The problem is not that counterfeiting is not being reported to law enforcement. The problem is that Amazon is doing far too little to allow them to enter Amazon's marketplace in the first place.
Amazon is making it far too easy for fraudsters to sell their crap, and (from what I hear) repeatedly: products removed because of counterfeit issues get re-added the next day under some other (or new) product code, or seller ID.
I work in the banking industry. It's not very unusual to discover that a client might be doing something that is suspicious enough to notify law enforcement of it (these notices are mandatory).
But that's the last line of defense. You're supposed to attempt to prevent these situations from happening in the first place, hence there are strict AML/KYC procedures.
If a bank were to open a new account for a client they had banned in the past for other reasons, financial supervisory authorities would bring down the hammer on them so fast and so hard, they'd regret it a thousand times more than whatever business they expected to make with that client.
Amazon's claim that they can't do more against counterfeits than they are already doing now is bullshit. There's an entire industry with decades of experience in that matter that they could turn to. But why would they.
Buying counterfeit items unintentionally can create huge problems for the consumer (eg [1]). Why is the onus on the consumer to look at a listing and decide if it's counterfeit or not?
Amazon is probably taking the stand they're no different to a search engine and Google isn't (mostly) responsible for search results. But that analogy is not apt.
The comparison to banking is far better. Banks can be held responsible is they fail due diligence with customers. Amazon should be held to the same standard.
Like how drop shipping fraud can even exist on Amazon is amazing. This should be so easy to detect (ie lots of shipments to one address or cluster of addresses).
No one should be able to sell branded products on Amazon without being verified. Period. And Amazon should be wholly responsible for any counterfeit that occurs as a result.
No one should be forced to buy products sourced by an unknown marketplace seller unless they choose to. The way Amazon is doing this is IMO fraudulent. They present you with a set of prices depending on which seller you choose to buy from. Because of inventory comingling though, assuming they're all FBA, you will be shipped the exact same item no matter which one you choose.
Not to mention there's legitimate consumer demand to purchase direct from manufacturer. I'd happily pay a steep premium to buy household products, food etc from Amazon if could guarantee it's not counterfeit. Instead we made a household rule that nothing that goes on or in our bodies comes from Amazon. This is after my partner got fake soda and I bought some counterfeit eyemakeup.
Hope you’re talking about new products since their are thousands of sellers selling their used items that are branded. Should those people be banned for trying to make money from items they don’t use anymore? Next, you’ll be saying only verified users can sell branded items on eBay and all marketplaces.
Amazon has such differentiation in their system. Pretty much the only place to sell used stuff these days is Facebook. Craigslist has gone downhill in my area. Now everything happens in fb groups run by awful people with no accountability. I'd much rather have Amazon fill this role than whatever scammer is gaming Facebook the best.
Agreed. The only thing they need to change to fix this is to stop co-mingling. I know that makes their logistics harder but then people stop buying products from bad vendors as they have low reviews and the vendors lose money because of all the returns of the crap. In this kind of marketplace, it is deceitful to say you are buying a product from company A but really you are buying from a random company. It would be like DoorDash delivering a Wendy's cheeseburger in a Burger King wrapper.
A better analogy would be delivering an odd-looking home made cheeseburger wrapped in a Burger King wrapper. A couple of my recent Amazon purchases have felt like this.
Or they are both from Burger King, but two different restaurants, one that repeatedly is closed for rat infestations.
Then there is the not new, new items issue, which is like you got a cheeseburger, but someone else got it first, licked the bun, decided they didn’t want it and returned it to the counter.
For all of the billions of dollars Walmart is spending trying to be like Amazon, this is the one area they can nail Amazon directly in the gut. Amazon’s entire cashflow positive low margin growth model falls apart if Amazon was the one that had to try to be like Walmart. Once consumers think of Amazon like eBay or Craigslist, the cost to reverse that view will be massive or impossible. Ironically, I get electronics that are in great shape and undamaged from eBay, not the same experience from Amazon.
Right now Amazon is a giant flea market. It’s on par with Craigslist, and a little worse than eBay. When you buy something on eBay you know who it came from. Amazon, you know nothing. Try ordering 5x of the same thing from Amazon and see the wild variations in quality and condition they are in.
> Right now Amazon is a giant flea market. It’s on par with Craigslist, and a little worse than eBay.
I'd argue eBay is actually safer than Amazon now, because at least the reviews are less sketchy and easier to trust and also buyers can self-select from more legit products by going for higher prices. And can guarantee you're buying from the same seller every time who will ship direct to you.
Whereas for things like makeup on amazon even if you choose higher priced you're still at risk of getting knockoffs due to comingling.
> Ironically, I get electronics that are in great shape and undamaged from eBay, not the same experience from Amazon.
I've had the same experience as you. I'm not sure what the cause is (maybe there's lower volume, so scammers don't use eBay as much), but I've bought things like top-of-the-line noise cancelling headphones refurbished at huge markdowns on eBay and had zero issues, but I've not had great experiences buying similar things from Amazon.
As I've pointed out numerous times previously, commingling doesn't significantly add to the counterfeit problem. Amazon internally tracks which product was sold by which seller, so if a customer leaves a bad review or complains about counterfeit, Amazon will know which seller it was and will punish them.
Even if there are no complaints but simply a higher than average return rate, Amazon will shut down a listing, and this is done based on the actual supplier of the stock, not the commingled seller. Source: have gotten such emails from Amazon when I was selling that specifically said "you may not have actually sold the orders these complaints are for but it's your inventory".
The issue is that the review is now co-mingled too. You weren't the seller but it was your inventory. That review needs to go against you and your inventory, not the other seller. That is another area with reviews that is bad. You should only see reviews for this product and seller combination.
Are you saying that if I buy a widget from vendorX, but due to co-mingling, the seller is actually vendorZ, Amazon correctly files my review against vendorZ? So, they co-mingle but still know exactly which seller put a specific instance of the widget into circulation?
"For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit."
That's good for Amazon, but from a consumer's (and responsible vendor's) perspective, until a bad actor vendor gets caught by this system and kicked off Amazon along with all the reviews of their counterfeit/bad inventory, consumers have no way to protect themselves. A consumer on Amazon cannot even protect themselves by ONLY ordering from Amazon's own seller listings. I've done that myself and ended up with used/repackaged stuff sold as new.
It creates a natural "market for lemons" experiment on Amazon. I can't imagine that is healthy for Amazon in the long run.
“1 star. Shipment was late.” I’m genuinely curious why people think that’s ok? How is saying the product sucks going to solve a problem with Amazon Logistics? Or even USPS/UPS/FedEx?
With their transaction volume, Amazon should be able to detect and properly address these reviews. You're not going to change consumer behavior here, it's on Amazon to adapt.
