-abuse staff, who can all obviously see the same account behind it) Creating an account is hard. The site would employ advanced protections against account takeover.
Whenever you buy and sell from someone, perhaps you can see the "7 degrees of Kevin Bacon" style interpersonal connections that link you to them via vouches. If fraud happens, it makes all of your connections look bad, and there would be an incentive for them to shun you, if they care about retaining their access to the site. When fraudsters get onto the platform, you can always trace their vouches back to the "bad apple" who showed poor judgment and began inviting the wrong certain people. Indeed, perhaps in order to retain access to the platform overtime, you have to keep getting vouches every once in a while.
Big sites would not use these policies since they would invoice friction on purchases in result in lower conversion. But perhaps there is a niche somewhere for a highly trusted online auction house.
I wonder how far a system like this could go in stamping out fraud online. It seems like the problem with fraudsters is that they can always keep coming back with new accounts that everyone is forced to treat with the certain default degree of trust, and then the fraudsters exploit that. If you made it difficult for each person in the world to have more than one account on the service, then anyone engaging in repeat fraud would very quickly stand out as such. (As many personas as you want, but only one account)
Facebook already lets you post for-sale ads in a group if it set up for it, it even reminds you from time to time to take down your ad if you have sold it. They do not take any commission for it and rely on you to you use your common sense as if you were selling in a newspaper.
Can't have both sides simultaneously, both a marketplace with too many scammers requiring a complicated solution AND A clean marketplace.
Or phrased another way, its like the gun control problem where the only people following the gun control laws are the non-criminals you have no need to fear, and the people who don't play by the rules are the only source of problems.
It sounds like new users would have to rub a bunch of bots just to start making their first sales, leading to high demand for a user friendly botting ecosystem
I once sold some parts on eBay from a washing machine I broke up, including the busted motor controller board - this particular model of board was not very sophisticated, but it was difficult to source and very expensive, so I sold it 'for spares or repair', stating that the main triac had blown and taken a track with it, so the board would either need some competent rework, or be stripped for what was still working. The guy whe bought it complained that I had sold a faulty part..and ebay agreed so I had to refund him. I insisted the board was returned 'for inspection' and just binned it. Too much hassle.
> I sold it 'for spares or repair'...complained that I had sold a faulty part..and ebay agreed so I had to refund him
Unfortunately even though eBay violated their own written policy by siding with him, this is SOP for them. They have a decades-long unwritten policy of shitting all over their sellers. This became apparent when they removed sellers' ability to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, which led to a huge influx of scammy buyers. eBay didn't care because more buyers means more revenue, and the sellers who had built their entire business on eBay had little choice but to stick around for the shafting.
In my (fortunately limited) eBay selling experience, you also just have some very stupid people. I got into a hassle with selling a brand new digital camera to someone because they refused to understand (in barely coherent English) that the "digital zoom" in the specs cut & pasted from the manufacturer was not a "zoom on the outside" to use his terminology.
I haven't sold on eBay for ages. There's very little I want to sell that is worth enough to go through the hassle though I'm not sure there are generally good alternatives. (For used photo gear, I'd use one of the online stores. I won't get as much but there's much less risk and hassle.)
Yep. When I sold my last Iphone, the guy said the wifi had connection issues (It was the version where your finger could reduce the signal). I told him that that was a known problem with the phone, but if he still had problems with it, he could take it to an apple store as the phone still had applecare+. He said the apple people are mean and he didn't trust them. He kept trying to get me to compensate him $50 for a repair until finally he ended up returning. So annoying.
Another lesson about ebay: Don't ever ship something to an address other than the one ebay has. My brother sold his phone and the guy asked him to ship it to "his daughter's house for a present". Turns out the account had been hacked and now he had just sent his phone to a scammer.
The last horror story i have: The same brother sold an iphone on ebay and the guy claimed it came with the screen cracked. Ebay sided with him on the return and my brother received a letter in return with nothing in it. Fortunately for him that time, ebay just let him keep the money and the scammer keep the phone (albeit, after 2 hours of arguing with their customer service).
TLDR: I've had way too terrible experiences on ebay to ever use them again.
I guess e-bay and amazon are good in aggregate, i.e. there are only a few scammers, so if you sell thousands of units you don't really care, but the risk is just not worth it for the individual seller.
