I stopped ordering tech on Amazon when I got a fraud twice in a month on back-to-back orders a few years back.
First was a laptop that wouldn’t start. I looked at the bottom and the scewes were mostly stripped, and once I got them out most of the components had been removed from the boards.
Second was a Spyder color calibrator. What I got instead was a iPhone 4 screen protector with a sticker slapped on with the UPC for what I’d ordered. When I tried returning it, they gave me flack for slap-tagging a return, but I was able to escalate in that case.
@chiliedogg @themachinestops
Amazon will consistently facilitate fraud. I had sworn I would not order from them, but it seemed there was an exceptional deal on a certain type of tortilla.
There were supposed to be 12 bags of tortillas, but there were only 10.
I read there guidelines, and there is absolutely no recourse for something like this. I opened the box, now it’s mine.I had decided quite firmly I wouldn’t deal with them, and it was a serious mistake when I did.
So what exactly did you do to piss off the Amazon Returns department? Because from my experience, they are the most lenient company when it comes to returns/refunds. I’ve had stuff arrive broken, or scuffed up, or it was the wrong item, or I just plain didn’t like a product and every time I’ve been able to submit a return without having to interact with a single person.
I feel like you either have to be lying about your experience, didn’t even try to return it, or did something that got your account flagged.
Amazon Let Its Drivers’ Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink
Drivers urinating in bottles has been reported in the past, but what wasn’t known is that some claim they also get penalized for having those urine-filled bottles in their truck when they return to the warehouse.
…
To avoid penalties, they end up discarding the bottles by the side of the road. Butler searches the roadsides near Amazon warehouses from Coventry to New York to Los Angeles and more often than not strikes liquid gold.
From there, it’s laughably straightforward for Butler to get Release listed for sale on Amazon, with very few checks and balances in place to ensure the product he’s selling is safe and legal. “Releasing the drink was surprisingly easy,” Butler told WIRED. “I thought that the food and drinks licensing would stop me from listing it, so I started it out in this Refillable Pump Dispenser category. Then the algorithm moved it into drinks.”
Isn’t that a plot in Moral Orel?
@UnderpantsWeevil
they need to be shut downNationalized and folded into the USPS. Idk about shutting down the biggest commercial retailer in the world.
@UnderpantsWeevil
It would certainly take some work. Like the Army, they rely on a failure elsewhere to provide real jobs and paychecks.
Bring on the guaranteed basic income. Fuck your job.But income isn’t useful if you can’t buy stuff with it. And Amazon is the supply chain network that delivers stuff in exchange for money.
And Amazon is the supply chain network that delivers stuff in exchange for money.
Allegedly.
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@UnderpantsWeevil Nationalize is a good idea.
No judgement…but why would you buy 10 bags of tortillas from Amazon?
@QuandaleDingle
I paid for 12. and it was supposed to be a good deal. why do you ask?
d’OhI’m just curious. You probably go into a hispanic food store and get them for a similar price, or better. And you know what you’re getting then. shrug
But you saw a good deal and thought they’d honor that. So it really sucks that happened. I mean, it’s tortilla! ToT
Yeah, if it’s not made by Amazon and sold by them, I typically won’t buy it. All the other stuff is just marked up stuff from AliExpress and temu.
They don’t make anything. You’re buying marked up stuff from AliExpress and temu that has an “Amazon basics” sticker on it.
I get that, but imo they do vet them and make sure it’s not absolute crap.
I think I will just go to Microcenter
Same. I’m lucky enough to have two within driving distance. I’m genuinely worried about them staying in business if PC building takes a nosedive thanks to the RAM/SSD prices.
I miss Microcenter
I wish I had a Microcenter less than 8hrs away. Best Buy is all I have and I am not buying there.
Same, i don’t have one less than 7 hour round trip drive.
Why put a weight? DDR2 weight vs DDR5 weight difference wouldn’t be noticeable until they put the weight in because now it would weight 3x what it should. I suspect the person claiming fraud is the one committing fraud or this is a fake article.