Sure, but if I don't want to get a bad product in the first place, comingling hurts me (or hurts Amazon when I give up on ordering stuff sold by multiple vendors from them, as I largely have).
My orders/year and dollars/year at Amazon are <50% what they were a few years ago.
I’m also cutting way back on my amazon spend. I still buy when the reviews don’t indicate counterfeit red flags, but it’s fewer and fewer product categories each year.
Amazon is no longer the first place I look for many items; with things like Shopify, high-quality eCom experiences are available to basically every business in a way they were not 10 years ago. For branded products, I’ve started buying direct from the brand websites with mostly good results. I’ll probably cancel Prime next year.
Does Amazon then proactively email all of the buyers telling them "you may have received a counterfeit product?", or do they figure that if they didn't notice then no harm no foul?
> I work in the banking industry. It's not very unusual to discover that a client might be doing something that is suspicious enough to notify law enforcement of it (these notices are mandatory).
You work in the banking industry. This is not the banking industry. Money laundering laws as they are written make bankers (and other financial service industry workers) criminally liable for criminal acts even if there was no criminal intent on the part of the bankers. That is not the case in retail, and I shudder even at the thought.
> You're supposed to attempt to prevent these situations from happening in the first place
You're not "supposed" to -- you are legally required to play police officer, and can be criminally liable if your organization allows this activity if there is any sort of way to detect it, even if that detection is not part of the legal mandate. Filing too many SARs can get you in as much trouble as actively money laundering.
These AML laws are horrific, and create a ton of bureaucratic burden on companies and force them to deliberately cut off customers who are using their facilities for totally legitimate reasons because they match a pattern also used by criminals. This, of course, it part of the reason for these laws; to starve sectors (for example, legal marijuana dispensaries) that can't be explicitly made illegal and have to be made "uncomfortable" instead.
Amazon shouldn't play cop; they should let law enforcement prosecute real cases of fraud, rather than trying to preemptively prevent fraud and in the process add burdensome requirements that restrict access to their marketplace and allow well-capitalized rent-seeking incumbents to further consolidate their market power over small shops that rely on equal access to the marketplace.
I really don't understand how a law enforcement agency is supposed to prevent fraud on Amazon, especially one constrained by national borders, when Amazon is a global platform. In what way do you propose a third party (not Amazon) reduce fraud on Amazon?
> This, of course, it part of the reason for these laws; to starve sectors (for example, legal marijuana dispensaries) that can't be explicitly made illegal and have to be made "uncomfortable" instead.
No, it's not, because:
1. These laws were in place long before half the country legalized marijuana.
2. The dispensaries just pass the costs of being shut out of the banking sector to the customer, and if we know anything about drugs, cost and a bit of inconvenience are not going to stop people from using them.
Amazon's claim that they can't do more against counterfeits than they are already doing now is bullshit.
Especially considering how effective they can ban customers for any ol' reason and make damn sure that said customer can't reopen the account, or open an account under a different name.
Amazon will do exactly shit, unless either the hammer of the law crashes down on them, unless it costs real money, or unless the publicity is so damning and visible that it hurts.
>> Especially considering how effective they can ban customers for any ol' reason and make damn sure that said customer can't reopen the account, or open an account under a different name.
> Amazon is making it far too easy for fraudsters to sell their crap, and (from what I hear) repeatedly: products removed because of counterfeit issues get re-added the next day under some other (or new) product code, or seller ID.
I stumbled upon the latest Amazon scam this past week. I was searching through my Amazon order history to find a wallet I had ordered years ago in the past. Imagine my surprise when my query for "wallet" returned an order with the wallet's name as the title, an image of a 5 pack of Lightning cables as the picture, and a 3 pack of Lightning cables when I actually clicked through.
The reviews [0] were clearly for a bunch of different items: the wallet I had purchased in the past, a laser pointer/clicker for pets, socks, etc. But the current item being sold was a set of generic Lightning cables. It amazes me that Amazon would let sellers so blatantly apply reviews from a bunch of older and wholly unrelated items to a completely new (and also unrelated) item.
Wow, one of the recent (almost certainly fake) five star reviews looks auto generated.
>They are really durable because they have just arrived, they are good price, they are exactly the length I want, they arrive very quickly and they look good quality.What else do I want?I can only think that the product is really good!
Also looks like the non-charger reviews are hidden on the mobile site?
The photo of the wallet falling apart with the Indian cough syrup packaging is hilarious... wow what a shambles having the same product code recycled by a vendor for multiple "crappy" products.
Amazon currently requires ID for signup. Any bank that allows online signup would have the same issues.
They do take significant measures to block repeat offenders, but bad actors are sophisticated.
I've heard, for example, that if a new account is selling inventory that's too similar to a banned account, it will get flagged. If accounts ramp up sales too quickly, if too many details match existing accounts (name, address, IP, credit card, etc) it's gone.
Even if these measures exist, their performance is evidently too poor to be acceptable.
Online signups work when risk is low to the point of being non-existent. Regulators aren't worried about students buying Ramen noodles.
Online signups don't work when there are credible risks of malfeasance. When you're a merchant making more than X in revenue, vetting becomes necessary. If banks can do this, then so can Amazon.
If a bank were to say "we're trying our best but people are still heavily abusing our online signup", then I'm all but certain that the regulatory response would be "too bad, then you can no longer offer online signup".
What do you recommend they do? I'm genuinely curious what reasonable (commercially viable for Amazon and that wouldn't have a chilling effect on legitimate small sellers) steps could be taken to drastically reduce counterfeit goods.
Profile new clients, and assign to them a risk score based on that assessment.
The client is a small wood-working shop somewhere in Ohio, has been registered as business for 30 years, and has a projected volume of 5-10 items sold per day? -> low risk, can be approved online.
The client is some LLC or similar that sells USB cables and USB flash drives, and that has been registered as a business only days or months ago, and the client is somewhere in a jurisdiction associated with exceptionally high reports of counterfeiting? -> high risk, no online approval. Visit some office.
I actually don't care if it's viable. If preventing harm and trash on the third party marketplace makes it nonviable, then it shouldn't exist. Right now I try to avoid it, and I absolutely avoid buying anything for my baby that might be harmful. Walmart gets those sales. It's impossible to buy with confidence from Amazon now.
I don't think they've internalised the extent of this problem yet. I agree with the previous post that in some cases it's worse than ebay.
Maybe scorched earth is the best answer here and built up a new resilient system slowly. The current system is demonstrably broken.
why does it have to be? What if the business that Amazon chose to engage in simply isn't commercially viable? I personally think there is a way to make it viable but I am almost certain that'd significantly bite into the crazy profit margins Amazon is reaping. And maybe that's the explanation, maybe Amazon's huge profits are largely coming from ignoring market rules that everyone else needs to abide by and, when the market is made fair, they'll still be profitable, but forced by competition to survive on much thinner margins.