I lied, i have one more minor horror story with buying too. I bought my rMBP off of ebay for a pretty good price. A few months after I bought it, it stopped booting and would show a grey screen with a question mark on a folder (means there is no boot drive to load from). When I took it into the apple store, I found out that this laptop had been dropped right before I bought it and had to have like $1500 worth of repairs as it was having the same problem.
So not only do you have to worry about scammers, you have to deal with a market for lemons [1]. (Quite ironic now that I think about it as that is one of my favorite economic articles)
I've found ebay is a great place to sell smaller, cheaper things that I probably couldn't find a buyer for on craigslist. Stuff of lower value (<$50) that I wouldn't mind losing anyway really, like an extra laptop battery or an old cell phone. For those things, it's not worth the effort to find a craigslist buyer and meet up somewhere, but tossing it into a flat rate box is very easy.
As things get more expensive on eBay, you become a bigger target for scammers and stand to lose much more, so it becomes a terrible option both because of how many scammers there are and their policy of screwing over sellers. Also the more expensive it is the more likely I'll be able to move it on craigslist which is a sure thing.
On the other hand for the odd item at less than $50 or so, I can't be bothered spending the time and effort to list on eBay. I'll just take it down to Goodwill or whatever. Not worth my time.
Selling on eBay only makes sense in bulk, with hundreds or thousands of SKUs. I gave up selling in low volume there long ago; nowadays for phones, tablets, and watches I use Swappa, and for anything else it's Craigslist or local "online garage sale" groups on social media.
The company I left last year sells the bulk of their products on Amazon, and maybe 1/4th of their inventory (same type of products) is listed on eBay. Amazon sales are relatively smooth with much less friction per sale than eBay. It's gotten better since they went with a sales aggregator service, but they still barely break even on eBay as opposed to Amazon and physical storefront sales, when they figure in labor and time costs. When I worked there the sales personnel were able to list five or six items on Amazon in the time it took to list one item on eBay.
On eBay, yes, because even today eBay still requires you to photograph the actual item you're listing if it's not new and factory sealed, and a lot of their merchandise is open-box. The switch to a sales aggregator service helped, but they still have to go hands-on with the bulk of their eBay listings.
eBay really doesn't make sense for a larger business unless they have thousands of the exact same, new sealed merchandise, and that tends to be the cheap mass produced garbage that you find on wish.com and similar sites. The small to mid closeouts wholesaler doesn't have a place on the site anymore, which is why many are moving to Amazon. Unfortunately, as this article points out, scammy buyers are just as much a problem there.
Whenever I sell any of my electronics now, I do it via Craigslist or specialty forums - Hardforum and Anandtech have pretty large For Sale/Trade communities and they all use Heatware for feedback.
You are identifying eBay with Paypal. If you accept, say, only bank transfer, the worst thing that can happen (in "regular" conditions; of course there are exceptional cases) is a negative feedback.
I've sold hundreds of items on eBay, almost all payable only via bank transfer/cash, and never had serious problems. If I get a smaller audience, well, that's an acceptable compromise in the long term.
They used to. But lately as they've spun off paypal they've been trying to distance from it because paypal takes a seperete cut of the transaction too.
>This works because Amazon heavily favors customers in their A-Z Guarantee claim process, and sellers don’t tend to record video evidence when shipping expensive merchandise (which they should)
FWIW my friend and I made an app called "Emberall" it makes it easy to record/label video and save it to the cloud. It's mostly used my new moms recording their kids, but would be equally useful to anyone that wanted to regularly record and archive video evidence like the article suggested.
As a buyer, I could still win a claim against you for bad shipping, though. We run two repair shops where we buy a LOT of parts on eBay, and the way some people ship things is atrocious. We've received laptop keyboards with keys hanging off, LCD screens that are broken--even video evidence wouldn't be sufficient for you, as the seller, to win the case if poor shipping is involved.
It's bad for sellers, too. Imagine shipping a $400 LCD (this is approximately how much the MacBook Pro retina screens cost) and the buyer receives it scratched or broken. It happens alarmingly often. As the seller, the only thing you can do is replace or refund. That's why you basically have to make a ton of profit off of these--or really learn how to package them (many sellers won't bother.)
