Blatant Tech Frauds Run Amok on the Biggest Online Marketplaces - Slashdot
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Blatant Tech Frauds Run Amok on the Biggest Online Marketplaces
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Review Geek recently showed that the scheme includes selling a much lower-capacity microSD card instead of a large-capacity SSD (the site received a 64GB card instead of the advertised 16TB SSD). Fake SSDs are just one example of counterfeit tech scams on huge online retailers, though. Consumers also have to look out for fake Apple chargers, cables that don't meet the advertised specs, and counterfeit batteries that threaten serious physical harm. Despite their considerable resources, these marketplaces have failed to properly vet sellers and their products. Without outside pressure, shoppers will continue to pay the price.
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Until there is more of an incentive to keep trash off the platform.
They don't care. They prolly help this along. They get the sale. What do they care.-
What this tells me is that Amazon doesnt have enough competition as if they did they'd be worried about losing customers due to selling them fraudulent product through their site.
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Imagine if a State AG prosecuted Amazon for falsely promoting illicit products and services a al Dave Ramsay's current legal troubles.
Nobody wants to take on the REALLY deep pockets. They are insulating.
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Imagine if we took corporate personhood literally for consequences and responsibilities instead of just rights and benefits and put them on trial like we would a normal human being. Have Texas start executing corporations by revoking their charter, liquidating their stock and distributing it among victims, and jailing executives from the top down.
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Newegg marketplace used to be a very similar disaster, but checking just now it looks to have been cleaned up and I don't see random brands of several TB cheap USB flash drives anymore. Newegg can probably police the computer stuff. I am not sure how Walmart and Amazon would do it since they have everyone selling pretty much everything across the board and would need staff with expertise across the board. There seem to be a lot of sellers with almost random names that don't stay around for very long on
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Walmart and Amazon categorize products. I'm sure they could figure out how to group those categories into knowledge domains, and hire appropriate staff to cover them. They choose not to do so.
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I saw someone else mentioning Newegg being good on this nowadays so I'll have to make sure to shop with them more. I've only had good experiences with them in the past.
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The same people are selling the same fake shit on other marketplaces.
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Word is under this article that Newegg has cleaned up their site pretty well in regards to this. I'm sure stuff occasionally slips through but given how many listings for product that was likely fraudulent I came across the last time I bought a memory stick off Amazon I'm happy to try someone else.
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Its simple, make the first tangible US company involved in the sale responsible and liable for the product. This is also the only real way to enforce US consumer protection laws (of which circumventing those laws is what third party selling is all about).
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Exactly. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. Amazon, Newegg, Walmart, and other "marketplaces" online are not in the business of selling products to consumers. They're in the business of selling consumers to chinese scammers. Both Amazon and Newegg operated for many years as legitimate businesses known for their quality of service and reliability. They're perfectly capable of operating as a legitimate business. They choose not to because it's vastly more profitable to run a blatant daylight scam.
They're neve
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Although since they also run a marketplace I am not guaranteeing they are fraud free, but they run a much tighter ship at the very least. Also, stuff that ships from NewEgg should be good.
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by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @11:53AM (#63580579)
Now owned by Hangzhou New Century Information Technology Co., Ltd. - no thanks.-
Also, if you have to actually contact them, good luck.
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As long as you pay attention when selecting your widget since most stuff ordered by lowest price will ship from mainland China and take a while to arrive (surprisingly fast, actually, given the distance, but still several days longer than stuff shipped from within the borders)
I don't even know how it makes sense to ship a $5 cable from China, but apparently it does...
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Because giant boats that burn crude oil for fuel, of which a mere 15 account for more pollution than every single car and truck on the planet, are unbelievably cheap to operate.
There's a reason Saint Greta demanded you give up air conditioning, cars, meat, and safe family homes to live in a pod and eat bugs but never said a word about all the cargo shipping to and from china and india.
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Where people will list an item for a ludicrously low price (9 drawer Craftsman toolbox new for $50) and location near you, but look at the seller profile. IT is often in Arabic, they joined within a a week or even that day, and the main profile lists they life at some middle eastern city.
Most of these point you to a link for an obviously sketchy site. Yes, obvious.
It's a huge mess, and some regulation needs to be instituted. WalMart should know better. Facebook needs to decide if Marketplace is expected to be marginally honest.
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And so what exactly is the "scam" here? Are people actually dumb enough to pay for something online before driving to a location nearby where you would normally validate it's not a scam and inspect the very product you're going to buy?
If mere trolling has become that profitable, I'm in the wrong damn career field.
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First, same scam as ordering something online for a ludicrously low price
Second, you can't drive out there, when you respond with 'can i pick this up', you've not read the description, which tell you about the great site they used, and how cheap it is. They show up on local results near you because they claim to be local. Lie upon lie.