In case Amazon does weight comparison to the original in the shipping center. They have to be close or the package gets rejected and inspected.
The article that this article is based on (found here) has pictures showing that the DDR2 sticks had fake heat sinks put on. The weight is behind the fake heat sink to make it feel more authentic. I had the same initial thought as you, but heat sinks add a decent amount of weight.
Maybe they ordered a kit of 2 sticks and they put 1 stick and a weight in there
Cost doesn’t seem to matter with return fraud. I recently received a “new” $6 item that had its contents replaced with a $4 item and then taped shut. Seriously, who wastes their time on this stuff?
Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.
I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There’s a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.
I hate that saying. It’s not a law. It’s a funny quote. Absolutely do not base any judgment you make on it.
@tomiant @punkwalrus Applied to interactions between strangers, “Hanlon’s Razor” is a recipe for getting scammed.
Find a $2 scam you can pull hundreds of times a day and you’re a third world billionaire.
Probably the same people running Pokémon card hustles. I recently saw a guy acting all pissy he had to wait in line at target to buy some packs, started berating the workers “you work at target, you’re broke as fuck”. The workers actually went in on him, I was so happy to see it. They made fun of him for trying to hustle over cards for children and told him to go home and cry to his mom about it.
That’s the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
Please sir, do you have a link.
I’ll see if I can find it later
Edit: found it
https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1phew1b/scalper_argues_with_target_workers/
Thanks, appreciate it
If your time is worthless to you and everyone else, that profit margin can be very tempting. Sounds like a symptom of a serious problem to me though.
have you seen r/pokeinvesting, or r/pokecollecting. so sad losers of adults, they arnt even collecting because they play it, its to flip it. all TCPI/TPJ have to do is increase the pull rates, and increase printing of the cards, or have the ability to buy the individual cards on a official shop, instead of issuing RARE CARDS ON stupid events with a limited number and time, and location. instead they are just trying to limit how often its being bought.
opening/buying them is one thing(steamings do this kind of asmr thing).
Volume and slavery.
My headlight connector got a little melty, just enough to get loose and stop working, just wore out I suppose.
I bought one on Amazon, along with new bulbs, installed it, and within an hour the new connector had catastrophically melted and shorted out enough to blow the fuse.
I should’ve known, the wire felt cheap, copper clad aluminum. But I thought it would be fine, it’s just a headlight 🤷♂️
Now I’ve got a replacement from the local auto parts. So far so good.
Did you receive refunds or do amazon and scammers got away with it?
They got away with it. I bought the part months ago after bodging a fix on the stock connector. By time the bodge failed, the return window closed. It was $5 so unfortunately not worth my time fighting it.
Oh god yeah, so many LED grow lamps and LED drivers that melted or burned out well below their rated amperage. Leaves one to wonder if an entire house is worth saving $10.
This is a problem with all auto parts, even from NAPA supplying to garages. Mechanics are going broke replacing defective “new” parts.
Makes sense. I work at a different type of repair shop, we just had a brand new $400 battery go up in smoke on first power up. Ridiculous.
Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
Supporting giant evil DOES sometimes get you free stuff… I know folks who have accidentally been shipped multiple of what they’re ordering (in two cases, the items were quite expensive) and when they’ve brought it up, they were told to keep the extras.
Maybe not worth the evil, but hey, free stuff is cool.
It wasn’t technology, but i ordered a new mad lib style book for my kid from Amazon. The book arrived with cellophane around it and a nice label that clearly said new. Once opened, it was very obvious the book was used, since the last kid had already filled out the whole damn thing including his name and address inside the cover.
I’m not mad at the kid, although his parents are probably bad people for returning the book at that point. I am livid that Amazon didn’t flip to any random page in the book too determine if the book was used or not.
Fuck Amazon.
Actually that cellophane was brand new, as the label indicated.