Selling on Amazon at a small scale has bitten me lately as well. I had the same video card returned by three different buyers for buyer-only reasons (Bought by Mistake, Found Better Price) and there is no recourse for me and I'm out the $20 shipping each time unless I want to jeopardize my seller account
This is an opportunity for Amazon, IMHO. This sort of thing is what insurance is for - it's all about risk pooling so you can survive the big loss even if you're a small-scale seller.
Amazon could easily add an insurance policy option for sellers with a few minimal requirements for documenting the sale/shipping - Amazon collects a small fee, encourages better habits among small sellers and it all works.
Not quite escrow, but there's 'Fulfillment By Amazon', which takes care of distribution and shipping for you (albeit for additional fulfillment fees), and can be safer for both the buyer and seller since goods pass through inventory checks at a warehouse. (Disclaimer: work with Fulfillment By Amazon)
Can you post or point to more info on how this service works? To ask a specific question, can FbyA could handle items for which it's important for the seller to know which serial number has gone to which buyer?
The buyer's history was full of similar purchases.
The fraud problems exploded after eBay made it impossible to leave anything but positive feedback for buyers. You can't even leave neutral feedback for a buyer.
Amazon could set up some honey pots.. whereby they themselves send out the product. They know its good.
If a customer tries to scam that one... then Amazon has found their scammer.
Also... I'm surprised that Amazon just hands out these sorts of refunds on big ticket items. If I were them I'd require some sort of biometric data for the refund.
Can't they blacklist shipping addresses and/or credit cards? These people open new accounts for a reason; I'd think Amazon could connect and analyze data to discover and mark/blacklist scammers.
Hard to stop with pre-paid debit cards and PO boxes or mail forwarding services. It'd be pretty easy to just open a new one PO/forwarding address and use a different pre paid debit/VISA gift card to keep scamming.
There are too many counterfeits and schemes like this on Amazon. Finding a reliable seller that has a legitimate product and a good reputation has become almost impossible.
Interesting conclusion to the article. I stopped buying Apple items off Amazon a really long time ago because they let counterfeit chargers list as real Apple products and did jack shit about it. To some extent this has begun flowing in to other product categories for me as well.
"Meanwhile, the product page is flooded with fraudelent (sp) reviews, poisoning the well and moving future customers away from Amazon and towards trusted Apple retailers. Amazon and customers lose, but Apple possibly gets more customers."
Watch out for counterfit memory cards too. The jerks openly label them Sandisk, Kingston etc., but of course they are junk. I am puzzled why Amazon can't "follow the money" and completely shutdown these crooks.
I would assume they're following their own money. Still not sure why the name brands (Sandisk, Apple, etc) can't just sue Amazon for contributing to the trademark infringements...
Buying Apple brand products on Amazon at this point is just essentially impossible.
Buying printer ink I have found to be essentially impossible.
And there are more examples, those are just two obvious ones. It really doesn't seem like it would be all that hard for Amazon to distinguish between things they themselves are selling and things they are brokering through third parties.
The site claims to do this but in reality it doesn't. For one simple example, all reviews for a specific product are in common, so the reviews for off-brand fake printer ink and OEM real stuff are just all in the same product listing page because they have the same SKU presumably.
These problems are obvious, and it seems like Amazon is more than capable of fixing them, so you have to assume they don't by choice.
Everything that's fulfilled by Amazon gets mixed in the same warehouse. So if a third party seller that uses Amazon fulfilment sends them counterfeit goods, people buying "sold by Amazon" might get them. http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-ope...
Rode Microphones actually has a huge banner on their website warning people against buying on Amazon because of the sheer amount of fraud on there: http://www.rode.com.
Another thing that could be done... is that shippers could help out.
UPS, Fedex, USPS could all offer last step photo verification of packages, as a service. A few more dollars and you get a photo of what is inside and the handler packs the box up.
They could automate it by x-raying instead of taking a photo. It would clearly show the iphone vs a piece of clay and save them a bunch of time opening/resealing boxes.
That opens up opportunities for package handlers to start stealing stuff. For the most part, employees of UPS, Fedex, etc are not allowed to open packages (with international shipments being the exception, when they check for customs compliance). Your suggestion would be a massive policy change, possibly regulatory changes, and would open up more holes in the system.