1. The same thing that any of the millions of businesses that operate storefronts do. They've figured this out, somehow.
2. Alternatively: I don't know, and I don't care. They are a logistics company. It's their job to figure this out, not mine. If they want to pay me, though, I'll be happy to consult.
Problem is, these scam companies (really thats all they are anyways) will just have another employee sign up, etc. Requiring an ID is a very poor way to fight against any determined scam network.
All Amazon needs to do is just use their own site. It's so laughably obvious, like 1TB flash drives.
Amazon needs to vet the products sold on it better - it can use ML if it can prove that ML is sufficient, but in the meantime it should just be forced back into using manual labour for vetting and being held accountable for that vetting.
The issue, IMO, is that Amazon isn't getting more than a slap on the wrists so there is no motivation for them to fix the issue.
That the richest company in the world can’t do this—the one that also runs cloud infrastructure for too much of the net—yet smaller businesses figure out how to operate in the regulatory framework, suggests that they just don’t give a fuck. Bezos can buy his way out of literally any scrutiny.
This is the true injustice of our system. Bezos can just play the Amazon Exceptionalism card.
Those products are often just white labeled items purchased from various suppliers - there is no guarantee of quality. And, while I think they're probably policing these a bit closer, I'm sure you could find a counterfeit or two.
Yes but the perception is that the Amazon brand is "better" somehow - and it creates a perverse incentive for Amazon to NGAF about counterfeiters.
Every time I buy on Amazon I have to use Fakespot to get something decent. For some things that's the best way to go, but it's a huge PITA, and I'm to the point where going to the local mall/outlet is actually less work now.
Absolutely - I didn't mean to indicate that these products were of a high quality, more to disabuse the OP of that perception. Something being the Amazon brand is absolutely no guarantee.
I wonder if we might actually take some insight from white-labeling in how to handle this... how is President's Choice held to account when a can contains contaminated food? Do they get to defer any liability on the original manufacturer or by white labeling have they accepted all the liability where the customer is concerned?
Seems to me to be a minimum response meant to satisfy vendor outrage and hold off law enforcement investigations.
The headline is very misleading and makes me wonder if it came from an Amazon press release: any crack-down on counterfeiters on Amazon, no matter how slight, would statistically qualify as a "significant ramp-up" compared to their previous habit of doing nothing until being threatened with a law suit by vendors.
The "ramp up" is that they will report all unresolved counterfeit incidents to "the authorities" instead of just some. I don't know to what degree "the authorities" do anything about it.
It seems like permanently freezing counterfeiters out of the marketplace would be the obvious thing to do, and if Amazon lacks the technical capacity to do so or to prevent their return I’d say that’s a pretty fundamental problem.
> It seems like permanently freezing counterfeiters out of the marketplace would be the obvious thing to do, and if Amazon lacks the technical capacity to do so or to prevent their return I’d say that’s a pretty fundamental problem.
If it was that easy to "permanently freezing counterfeiters out of the marketplace", they would have done it already. Blocking somebody, especially somebody with a strong financial motive, from doing something on the internet is incredibly challenging. They'll go to great lengths to route around your block using all kinds of fun exciting methods. Methods might include creating a new account with a different business & address, taking over the account of a dormant but reputable seller, and probably a huge list of other things I can't even think of right now.
But seriously. Blocking or banning people on the internet is almost impossible. If they have the will, they'll find a way back onto your site.
I reject that entirely - we're talking about giving people access to a selling platform, not a social website which depends on maximum user growth and minimal barrier to participation.
Amazon has prioritized growing the number of sellers, but they're in complete control of who they allow to sell on their platform, and what they require from sellers prior to beginning. You seem to be accepting, uncritically, the argument of "platforms" everywhere who don't want to be held responsible for what their "users" do. I don't agree with that perspective generally, and I think it's especially silly with respect to a web commerce company like Amazon.
You can reject all you want, but the reality is that it is almost impossible to block people on the internet. You cannot change this fact no matter how much you wish it were so.
This is probably why amazon wants to get law enforcement involved. Those folks can stop the people behind the fraud....
> "is almost impossible to block people on the internet"
That doesn't actually mean anything though; the modern internet isn't some homogeneous medium people choose how to interact with, it's a federation of privately managed networks and services. Amazon can control exactly what is required for people to become sellers on their network, and it sounds like they may actually be starting to do just that.
> it is almost impossible to block people on the internet
This isn't just "people on the internet", though. These are people who have some sort of physical presence that they ship goods from, and have some interaction with the financial system so they can accept payment. There are finite ways that they can do this, and that provides a way to actually identify the person across account signups in order to keep them blocked.
No, it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than, say, trying to block someone from HN who is determined to keep creating new accounts using VPNs, proxies, whatever.
Account verification is orthogonal to communication channel. There's nothing about the internet that precludes identity and other KYC checks. Your argument only makes sense if Amazon needs an extremely high throughput and low latency of new vendors coming online. The status quo has certainly been fantastic for their business, but I don't see any reason why they can't afford to add a little friction there.
You ban them from your platform, and since you know them, they'll have a really hard time getting back on. And yes, report them to the authorities too.
The bans are much less permanent than amazon makes them seem - next day: new name, same product, same listing. Banning is quite ineffective on actually removing counterfeit items.
When a merchant account is opened, it should be possible to accurately identify an individual responsible such that civil/criminal charges can be filed against him. Anything short of that will end up with a new account opened the next day, and it doesn't matter the platform.
I actually prefer the current chaos to something like Youtube where they have given rights owners an (practically) unappealable veto over everyone's content. Yes, I know that 98% of the strikes are probably correct, but some are completely bogus and others are exploiting fair use correctly.
One of the first things we would lose with a Youtube style agreement is the doctrine of first sale.
Right now they require ID when opening new accounts. My understanding (based on talking to sellers) is that it became significantly more difficult to open new accounts when this policy went into effect. Sophisticated criminals willing to fake IDs or commit identity fraud are hard to counter.
I do think they could enforce an insurance requirement which would help pay out civil judgements, at least.
By the way, YouTube claims are easily disputed in almost all cases, with the exception of UMG which has a contractual right to veto counternotices. Otherwise, YouTube responds to disputes reasonably, in my understanding. This wasn't always the case, many of the favorable policies are only a few years old, such as holding revenue in escrow until a dispute is resolved.
I don't think they can bring criminal charges just for opening an account. But if they continue to do business after supplying false information that might be some kind of fraud.
But they could also just enforce stricter rules around reviewing and approving sellers. While not having the threat of legal action it is something they have much more control around.
Stop commingling inventory. At the very least, stop commingling third party and Amazon inventory so that if I order an item that is "sold by Amazon.com" I can be reasonably sure I'm not going to get a counterfeit item.
My question above was "What policy do you believe would prevent new sellers from selling counterfeits while still allowing legitimate sellers?". Abolishing the commingling program doesn't do that.