Iirc correctly, Amazon actually doesn’t resell their returns. At least not through their storefront.
They have “return auctions” where returns are put onto a pallet and then people bid on them to purchase. Apparently this is cheaper than having a workflow for their returns, checking them to make sure they are resellable, and then stocking them back into their warehouse.
Amazon Warehouse I believe is open box and returns. It also gets confusing that marketplace sellers are mostly outside of Amazon’s control
I don’t care if it was actually a store front. I blame Amazon for not doing oversight of its supply chain. So, it’s their fault, or it’s their fault.
So are all these people who say they are buying from Amazon actually buying from 3rd party sellers on Amazon? I’m always confused by these stories with used items being delivered.
Its all the same, you search for something on Amazon, find it, and buy. Not obvious if it is a 3rd party seller or no. It feels like all the same thing.
You can see on the right side of the screen who the seller is though? It is annoying there isn’t a proper filter but you can kind of use the qualified for free shipping filter to filter out third parties.
As I understand it, if any seller is using Amazon fulfillment centers, the product you’re given is picked out of the same box regardless of the named seller. That makes it impossible to buy confidently from Amazon based on the reputation of the seller, and makes Amazon themselves an unreputable seller.
Customers shouldn’t have to be uber careful all the time, these are dark ui patterns.
Caveat emptor
You can. I can. But how many people do, and how many just flick through on their phone and click “Buy now” without really looking?
Basically if you filter by “prime delivery” you’re sure it comes from amazon
I got something recently that was “free shipping for prime customers,” but when I had to return it, it turns out that it was different and returns were not free.
You can be sure it comes out of an Amazon warehouse. And that’s not the same thing.
Although frankly, it should be. I don’t know how they’ve got this cushy position where they take items from others, store them, and then ship them out for enormous fees without taking on any retailer responsibility.
It does say “sold and shipped from amazon” in the listings, as opposed to “sold by random Chinese company”.
Many years ago it used to be very obvious when you were buying from Amazon vs 3rd party sellers. Today the only difference is a small bit of text that says “Shipped and sold by Amazon”. The fact that you can even get prime shipping on items from third party sellers makes it so that people often don’t realize.
the problem is they mingle stock from every source into one pile with no discernable way to identify what came from where.
The principal issue is this, Amazon commingles stock. This means that there is one box for a particular SKU. If a seller sends product to Amazon for fulfillment it gets dumped into the bin with everyone else’s.
This means that if a seller sends counterfeit or poor products to Amazon it gets mixed in with the real ones from other sellers or Amazon’s own stock. This causes major problems as you can see.
Yup, this is the real answer. Verified vendors’ stock isn’t kept separate from the shitty scammers’ stock. Vendor has 10 good memory cards in stock, and a scammer has 5 fakes? The bin will have all 15 cards… So buying from the vendor doesn’t guarantee you get a real memory card, because the counterfeits are in the same bin.
Every professional photographer knows that good SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from B&H Photo Supply… While bad SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from Amazon.
And somebody buying from the scammer could get a legitimate card, thus allowing the scammer to blend in.
You don’t know that Amazon is a marketplace? So is Walmart and Target. Com for example. You can open a store on any of these platforms and sell while using them for advertisement, warehousing, and shipping. You are responsible for fees and sales etc, but they handle everything else. Yes, they have their own products as well, but most their sales come from vendors on their platform.
I bought a 3 pack of Corsair LL120 RGB case fans directly from Amazon-dot-com (as the seller) before and got a 3 pack of someone’s old case fans instead (the old swapperoo). So Amazon told me to just keep them after I sent them many photos of the box and the LPN sticker on it, and they sent me another. Take a guess what was in that box? Yup, more swapperoos. But this was back in 2016-2017 so they may have changed up how they handle returns since then, or how they isolate their own products from 3rd party ‘FBA’ sellers
Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.
Pretty much any of the retailers have this happen. They’re isn’t anything special about ordering from a different site or even picking it up ina brick and mortar store.