That seems like a service that would cost quite a few dollars to implement and would only force the fraudsters to try a little bit harder.
I had someone buy my cell phone on eBay and then return it as broken by sending back a different nonfunctional phone. They even swapped the serial number sticker inside the battery compartment.
Amazon is handling the warehousing and shipping for a lot of this stuff, they could xray the shipping box as it goes out, in the event of a dispute, it would be pretty easy to check the scan to see if they shipped electronics or clay.
Interestingly, too, I noticed in 2013 that Amazon's general marketplace is rife for abuse: https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/16/is-amazon-coms-marketplac.... I assume that Amazon tracks the number of returns a particular account engages, but still, I wouldn't sell anything of real value on the site.
My guess is sellers absorb this as a cost of doing business. As long as fraud rates remain in low single digit percentage, it's probably not worth it for the seller or Amazon to fight it.
It is always fun to dissect these scams. There's an interesting e-commerce scam prevalent in India that popped up as the country embraced e-commerce without much credit card infrastructure in place (most online orders are paid to the delivery person in cash) https://simility.com/delivery-fraud:
"The fraudster businesses ordered hundreds of products from the victim’s website to be delivered on a daily basis. Meanwhile, if customers came into their store asking for an out-of-stock product, they were told it would be in stock later that day. Then the fraudsters paid the delivery person in cash for the small fraction of products they had pre-sold to customers, while returning the vast majority of unsold products without paying for them at the cost of the e-commerce company, thus completing the delivery fraud cycle."
Indeed, fraud and shrinkage are costs of doing business for practically any enterprise. My worst experience was being a nice guy and accepting a personal check, which of course bounced, so I was out my cost-of-goods plus an additional fee from the bank.
My main protection is that my cost-of-goods is about 1/5 of my selling price. Also, it's a niche market product that would probably be hard to re-sell. Because of my healthy mark-up, I can afford to handle practically any dispute by offering a prompt refund.
It's tougher if you're not a retailer, but an individual selling a few items, in which case you don't have a mark-up or the law of averages to fall back on.
given the amount of garbage amazon sells nowadays, if it didn't favoured the buyer they would be gone by now.
Almost everything i buy that is not books i have to return once or twice until i receive the item from a seller that is not trying to fence a couterfeit version. This happens with $100 pro SD cards down to $15 arduinos clones (which i think amazon still do not carry the original, but all ads show the original in the picture)
Which is why I don't generally purchase from Amazon unless the item's shipped and sold by Amazon or a third-party seller I trust (I only have a few of those).
If I wanted to play the eBay "buy it now" roulette, I'd buy off eBay.
I wonder if using Amazon's fulfillment service would help prevent against this. It is possible to get merchandise directly delivered to a fulfillment center from the vendor? It would be pretty easy for a seller to battle a fraud claim if they can show that they never got within 500 miles of the product.
While that certainly sounds like an effective way to prove that the seller isn't at fault, I have to wonder just what purpose they actually serve in such a scenario.
As others have pointed out, dealing with fraud at scale is really really difficult. As a result its cost are often priced into sales (either transaction costs or product costs).
While the privacy implications are large, it is an area where the more data around the transaction can identify systemic fraud. (which is to say organized group that spread their activity across a wide area to keep it below the radar of fraud detection algorithms).
In the case of phones, the seller has a lot of power. They can record the serial number/IMEI data from the box prior to selling it. At which point you can track where the phone is and if its being used. The challenge has always been taking action against the scammers. So perhaps there is a startup idea for a private investigation group in large cities that would go get scammers and recover merchandise. Such action would quickly reveal if the scammers were part of a larger organization or acting independently.
> So perhaps there is a startup idea for a private investigation group in large cities that would go get scammers and recover merchandise. Such action would quickly reveal if the scammers were part of a larger organization or acting independently.
I would, if the police were filling that particular niche. As most police departments have limited funds, simple economics steers them to putting their resources on the highest impact cases. So "Some guy defrauded me when {buying|selling} an iPhone." is below the activation threshold for the police.