So your position is that Amazon itself knowingly sells counterfeit items? Otherwise I don't see how stopping commingling gives a "slight" reduction in the chances of receiving a counterfeit item when buying directly from Amazon.
The chances of receiving a counterfeit in general are very low. And there are some who've accused Amazon of selling counterfeits directly, so the odds there aren't 0.
The relative reduction is probably large, but if it's something like one in 100k instead of one in 10k, that's a slight reduction on an absolute level.
>The chances of receiving a counterfeit in general are very low.
Well, that's open for debate, and the concrete data is so scarce that it's hard to have any meaningful debate, but I thin we disagree here.
>And there are some who've accused Amazon of selling counterfeits directly...
Got a link for such an accusation? I've only ever seen them accused of commingling third party inventory with their own, which sometimes results in receiving a counterfeit item when buying directly from Amazon, but that's a very different thing from Amazon procuring and selling counterfeits.
Lawsuits. William Sonoma and Mercedes Benz have both sued Amazon claiming they sold counterfeit. Popsockets recently told Congress that Amazon had sold counterfeits (although as I commented in the recent HN thread on that (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079904), popsockets has been bullying other sellers in ways I view as illegitimate, so I take anything they say with a grain of salt.)
This is nothing unique to Amazon, by the way. I could show you lawsuits against Walmart and Costco for selling counterfeits. Every massive retail company that doesn't buy 100% from the manufacturer is going to eventually have some leaks. You buy from the grey market, vast majority of the time you get legitimate cheaper product, occasionally someone scams you.
Oh, and Apple famously sued Mobile Star LLC claiming that they had sold Amazon counterfeit products through Vendor, which was "sold and shipped by Amazon.com".
Getting rid of the entire marketplace, which is more than half their sales, just to stop a relatively small counterfeiting issue seems overkill to me, but you're entitled to your opinion.
And what exactly is "law enforcement" going to do about this? Not much.
It's not like Mr. FBI Guy is going to knock on the door of a counterfeit factory in China and say, "Can you pretty please stop making garbage that looks like quality merchandise? KTHXBAI"
It's my understanding that stopping counterfeits are usually the province of Customs. But that department is already overwhelmed by dealing with the existing flow of counterfeit items and only stops a very small percent of them getting into the country as it is.
This move by Amazon feels like a PR stunt, or offloading its responsibility to its customers onto the government, and will not actually have a material impact.
Most other American retailers don't seem to have any trouble with this, so I shop with them instead of Amazon. At this point, the issue I have with Amazon if simply one of trust: I don't trust them any more.
I might occasionally but something from Amazon, but only stuff that is basically "uncounterfeitable" such as a bunch of simple, metal bookends or plastic cord management sheathing. I also usually wait for them to offer me yet another free month of Prime so they eat the shipping cost too.
I shared your unhappiness re: not knowing if I was unwittingly buying a counterfeit. However, rather than close my account, I do my research on Amazon as far as I can take it, then go to the website of the manufacturer (Garmin, Das Keyboard, Bluelounge, etc.) and buy direct from them. No counterfeits EVER.
I do the opposite. Amazon browsing is next to impossible unless you already know what you're looking for. For all the complaints about counterfeits I've never once received one.
Even stuff I thought would definitely be fake (electrical components) was legit.
do not buy brand products off amazon! unless it's the official brand store. at this point, there's so little to gain doing so. the only thing that comes to mind is not having to sign up for another online account and entering details. nowadays, most brands match up the fast 2-days shipping and they have better discounts and deals, and you know the stuff you are getting is from them.
Anecdote time. Last year I bought an Anker power brick via Amazon, using the link on Anker's own website. When it arrived, instead of Anker's normal well-designed retail packaging, the brick was simply wrapped in bubble wrap, with a printed label stating that it was "new" and thrown into its shipping box. I inquired with Anker support about this, but they could only say that all their products they send to Amazon for distribution are in retail packaging. I did confirm that the item was purchased through the AnkerDirect seller, so I can only guess that it was either a returned item or that the retail packaging had been damaged, and someone at the Amazon warehouse repackaged it and put it back in the "new" bin. I ended up returning it for a refund. My trust of Amazon as a retail platform has been steadily eroding over the past few years, and this was just another reason to shop elsewhere.
Amazon commingles inventory, so if there were any other sellers of the item, you get an item from a random seller, not necessarily an item that was provided by the seller you purchased from.
Since a counterfeit power supply can kill you (a British study showed out of 400 tested chargers, 398 could not safely handle power surges), this is literally a life-and-death issue.
The thing is, the commingled stickerless inventory program is only supposed to apply to items sold by Amazon, not to third parties like AnkerDirect, so the hypothesis it's fulfilled-by-Amazon that screwed the pooch is more likely.
Amazon should require certification from a safety lab like UL or CE before allowing any seller to sell inventory. And they should also require sellers of these products to post a bond or provide proof of liability insurance before allowing them to list these items.
That would cut down on the number of shitty dangerous power suppliers they're selling.
Unfortunately CE is self-certified. In theory the vendor is liable if their product doesn't comply with the requirements, but good luck sueing some Alibaba reseller from Shezhen.
Certifications from UL or similar labs are much better, but many producers don't hesitate to also fake the UL logo on their fake products.
Right. I looked this morning, and AnkerDirect claims to be "...the sole authorized seller of authentic Anker products (other than Amazon) on the Amazon platform." I don't recall if this was true back at the time I bought the power brick, but I suspect it was.
The worst is when you call support and they make it seem like its your fault their market place is flawed. Took me three representatives to return a fake keyboard. Cancelled my subscription to Prime and began the transition from AWS to Azure.
I bought a cologne from Amazon that I felt is not genuine. I bought another one from Amazon and bought the exact same thing from the company online store. Surprised to see they were very different in packages and product shape. The scent was different according to many blind tests I did myself and using my friends help. I posted a review on the listing[1] pointing all of this out. Called Amazon and they refunded my money immediately and asked me to discard the product.
This product was SHIPED AND SOLD BY AMAZON.
It's not a 3rd party seller problem. Amazon might be using 3rd party suppliers too.
> It's not a 3rd party seller problem. Amazon might be using 3rd party suppliers too.
It's because Amazon co-mingles stock between sellers for the same SKUs. As in, they add all of the same SKU to one one big inventory and no matter who sells the product, they pull randomly from that inventory. So while it was shipped and sold by them, they most likely didnt supply the product.
I bought a counterfeit hummingbird feeder on Amazon, which leaked sugary water everywhere.
I didn't even know it was counterfeit until I saw the identical one at Home Depot. Surprised that HD would sell something so non-functional, I took it apart and noticed it was assembled entirely differently - excluding the screw on the bottom that caused the Amazon one to leak. Both were completely identical on the outside.