Reporting them will be useless, FB seems to not have a method to address these outright fraudulent postings, location of THE ITEM being completely fictitious
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I see this a lot on FB marketplace with expensive espresso machines. It’s always an advertisement for a scam retailer in the description.
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Or ridiculous claims. A 100,000 lumen rechargeable pocket flashlight for under $30. Sure . . .
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Require the company that runs the marketplace to provide full refunds, with free return shipping, in cases of misrepresentation by their vendors. Of course, this will add to the reverse problem: Fraudulent returns.
A more nuanced solution:
For vendors who are in the US or in countries that have and enforce anti-fraud laws: Criminally charge the companies and their executive officers in the cases of fraud where the company's upper management knew or should have known or failed to take industry-best-practices steps to prevent fraud. For rogue employees who found a way around a company's industry-best-practices anti-fraud/fraud-detection mechanisms, give hefty civil fines to the company but save the jail time for the rogue employees and any supervisor who turned a blind eye.
For vendors who are out-of-reach of the American legal system and whose home country won't give justice, the marketplace (Amazon, etc.) should do its own inspections of every delivery before they reach the customer and provide a money-back guarantee. Of course, this will cost money, which will drive up the price those vendors' customers pay. It also invites return-fraud.
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Better yet, don't allow junk like this to be created and marketed in the first place. Considering all the "AGW" concerns and efforts around that, the production of junk products should be a focus of every gov't. Open every container that comes into a nation, if you have a "junk" or counterfeit product, put it back into another container and load it on the same ship it came in on.
Wait, you say "muh GDP!" to which we can reply "When has your GDP been a concern in AGW discussions?"
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This is the key. When executives make use of the "idiot defense" by claiming to be unaware of what their company was doing it should not be a defense, it should be a confession of gross negligence on top of everything else.
No, always jail the executives. If you do this they'll just structure the job in such a way that people are forced to violate those standards and mechanisms in order to stay employed and meet their quotas. It's the same with OSHA practices.
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If there was a brick-and-mortar store that sold counterfeit merchandise the police would be there.
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Not just the super high tech stuff.
I assure that any Stun gun advertising millions of volts is lying. If they offer 14 million, you will be lucky to get 14 thousand.
Most flashlights lie about the number of lumens. Anything more than 400 is likely bull.
Show a thermometer strip on a cooler? Decorative, not functional. Even if it is advertised for medical use. (Insulin coolers for diabetes)
Amazon is the equivalent of buying from a guy on the street with a table labelled "Definitely real, no fakes!"
Unless Amazon itself is selling it. Then it is totally real, advertised correctly - and they ripped off the idea from one of their clients who went from making 100k a year to 30k after they did it.
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The "sells from" label is who gets the money. It's not a guarantee of who sourced the item. I used to think like you did, then I got a counterfeit Lenovo battery from amazon.com (as the seller). I paid a reasonable price (market price), bought directly from amazon.com as the seller, and what arrived was a plain box, printed on some dude's laser printer and a counterfeit battery with the wrong label, etc.
The reason? They mix stock. So Amazon.com has an order of 1 million batteries, but "Zhu's House of
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If something sounds too good to be true, it is.
You see 10 sellers selling something for roughly X bucks, maybe plus or minus a few cents or even a few percent. And then there's a seller that sells it for X/2 bucks.
Why the hell would you think that this is anything but a scam?
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Half the typical cost is OK when an online price is compared to a local shop price. E.g. I'm buying bicycle brake pads from Aliexpress. The price is about 50% of the price from a local shop. I never had any problems with the Aliexpress brake pads.
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Amazon is basically Aliexpress with a domestic markup. I order from Aliexpress because I know it’s cheap and direct from China. Can’t beat led bulbs for $1 each shipped. Also picked up some M3 screws and standoffs for upcoming projects.
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by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @12:41PM (#63580791)
Buy direct from the manufacturer when you can. At the least you might be directed to a legitimate Amazon storefront with valid product that is hopefully fulfilled by the manufacturer or Amazon (if they are an authorized reseller).
For me, the small amount of savings often isn't worth the hassle of wondering if you purchased valid product from reseller mega-sites because they clearly don't care enough about the counterfeit problem and likely never will. They'll merely pretend to care in order to appease regulators who barely care.
Another benefit of purchasing direct is it can often make the product registration process quite automated and warranty claims become a bit easier.
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It won't matter because Amazon deliberately mingles inventory in their warehouses based solely on the claimed identity of the product from the shop supplying it. This is how they protect the chinese scammerswho are their real customers (you're the product being sold) and deliberately obfuscate responsibility.
You can pay 3x the market rate to get something directly from the original storefront of the original manufacturer and still wind up with the chinese knockoff.
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