But investigating these "small time" frauds benefits from scale. And like the company that was fixing parking tickets (normally a time consuming and costly exercise for the ticket receiver) by apply resources across a lot of people with parking tickets, I could imagine an equivalent "fraud fighter" business where the "fee" was 1/2 the recovered value. So the company investigates 1000 fraudulent amazon sales in the greater New York area, lets say they can prove half the time that it was fraud and get the appropriate fraud protection coverage to kick in. If they keep 50% of that value, they have now a revenue stream that is 25% of the defrauded value.
The mechanic here is that small time fraud allows millions (maybe billions) to be siphoned out of the commercial shopping stream. That burden is generally born by the sellers who raise prices to cover their losses. If a startup can mitigate those losses by 50%, and the seller is willing to split the mitigation 50/50 with the startup, then the seller has 25% less "loss due to fraud" and the startup has 25% of revenue from defeating fraud. It takes money out of the fraud pipeline.
When larger fraud rings are uncovered by the startup they can hand them off to the police who are willing to go after multi-million dollar criminal enterprises.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadWhen you send a replenishment shipment to Amazon for a FBA item, they don't open and verify you sent the correct product. You only find out about mistakes after the items have been sold.
For some common FBA items (presumably like an iPhone), you can co-mingle your inventory. This means you send in an identical item (with UPC, etc), and your inventory can be used to fulfill another seller's order (if that warehouse happens to be closer to the customer). They do the same for you.
This means buyers get their order faster, but it also means the item going out the door may not have been yours (opening the door for this clay scam to spread to impact many many sellers).
It's one thing to ship from the closest warehouse and credit the sale to whichever seller offered the price chosen by the customer. It's a totally different thing to not know where the item came from at all.
This does leave a door open for many items to ship before any error was realized... (sometimes within a few days, but usually up to a few weeks after it happened).
This isn't a solved problem but its certainly solvable because scammers should be pulling the trick repeatedly.
If even just one of those sellers is scamming (or just has a bad batch of products) and ships out multiple of these clay boxes, it's not at all surprising that you'd get multiple of these reviews.
eBay is slightly better for one-off sales: you can refuse returns (if specified in the listing), and cancel sales by buyers without verified paypal accounts or no feedback. Plus they have a sellers guarantee, although I don't know how often they'll actually stick up for the seller.
Perhaps Amazon Sellers are attempting to buy iPhones on the grey market at a discount, in order to resell them on Amazon at a profit. However the person they're dealing with upstream is actually shipping them clay or similar and plans to disappear when discovered.
Don't get me wrong, buyer scams exist, and that might be what is happening here. But why even post a review at all? The A-Z guidelines don't require it. He's also making the assumption that an Amazon Seller is going to open a sealed phone, or that their channels never get fraud in them.
I hadn't considered this possibility, but it is definitely possible as well. I see it as less likely, because the Amazon Seller that is the responsible party would probably get flagged for fraud and their account disabled. Additionally - the profiles of the buyers posting the reviews raises suspicion on their part.
> But why even post a review at all? The A-Z guidelines don't require it.
Claims that aren't resolved between buyer and seller involve a customer service individual from Amazon. If the buyer can point to pictures/reviews they posted, it likely strengthens their case and encourages the customer service to resolve in their favor, especially when the seller has no alternative picture evidence.
You realize that the "buyer profiles" you're mentioning are actually "reviewer profiles" that only list what other reviews that buyer has posted. It does not tell you a buyer's history (unless they post a review for an item), nor does it tell you when they signed up. It's not uncommon for people who have been using Amazon for years to never post any reviews, at least not until they're disappointed by their purchase.
And I'm not so sure that pointing to a review they posted strengthens an A-z Claim, at all. If images played a role, they'd let buyers upload an image when filing a claim, but they don't let that happen. They just let you fill in info about the shipment and then give you 2000 characters to explain the claim.
That said, Amazon definitely sides with the buyer most of the time. Filing a claim makes it so that the seller is automatically guilty unless they can prove otherwise. Auxiliary proof of wrong-doing is not necessary at all, especially since, as you mentioned, most sellers do not have proof that they _didn't_ ship the clay.
Looking on Amazon, I'm not seeing any iPhone 6 sellers other than Apple.
Ex: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00NQGP3L6/ref=dp_ol...
The "by Apple" under each listing in search results identifies the manufacturer/brand, not who is selling the product or fulfilling the order.