Imagine what else we're buying if something as banal as a hummingbird feeder is counterfeited and sold via Amazon.
That is not even the only fake birdfeeder I've seen on Amazon! I'm in a couple bird nerd fandom subreddits and people discuss counterfit birdfeeders and anti-squirrel feeders on the subs weirdly frequently. Basically Chinese firms reverse engineer the designs, swap out for bottom barrel components and profit off the price arbitrage.
At least when you go to the faux-product markets in real life on the streets of NYC and SF you know you're getting a "Kate Slade" bag not a Kate Spade bag etc. But on Amazon you're just fish in the barrel and not even getting a good deal for buying the sketchy or off-label item.
It's a bummer and I wish Amazon would deal with it.
Seems to be a lot of comments in here supporting Amazon (I never got any counterfeits) and even victim blaming like you noted (if you got counterfeit, you should have known; therefore, you wanted it).
Reminds me of the PR attack on lawyers and the plaintiff
and the McDonald's coffee. Sure its easy to spin a case that awarded millions for spilling hot coffee and victim/lawyer blaming...then come to find out the McDonald's systematically heated their coffee above safety and industry standards, had already been warned, and lid was not fasten properly, and the woman had 3rd degree burns through her jeans on her privates/thighs requiring skin grafts. The "millions" was punitive for McDonald's willfully disregarding prior warnings about their coffee and calculated as 1 day of coffee sales (seems pretty reasonable).
I can't wait until someone sues Amazon and all the documents and communications leak revealing what Amazon executives knew about the counterfeits and how they willfully refused to make changes to curb counterfeits, and rather took actions to facilitate and cover up the source of counterfeits (co-mingling products).
They claim they are just a platform for their third party sellers so if a third party seller send you a fake or dangerous product then they are "the culprit," not Amazon, Amazon is just a middleman. Of course, most third party sellers who send counterfeits are Chinese fly-by-night operations that can't be located to sue when someone gets hurt.
I wonder how tested in the court is this theory? Is it established precedent? Because as a consumer, I'm shopping on Amazon.com and I pay Amazon.com and I receive goods from Amazon.com. Maybe they're legally sound, but it sure looks like I'm transacting with Amazon.com and not some third-party seller most of the time.
Uber and Lyft have been losing this argument in court. I suspect this will come to impact Amazon too, which actually is a "platform". This would be a good outcome.
Yes it has been tested in court and amazon has lost. In the case of Oberdorf v. Amazon.com Inc a woman was able to sue Amazon. However this ruling depended on the original seller not being available.
Yes, I had purchased a bunch of Apple USB Ethernet adapters from them and they seemed to work OK. Then one day I brought my new 2015 12" MacBook and they don't work. In the Network control panel, the adapter name is random Chinese ideograph. On closer inspection with a magnifying glass, it becomes apparent the labels on the adapters are not precisely centered the way Apple's are.
I returned them for a full refund, even after 1.5 years, but I can't shake the belief they knew about it. Furthermore, when they find out something is a counterfeit, they should be required to notify all known past purchasers and offer them the option of a refund or exchange.
I guess there's safety concerns from sub-standard components burning out, or storage sizes being fraudulent and you only noticing when it's too late, or good-old lead paint, or more issues.
But yeah, I have never even had a hint of any suspicion that anything I've bought on Amazon was a fake.
I read a really interesting article once about a 128MB sd card having its firmware flashed so it claimed to be a 512MB. You saved files and when you got to the "128th" MB it just started writing at the 0th sector again...
I thought that was a very clever fraud. Can't find the article now but I'll check on desktop later and share if I can...
> storage sizes being fraudulent and you only noticing when it's too late
It's good practice to run all your new memory cards through a storage test application to confirm it can store what it says. Doesn't mean it's not counterfeit, or that it will continue to accept writes to the full disk, but it's probably ok (and you may have sequential write/read stats as a result)
I read a really interesting article once about a 128MB sd card having its firmware flashed so it claimed to be a 512MB. You saved files and when you got to the "128th" MB it just started writing at the 0th sector again...
I thought that was a very clever fraud. Can't find the article now...
Um... You're article doesn't mention amazon, everything in it happened in China, and there is no actual evidence the issue was the charger or that the charger was "fake". Its just someone who electricuted themselves while using a phone.
Like a router with a backdoor in it? Vitamins contaminated with carcinogenic material because testing and purity cost a lot but are invisible. Sadly I think most consumers have your mind set, they’ll never learn what caused their cancer or why they’re part of a giant botnet. American zen masters.
> Like a router with a backdoor in it? Vitamins contaminated with carcinogenic material because testing and purity cost a lot but are invisible.
Both of these things can and do happen with items at B&M stores and other vendors.
Think about the whole cable modem backdoor that was recently discovered...
Or the various cases of food poisoning that happen seemingly regularly...
You aren't safe just because you purchase items thru a different "trusted" source. This is the outsourced world we live in today. When everything is outsourced, the possibility for counterfeiting, tampering, and maliciousness rises - because nobody can be held accountable (diffusion of responsibility).
At one time, it was possible to trace things back far enough to find the original culprit and prosecute them. Today, if you're lucky, you might find a reasonable suspicion of a company - who will instantly (sometimes with a literal click of a button) close up shop, move everything, and re-open the next day under a new name. Furthermore, even if you ask around about them, nobody knows nuthin'.
The purpose of a "brand name" is to provide insulation against this. If you have a brand that you trust, and you buy from that brand regularly, and the brand is based in your country, then they're more trustworthy because you know you can sue them or drag them into the mud in the court of public opinion. Whereas buying "the same" stuff from some random company in China gives you no such protection as they can just fold or trade under a different name.
Food poisoning is an interesting case to bring up. If you know that a neighborhood restaurant has food poisoned you or someone you know, then you stop buying food there.
And if you buy something from a physical store like Best Buy or Safeway, you also know there's someone you can sue and somewhere you can go if the product is recalled by the manufacturer. Those companies have a brand to protect and will take steps to do so.
So no, the brand isn't dead and it is still a good proxy for quality of service or quality of merchandise. I forgot that for about 8 years until Amazon reminded me.
If a non-counterfeit good has a 1/1,000,000 chance of burning your house down, and the counterfeit has a 1/10,000 chance, you're going to have overwhelmingly happy consumers in both scenarios.
I've never had it happen to me personally, but there have been a number of times where I've been saved by reviews. My policy has been to read the negative reviews for every product (not just look at the overall star rating), and if there's even a hint of counterfeiting in any of them to move on to something else.
It's a pain, but so far it's worked, and every time I'm looking for things I see more horror stories: "Huggies" diapers that have no branding on them and break all the time, electronics sold as new that would be considered in poor quality if sold as used, etc.
Problem with reviews on Amazon is, just like any other review system - it can be gamed.
Reviews can be "bought" - sometimes literally, sometimes "under the table" (reviewers are supposed to disclose things like "I was sent this item by the seller for feedback and review" or similar - but do you think all reviewers are honest?).
What also happens (far more often than you'd believe - but if you look close, you can find it) is a product will be sold and gain a large number of great reviews, then the seller will turn around, and mark the item's cost up to some insane amount (an item normal selling for $5.00 will be marked up to $99999.99), only to later put a different item (description, pictures, etc) in it's place (keeping the SKU the same), drop the price back down to something reasonable, and now "new item" has "old item" 5-star reviews.
I see this all the time on Amazon when I look at my purchase history over a year or more time-frame. I purchase a lot of stuff on Amazon, and I mostly see this kind of thing on the hobby electronics and stuff I purchase, but I have seen it also on regular products. I'll look at my past purchases, and the name and picture of a purchase I made will be changed to something I know for a fact I didn't purchase (because it was something I'd never purchase, due to non-interest, my purchasing patterns, or not marketed for my demographic or such).
Of course, this is with "hobby electronics" - a lot of which are drop-shipped out of China/Hong Kong, or were imported to the USA for "Amazon Fulfillment" purposes. But I have no doubt this same thing happens with other, more general products. If the seller doing this plays their cards right (like selling RAM sticks with the reviews for flash memory cards), it can sometimes be very difficult to tell that a swap was made, without reading every review very carefully. Imagine this being done with products like clothing or fashion accessories...!
Search amazon for “1tb flash drive”. Once you get past the ads/sponsors/Amazons Choice you’ll see a $300 1tb flash drive as the first option, and the second is [1] $20, and they advertise that it even comes with free gifts! Now read the reviews. Even though it has a 3 star rating, nearly every review says it’s (at best) 16gb, and at worst failed after the first use.
And this is the second most recommended product on Amazon for that search.
I’ve made this comment a few times over the years. “It’s never happened to me so I don’t have a problem with it.” And then it happened to me. And then again. And again.
Has it not happened to you, or has it not happened to you yet?
I've also never been suspicious of any item I've bought on Amazon and I buy almost everything there. Maybe I'm extremely naïve, or maybe other people are going out of their way to find suspicious items? I'm not really sure.
What kind of items are you buying? I've received counterfeits for super random items like pillow shams (completely different color and material than advertised) and light bulbs (burned out after just a few days of use). It's also a well-known fact that you should never buy beauty products on Amazon because almost all of them are counterfeits. They arrive with a totally different color/texture/smell to the original product and have been found to contain known carcinogens and even animal waste.
The risk of counterfeits means I will rarely buy anything electronic from Amazon.
On the other hand, take a category like pet toys. Cheap plastic things where I'm not concerned with getting the genuine article, like a collapsible dog bowl. There are dozens of identical "brands" with thrown-together phonetic names for an entirely identical product with slight price differences. How do I began to choose? And who's to say any of them are produced with safe materials?
I'd really like to know how well Amazon's "put anything on the digital shelf" strategy works over a curated product inventory. Exceedingly well, I suspect, but it seems like the blowback over poor product will continue increasing.
Same here. Amazon is a mess, and in many ways worse than eBay was when it got its (deservedly) bad reputation.
For many product categories, almost every single result flunks Fakespot.com with a D or worse, so it's too much work to keep going in the hope of finding some wheat in the chaff, and easier to just buy somewhere else like B&H Photo or Target.com. Two recent examples: Ethernet cables and sleep masks for airplane travel.
Then there are bizarre things like how when you select "Sort by price, low to high", the results aren't actually sorted by price, and half the results you saw in the default view don't appear in the sorted by price view.
Pet toys and food were the first thing I stopped buying off of Amazon. I have zero faith in the quality control of the product coming down - in the United States, at least, pet food and pet toys are actually held to a decent standard.
Even American pet food/treats is riddled with frauds or questionable companies. There's a treat called No-Hide that people have sent in for DNA testing and other testing that is suspiciously similar to rawhide despite being claimed to be starch based The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture did an investigation and this person FOIA'd the documents and the testing shows a lot of discrepancies even though the government cleared them of misbranding. https://truthaboutpetfood.com/is-it-no-hide-or-rawhide-from-...
Law enforcement is going to love being inundated with tons of different requests from Amazon constantly. Counterfeit goods is probably one of their lowest policing priorities. This is just Amazon passing the buck so they can point and say "we did something!".
I bought a car part on Amazon that, when I opened it, was a chunk of blue clay in a box that was poorly-printed to look like the box of the correct part. I never bothered to return it because the cost of shipping and my time would have been more than the cost of the part.
I'm sure this seller was eventually discovered to be selling obvious fraudulent goods, but I never received any notification saying as much.
Cost of shipping? Time? Returning this kind of stuff is something Amazon if very good at. It won't cost you anything and they have dozens of ways of returning things (by mail, from a UPS store, from Kohls, they will come and pick it up, etc.) Returns are easy and free.
My hourly rate after tax is about $50, let's say $60 for easy math. That means that returning a $7 item has to take less than 7 minutes to be worth it, less if there's other costs besides time. I'll easily spend that much time in the car.
In many (most?) cases time=money is a false equivalence because time spent doing something isn't necessarily always time you would be spending working, but the local postal services are only open during hours I would be working, so it's not a false equivalence in my case.
Receiving the item you ordered and paid for is easy and free. Returns are not.
Why are we even having this conversation? They sent me a box of clay when I ordered a car part. This isn't an ambiguous situation.
For the time you spent typing this comment you could have created a return and had UPS come pick up your package or in my experience, Amazon wouldn't have even required you to return the item and would have just sent you a replacement.
Also, I see your rationale and think you are really missing the point. You may have a small hourly rate of $60 and use that as justification but its complete garbage. I do better than that and I work with guys who literally make 10's of millions a year. Taking a preventable loss that only requires a phone call or a chat is foolish, even if it is $7.00.
If we're going to talk about missing the point: Which is the better way to prevent the loss?
1. Order item from Amazon, discover item is a block of clay, go through the Amazon returns process, reorder item, which may be a block of clay again.
2. Order item from a site that ships me the item I order instead of a block of clay.
So again, why are we talking about this? We can argue as much as we want about Amazon's return policies, but the return policy would be irrelevant if they had sent me the item I ordered instead of a block of clay.
Unless it's shipped direct by the seller in which case Amazon requires you to pay for shipping even if you have to send it all the way back to China. And they don't refund anything until the seller confirms it's received.
My fiancee had to ship a $20.00 dress that wasn't even the right color or anything like the picture back, costing $40.00, before Amazon would even refund her. And worse, the package actually bounced because the seller had folded at some point in the return period, so the package arrived right back on her doorstep. Because Amazon didn't have confirmation from the non-existent seller that the package had arrived at their non-existent company, she had to spend several hours on the phone with CSRs and different people haggling over what was essentially $60.00.