Look for "used" or "refurbished iPhone 5", there are many (many!) sellers like BREED and Vius. Most fulfill through Amazon, so this may be their way of trying to tackle this problem?
This took some work to find, but I found it:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HT4BF4U
Its a control theory textbook for $44 from a 3rd party. Which is a pretty good deal because the "real" book sitting on my desk is somewhat more expensive.
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Control-Systems-13th-Richard/d...
In very tiny letters the cover of the cheap version reads "Circulation of this edition outside the Indian Subcontinent is Unauthorized"
Something I find hilarious is the grey market edition is full of reviews that boil down to "this textbook sux and I hate my prof" but the genuine edition has one review by one guy who probably doesn't exist because if you click thru his reviews all look like stereotypical three word filler material.
I've been careful about documenting shipments since. Overall, I am reluctant to sell on Amazon these days because of the A-Z guarantee, which is only sustainable for large sellers.
Fraud is a sticky problem at scale. A few bad actors poison the well for everyone. As a buyer I appreciate Amazon's policies, but as an occasional seller I find them completely draconian. There is very little you can do to contest a decision against you.
From reading online, this is due to their use of Experian for identity verification. But if you don't have any credit history, as I do not, you do not exist within Experian's system and are automatically considered by Amazon to be a fraud threat and so are effectively cut out of the system and blacklisted without recourse, even if you're a longstanding good customer with other Amazon products.
Amazon's was especially bad because it allegedly had an appeal process that allowed submitting other forms of identity documents to bypass Experian's failure, but it never functioned correctly and attempting to verify my identity would fail because I had not yet verified my identity, and then the fact that I wouldn't verify my identity manually sent up a bigger red flag that permanently blacklisted me from the service with zero recourse now, even as I explained that I was unable to because their system wouldn't let me. Their customer support people would just say "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You are not allowed to participate in this service anymore." I lost a lot of respect for Amazon at that point.
Pro life tip: just get a credit card or two and nurture your credit score. Don't fuck over your utilities and make sure your payments are on time. Voila. You're a real boy. Not my rules or something I endorse but hey someone here had to say it.
In my area, it's almost impossible to even rent an apartment without good credit history, and it's absolutely impossible to rent a non-crappy apartment. Why? Because there are enough people with solid credit histories to fill the buildings, and because of the lower risk, there's no reason not to rely on credit checks.
Real pity because it's hard to know where to sell that sort of thing these days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11847858
1. Craigslist is slow. On eBay, you're done in 7 days. It can be pretty hard to get full market value on Craigslist in anywhere near that amount of time, if at all, especially if you're in a smaller city.
2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
3. People on Craigslist are needy. On eBay, I list and then I sell. I am selling two items on Craigslist right now. You should see my phone's messaging app. It's full of the unknown numbers of un-serious buyers asking pointless questions they'll never follow up on.
4. People on Craigslist are, well, people. That means I have to meet them somewhere. Arranging that always ends up being more difficult than a trip to the post office.
I view the tradeoff like this:
eBay = simple, easy, fast, but with a nonzero likelihood of total loss
Craigslist = nearly guaranteed to be difficult, slow, and annoying, but with a very low chance of total loss
I don't think it's an easy decision. They are definitely not interchangeable.
I was beginning to think that buyers on Craigslist are instructed to act this way. :P
I was moving and had to sell a lot of stuff fast. I scheduled around 6 people to come look at a futon. 0 showed. Even after I offered to give it away for free. Huge waste of time.
http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/31621453/2-people-shot-d... http://www.cbs46.com/story/26038628/two-people-injured-in-kc...
The site would also collect identifying information about everyone who transacts while using it. Maybe phone number, or driver license photo. You are not allowed to have more than one account, although you can have multiple "personas" if you wish, each with their own ratings. (but creating multiple personas cannot fool site anti-abuse staff, who can all obviously see the same account behind it) Creating an account is hard. The site would employ advanced protections against account takeover.
Whenever you buy and sell from someone, perhaps you can see the "7 degrees of Kevin Bacon" style interpersonal connections that link you to them via vouches. If fraud happens, it makes all of your connections look bad, and there would be an incentive for them to shun you, if they care about retaining their access to the site. When fraudsters get onto the platform, you can always trace their vouches back to the "bad apple" who showed poor judgment and began inviting the wrong certain people. Indeed, perhaps in order to retain access to the platform overtime, you have to keep getting vouches every once in a while.