But if everyone that receives a counterfeit item returns it, that costs Amazon a lot of money (they have to pay to return it and pay to ship you a new one - all on their dime). By not returning it you are just playing into their hands. Not only did they not have to send you a legitimate item, that they can now sell to someone else, but they didn't have to pay the roundtrip shipping fees (plus someones salary to deal with it when they get it back).
And this isn't even touching on being nice to other people. That counterfeiter can keep on sending blocks of clay to other unsuspecting people and you did nothing to help stop them.
I left a comment above about how much of a pain in the ass it is to even get Amazon to issue a refund if the item isn't FBA. It took my fiancee over a month of calling them before she got anything.
>My hourly rate after tax is about $50, let's say $60 for easy math. That means that returning a $7 item has to take less than 7 minutes to be worth it, less if there's other costs besides time. I'll easily spend that much time in the car.
This math is infuriating. Do you actually bill for every waking hour of your day? If not, this calculation is nonsense. My hourly rate is similar, but I only work 8 hours per day. I have plenty of time after work to do things like spend 7 minutes returning a cheap item. I have absolutely no desire to work 16 hour days even if I was paid overtime, so it's totally disingenuous to pretend that my time after work is worth the same exact rate as my "hourly" rate at work. (I'm actually salaried so if I did want to work more it would just decrease my hourly rate.)
Maybe it's just a lack of imagination on my part, but I can't imagine how that paragraph is actually true. When I'm in the Bay area, I take returns to the UPS store, which has pretty long hours. When I'm at my second home in the middle of nowhere, Amazon will schedule a pickup for free.
TBH I regret even dignifying the return idea with a response, because the return policy is a stupid distraction to begin with. The real point here is: it's better to order an item and receive that item, than to order an item and receive a block of clay instead. Is this really an argument we need to have? Return policy is irrelevant: if I had received the part I ordered I wouldn't have returned it.
One main benefit of a return is that it creates costs to Amazon (shipping, returns processing, then disposing of the returned product). I'd like to think this makes Amazon marginally more likely to do the right thing, because it takes the profit out of the problematic products.
Recent return to Amazon, my wife got me a Legos Creator kit (one with six sets of bags, probably 2500-3000 pieces). I started working on it, and was missing a piece. Now I'm pretty organized with my Legos. I open all of the bags for each step and keep the contents separate. I searched through all of the opened bags, the box, the floor and could not find it. Finally gave up, figuring it wasnt a critical piece and skipping for now wouldn't hurt anything. Started finding more and more missing pieces before realizing, I was missing a piece or two, but an entire bag of pieces.
My wife returned it and Amazon sent a replacement the next day. All my wife has to do for the return is drop it of at Kohls next time shes out running errands. Pretty painless really.
So, how does your return experience compare to not having to return at all, because you received a Legos Creator kit that has all the pieces?
Your experience is completely irrelevant. If Amazon didn't send out obvious counterfeits, you wouldn't have to return them, which is inherently easier than returning them no matter what the return process is.
Everything they do costs time. I have attempted to return several items to Amazon. One time they sent me a UPS label... but UPS wouldn't pick it up and I would have to walk it to a store. Another time it was a third-party vendor and I had to print the label myself, arrange for pickup, wait around for the pickup, etc... all because they sent me the wrong item. It is always a huge pain. Amazon's model is to get stuff to you, not to get it back from you.
Why do you keep saying that? You brought the topic up, don't do that if you're just going to get mad and say why are we talking about it over and over.
You became a sucker and helped contribute to others being suckers by doing absolutely nothing after very obviously getting scammed.
Sometimes. It depends on the level of proof they have. I've heard from a seller who was banned after a distributor sold them counterfeit goods and Amazon gave customers refunds to the tune of over 50k.
I've bugged Amazon about counterfeit dust masks (and complained about it on HN too). Some masks claim to have valid NIOSH certification but don't, some advertise themselves as NIOSH certified but use a certification number that was revoked by the CDC 10 years ago, make claims about being N95 without providing any lab references, etc. All of the listings I've complained about are still up on Amazon.
Have you tried contacting legitimate manufacturer's? The way America works it's sort of incumbent on you, the consumer, to try suing Amazon on their fraudulent listings, but that takes a lot of money - but I bet actual mask manufacturers would be quite willing to defend their territory.
Especially with dust masks I feel like there might be departments in OSHA or the FDA that would help out here, but I don't know what they are or if they've been declawed.
I left a negative review on a 4GB USB thumb drive that was being sold as a 1TB model by a seller on Amazon. The review was rejected by Amazon because my claims didn't follow their guidelines (no specifics as to how so). Amazon is actively engaged in false advertising, counterfeiting, and bait and switch scams.
Where is the FTC? How is this not the most clear situation where government action against a corporation (Amazon) is needed? I've been called a libertarian and even I think this the kind of situation we need government for.
> The review was rejected by Amazon because my claims didn't follow their guidelines (no specifics as to how so).
Reviews have to be about the product. Amazon likely interpreted your review as "I received an incorrect product" which is a seller issue and has to be in seller feedback, not product review (which are shared between multiple sellers).
If I had to guess, I'd say you're being downvoted because a tweet from John Carmack is not influential enough (by several orders of magnitude) to cause policy change at a company the size of Amazon.
I figured he has plenty of followers to ignite some kind of larger discussion about policy, just a few days after tweeting about it. I guess we don't reply to disagree these days, just downvote.
Serves me right, I'll keep it to myself rather; might as well have made a troll comment about Trump or something, didn't expect that at HN.
It's a tweet with 139 retweets and 1400 likes. If you think that would influence Amazon, I have a bridge to sell you. And it's not like this was a previously unknown issue.
> If you think that would influence Amazon, I have a bridge to sell you.
You know I didn't even presuppose it, I dared to wonder out loud if it might be related since I'd seen an example of this Amazon counterfeiting just the other day from a somewhat well-known guy called John Carmack. Maybe there would have been some interesting discussion, I dunno; but it looks like no one is selling any bridges, just downvoting questions.
You're probably right, and I never disagreed with you; thanks for the snark.
Is it bad when you carefully try to make sure you are ordering a good quality product and instead get something shit quality? I think it’s wasteful and bad for the environment. It’s also a waste of time spent trying to choose the right thing and a waste of time and thought spent returning it (if one even bothers).
It is also bad for the company whose product is being counterfeited because their brand is associated with the poor quality knock off.
This is also the reason I hate print on demand and think the seller should have to specify how a book was printed.
Maybe you think counterfeits are equal in quality to the genuine articles. In that case I think the argument is different. But I don’t believe that is the case.
I mean, if you are really willing to buy an original product, a minimal check can be the price asked for it.