Big sites would not use these policies since they would invoice friction on purchases in result in lower conversion. But perhaps there is a niche somewhere for a highly trusted online auction house.
I wonder how far a system like this could go in stamping out fraud online. It seems like the problem with fraudsters is that they can always keep coming back with new accounts that everyone is forced to treat with the certain default degree of trust, and then the fraudsters exploit that. If you made it difficult for each person in the world to have more than one account on the service, then anyone engaging in repeat fraud would very quickly stand out as such. (As many personas as you want, but only one account)
Seriously boggles the mind what people are willing to say on Nextdoor.
Or phrased another way, its like the gun control problem where the only people following the gun control laws are the non-criminals you have no need to fear, and the people who don't play by the rules are the only source of problems.
Unfortunately even though eBay violated their own written policy by siding with him, this is SOP for them. They have a decades-long unwritten policy of shitting all over their sellers. This became apparent when they removed sellers' ability to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, which led to a huge influx of scammy buyers. eBay didn't care because more buyers means more revenue, and the sellers who had built their entire business on eBay had little choice but to stick around for the shafting.
I haven't sold on eBay for ages. There's very little I want to sell that is worth enough to go through the hassle though I'm not sure there are generally good alternatives. (For used photo gear, I'd use one of the online stores. I won't get as much but there's much less risk and hassle.)
Another lesson about ebay: Don't ever ship something to an address other than the one ebay has. My brother sold his phone and the guy asked him to ship it to "his daughter's house for a present". Turns out the account had been hacked and now he had just sent his phone to a scammer.
The last horror story i have: The same brother sold an iphone on ebay and the guy claimed it came with the screen cracked. Ebay sided with him on the return and my brother received a letter in return with nothing in it. Fortunately for him that time, ebay just let him keep the money and the scammer keep the phone (albeit, after 2 hours of arguing with their customer service).
TLDR: I've had way too terrible experiences on ebay to ever use them again.
So not only do you have to worry about scammers, you have to deal with a market for lemons [1]. (Quite ironic now that I think about it as that is one of my favorite economic articles)
[1]: https://www.iei.liu.se/nek/730g83/artiklar/1.328833/AkerlofM...
As things get more expensive on eBay, you become a bigger target for scammers and stand to lose much more, so it becomes a terrible option both because of how many scammers there are and their policy of screwing over sellers. Also the more expensive it is the more likely I'll be able to move it on craigslist which is a sure thing.
The company I left last year sells the bulk of their products on Amazon, and maybe 1/4th of their inventory (same type of products) is listed on eBay. Amazon sales are relatively smooth with much less friction per sale than eBay. It's gotten better since they went with a sales aggregator service, but they still barely break even on eBay as opposed to Amazon and physical storefront sales, when they figure in labor and time costs. When I worked there the sales personnel were able to list five or six items on Amazon in the time it took to list one item on eBay.
eBay really doesn't make sense for a larger business unless they have thousands of the exact same, new sealed merchandise, and that tends to be the cheap mass produced garbage that you find on wish.com and similar sites. The small to mid closeouts wholesaler doesn't have a place on the site anymore, which is why many are moving to Amazon. Unfortunately, as this article points out, scammy buyers are just as much a problem there.
I've sold hundreds of items on eBay, almost all payable only via bank transfer/cash, and never had serious problems. If I get a smaller audience, well, that's an acceptable compromise in the long term.
FWIW my friend and I made an app called "Emberall" it makes it easy to record/label video and save it to the cloud. It's mostly used my new moms recording their kids, but would be equally useful to anyone that wanted to regularly record and archive video evidence like the article suggested.
It's bad for sellers, too. Imagine shipping a $400 LCD (this is approximately how much the MacBook Pro retina screens cost) and the buyer receives it scratched or broken. It happens alarmingly often. As the seller, the only thing you can do is replace or refund. That's why you basically have to make a ton of profit off of these--or really learn how to package them (many sellers won't bother.)
Amazon could easily add an insurance policy option for sellers with a few minimal requirements for documenting the sale/shipping - Amazon collects a small fee, encourages better habits among small sellers and it all works.