Any good today is made of materials+manufacturing+marketing, it has some costs and a corresponding selling price with a given markup.
Once said that a number of branded items can have a selling price that seem completely disconnected from the relative costs, there are limits.
If you can find an item on the manufacturer site at US$ 100, do you really believe that you can find the SAME item on Amazon for US$ 10?
If you find it at say US$ 80 or 75 or even US$ 50[1] and it comes out as being counterfeited, you may have some valid expectations ruined by Amazon, but if you ordered it for 19.95, free shipping, did you really believe it was "original"?
[1] it is one of my per peeves, if you look at the price of many electronic goods, let's say printers or TV on the official site of the manufacturer they are often double their "street price", either online or at the nearest large shop chain. I often wonder how many printers Brother (say) sells from their site.
This isn't just about electronics though, or about big ticket items being sold at ridiculously low prices that seem too good to be true. It happens all the time with products a normal person would never assume to be the target of counterfeiters. As I stated in another post, I've personally had it happen with cotton pillow cases and light bulbs. If the fake costs $0.10 to make in China and the real version costs $5 to make in Ohio then there's still a lot of money to be made substituting cheap Chinese junk for a name brand product that should only cost $10 to begin with. Because of how Amazon bundles listings for "the same product" this is extremely easy to get away with.
20 years ago, I was looking for a SCSI card, direct from the manufacturer and knew it should be like $250-$300. However, no price was listed. I figured if I added it to my cart and went to checkout, theyd have to tell the price. It showed as $0. Proceeded to checkout, paid $7. Thought for sure theyd cancel the order, but nope, it shipped and arrived in about a week. That card was awesome.
When you get lower quality than you paid for, yes. Many would debate the IP end of it, but in terms of deception of the end buyer, I would say it is unequivocally deceptive and bad. Especially if you trust your life to the quality of an item, and it fails.
Definitely. There's lot of fake climbing gear on Amazon, and unrated equipment posing as 'safe climbing gear'. And even if it's fulfilled by Amazon, Amazon conmingles products from multiple vendors into buckets, which could lead to you getting a fake carabiner or belay device.
It's literally life or death purchases, and climbing forums have to warn people to avoid Amazon because the risks are so high.
I think if you want a knock-off and are aware you're getting a knock-off (i.e. a Brada purse) then there are some interesting morals involved and I'm personally cool with it - I think brand name markup in the modern world is insane and generally not justified. Then again I never go out of my way to have the flashy labels, I've never owned a Hershel bag and probably never will.
My concern is more on the fraud side. When you buy something usually you can follow up with the seller if the product is defective or damaged, when people fraudulently report themselves then that follow up is impossible. Additionally, legitimately imported goods should adhere to certain domestic safety regulations, the enforcement of this is complicated, imperfect and not always effective, but enforcing safety standards on smuggled items is a fool's errand so if there are unsafe materials that are significantly cheaper then you're more likely to find them in counterfeits.
So, without even touching the question of brand name entitlement and the defense of intellectual property... I think there are some significant reasons that counterfeiting is, indeed, really bad.
I just posted recently about a local company in my area that lost millions of dollars due to someone stealing and knocking off their bird feeders... Even such an odd little product to steal, makes a huge difference to some companies and can easily cost people jobs.
The fact that you even asked that is pretty sad, though...
I bought a pack of socks off of Amazon. Despite appearing new, and visually similar to the socks I wanted, in a similar plastic bag with appropriate markings, they lacked the "new sock feel" I associate with a new pair of socks.
Of all the things for the counterfeiter to fail to replicate--
Yes. Of course. At a bare minimum, the people who created/published the real thing are not getting any reimbursement. On top of that, I've never seen a counterfeit item that is as good as the real item.
from the article:
"The value of global trade in pirated and counterfeit goods is half a trillion dollars per year, according to an estimate cited in the Trump memo. "
That and burning your house down with fake or bad wiring from faulty electronics. Or a bestselling novel with the last 100 pages missing. Or a flash drive with only 1% of its labelled capacity.
The only occasions I’ve received counterfeit items the price had been suspiciously low to the point that I had a pretty good idea what I was in for, and was OK with potentially receiving knock-offs at a massively reduced price.
Is this not usually the case, are scammers out there charging full price?
For better or worse, I like having the option, as long as I am getting a discount and know what I am getting into.
> For better or worse, I like having the option, as long as I am getting a discount and know what I am getting into.
I kinda agree with you there - sometimes I want the cheapest thing possible, and I know I may get junk, but it's my money to spend.
Recently on Ebay I purchased a welder. This welder was supposed to be a multi-process switch-mode DC mig/tig wire feed welder, somewhat similar to the mid-range models Harbor Freight sells.
Now - this is the thing - similar welders on Ebay were selling for around $200.00. But I spotted one listing, that was being drop-shipped out of Hong Kong, posted for "buy it now, free shipping" for $20.00!
I thought "well, I'm not going to pass this up - let's see what happens" and I put an order in. I figure it's either going to be rejected by the seller (that they would see they forgot to enter an extra zero), or it's going to take the slow-boat well past the return period, and if I'm lucky I'll receive a "DIY" put it together yourself box-o-junk.
Amazingly, it supposedly "shipped" - now, I didn't even get a simple China Post "tracking" number - but it said it cleared customs in Hong Kong and was on its way. I guess I'll see if and when it gets here.
I'll be shocked, though, if it's a full and working welder. If it looks anything like an actual welder, I'll probably take it over to my friend's house (he has a full metal working shop) to try it out and see if it catches on fire or something.
That's the kind of thing I like to see - sometimes, I get surprised by sellers; maybe it was counterfeit, or maybe they made a mistake, but they still honor it. Heck, I've had sellers in the past send me the wrong item, tell me to keep it, and then send me two of the right item for free. Yeah - they get a good review for that kind of service.
You can pay with your life or your health if you're willing to take such gambles. But, yes, i agree that you should be able to risk. However, I think this should have some sort of flag for whoever isn't aware that they're taking a risk.
Amazon is making it far too easy for fraudsters to sell their crap, and (from what I hear) repeatedly: products removed because of counterfeit issues get re-added the next day under some other (or new) product code, or seller ID.
I work in the banking industry. It's not very unusual to discover that a client might be doing something that is suspicious enough to notify law enforcement of it (these notices are mandatory).
But that's the last line of defense. You're supposed to attempt to prevent these situations from happening in the first place, hence there are strict AML/KYC procedures.
If a bank were to open a new account for a client they had banned in the past for other reasons, financial supervisory authorities would bring down the hammer on them so fast and so hard, they'd regret it a thousand times more than whatever business they expected to make with that client.
Amazon's claim that they can't do more against counterfeits than they are already doing now is bullshit. There's an entire industry with decades of experience in that matter that they could turn to. But why would they.