If a customer tries to scam that one... then Amazon has found their scammer.
Also... I'm surprised that Amazon just hands out these sorts of refunds on big ticket items. If I were them I'd require some sort of biometric data for the refund.
"Meanwhile, the product page is flooded with fraudelent (sp) reviews, poisoning the well and moving future customers away from Amazon and towards trusted Apple retailers. Amazon and customers lose, but Apple possibly gets more customers."
I'm surprised Amazon hasn't been sued by Apple for still allowing these to be sold.
Buying printer ink I have found to be essentially impossible.
And there are more examples, those are just two obvious ones. It really doesn't seem like it would be all that hard for Amazon to distinguish between things they themselves are selling and things they are brokering through third parties.
The site claims to do this but in reality it doesn't. For one simple example, all reviews for a specific product are in common, so the reviews for off-brand fake printer ink and OEM real stuff are just all in the same product listing page because they have the same SKU presumably.
These problems are obvious, and it seems like Amazon is more than capable of fixing them, so you have to assume they don't by choice.
UPS, Fedex, USPS could all offer last step photo verification of packages, as a service. A few more dollars and you get a photo of what is inside and the handler packs the box up.
I had someone buy my cell phone on eBay and then return it as broken by sending back a different nonfunctional phone. They even swapped the serial number sticker inside the battery compartment.
It is always fun to dissect these scams. There's an interesting e-commerce scam prevalent in India that popped up as the country embraced e-commerce without much credit card infrastructure in place (most online orders are paid to the delivery person in cash) https://simility.com/delivery-fraud:
"The fraudster businesses ordered hundreds of products from the victim’s website to be delivered on a daily basis. Meanwhile, if customers came into their store asking for an out-of-stock product, they were told it would be in stock later that day. Then the fraudsters paid the delivery person in cash for the small fraction of products they had pre-sold to customers, while returning the vast majority of unsold products without paying for them at the cost of the e-commerce company, thus completing the delivery fraud cycle."
My main protection is that my cost-of-goods is about 1/5 of my selling price. Also, it's a niche market product that would probably be hard to re-sell. Because of my healthy mark-up, I can afford to handle practically any dispute by offering a prompt refund.
It's tougher if you're not a retailer, but an individual selling a few items, in which case you don't have a mark-up or the law of averages to fall back on.
Almost everything i buy that is not books i have to return once or twice until i receive the item from a seller that is not trying to fence a couterfeit version. This happens with $100 pro SD cards down to $15 arduinos clones (which i think amazon still do not carry the original, but all ads show the original in the picture)
If I wanted to play the eBay "buy it now" roulette, I'd buy off eBay.
While the privacy implications are large, it is an area where the more data around the transaction can identify systemic fraud. (which is to say organized group that spread their activity across a wide area to keep it below the radar of fraud detection algorithms).
In the case of phones, the seller has a lot of power. They can record the serial number/IMEI data from the box prior to selling it. At which point you can track where the phone is and if its being used. The challenge has always been taking action against the scammers. So perhaps there is a startup idea for a private investigation group in large cities that would go get scammers and recover merchandise. Such action would quickly reveal if the scammers were part of a larger organization or acting independently.
You mean the police?
But investigating these "small time" frauds benefits from scale. And like the company that was fixing parking tickets (normally a time consuming and costly exercise for the ticket receiver) by apply resources across a lot of people with parking tickets, I could imagine an equivalent "fraud fighter" business where the "fee" was 1/2 the recovered value. So the company investigates 1000 fraudulent amazon sales in the greater New York area, lets say they can prove half the time that it was fraud and get the appropriate fraud protection coverage to kick in. If they keep 50% of that value, they have now a revenue stream that is 25% of the defrauded value.
The mechanic here is that small time fraud allows millions (maybe billions) to be siphoned out of the commercial shopping stream. That burden is generally born by the sellers who raise prices to cover their losses. If a startup can mitigate those losses by 50%, and the seller is willing to split the mitigation 50/50 with the startup, then the seller has 25% less "loss due to fraud" and the startup has 25% of revenue from defeating fraud. It takes money out of the fraud pipeline.
When larger fraud rings are uncovered by the startup they can hand them off to the police who are willing to go after multi-million dollar criminal enterprises.