Yeah this stuff is why i never buy tech from Amazon, you never know if you’re gonna get a counterfeit item
Recommendations?
Newegg has been shit for a decade now (new owners fucked it to hell) and I don’t have a Microcenter closer than a 2-hour drive.
How did Newegg survive the outing from Gamers Nexus?
Anywhere that has an actual supply chain instead of website that’s just a front for individual resellers. Places like best buy, or if you could get shipped from microcenter.
I bought ram from Amazon some time ago and somebody had done a sticker swap and returned. The ram sticks in the package matched the box according to all the stickers but the kit registered in software was a lower end set with different part/serial numbers than the stickers/box. The funny part was when I bought it the price difference was only like $5 but about a year or so earlier it was closer to an $80 difference.
So they don’t have the resources to check returned goods or what? Or they simply don’t care enough?
Buying electronics from Amazon is really rolling the dice. I’ve received so many inadvertent open box returns… it’s just a matter of time before you get burned.
Newegg is also shit and so is bestbuy. I don’t have a microcenter near me. What else is there? I guess buying direct. Is there anything I’m missing?
Best buy resellers are worse than eBay.
Depends on what you’re buying. Wiredzone and Provantage are solid for enterprise/workstation gear, and for anything storage or camera related B&H is my go-to.
B&H is a great source for electronics, computer parts, and photography.
Its amazon, just return it. That’s really the only good thing about amazon anymore, easy returns.
Except in the UK for some reason where you can email and message them for months and pay your own damn return shipping and get fucked about and never recieve a refund.
Oh man, that sucks. Sorry, I wrongly assumed amazon returns worked the same everywhere
They tried to fuck me on a return once and after a month of it sitting in limbo i filed and won a dispute though my card provider instead.
Matter of fact i think it was over ram too, but it was over a year ago.
Not really anymore for me. A few times this past year they snuck in the return shipping cost at about $10-$15 USD. The page showed the cost refunded then added back. I don’t know but it fooled me.
With this hardware shortage insanity, I won’t be surprised if they get more aggressive with return shipping fees.
Return shipping fees? I’m guessing you live somewhere rural? Here we just drop it at a local store.
amazon has been getting less generous with the returns for years now.
Especially if you have more than a few returns per year.
This is my theory. The kind of stuff I buy there is all electronics manufactured in china/Asia anyway. I could buy it direct or from ali express, but Amazon shipping is hella cheap and fast and they actually do returns quickly and correctly.
Just ordered some digital photo frames for xmas gifts, and neither one of them work. One is apparently an opened box return. Trashy!
Just got a retro handheld for a gift. Package looked a little suspicious with no way to tell if it had ever been opened. SD card reader broken. Sad to return it a few days before Christmas with no chance at replacing in time.
Play the long game. Chargeback.
And lose the Amazon account anything associated with it.
So?
It’s worth knowing as some people would be adversely affected.
Some people have extensive libraries there. I have over 1k books, and probably half that in audiobooks. I do have them all DeDRM’d but still it would be an annoying loss
A prudent strategy would be a 2nd account for orders, maybe?
Not necessarily, they have been known to shut down accounts they think are trying to evade a ban.
Not sure how sophisticated it is, but it does exist.
Will*
Stockholm syndrome…
I ordered 2x32GB DDR5 on Amazon two years ago and received 1x32 and 1x8 in the same package.
Luckily they replaced it for me completely, still wild. Can only imagine it’s going to get worse.
I have some 128gb ddr5 kit I bought a few years ago. Want to sell it back I’m not going to use it but the scammers be scamming.
So uh… How much you want for it?
This isn’t exclusive to Amazon. I had it happen with friends build back in the Newegg days.
We’d need to know exactly how far back because NewEgg has for years been just like Amazon: a listing service for junky third party sellers.
Evga still made GPUs back then.
I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.
You can order friends on newegg?
Yea, but only open box or refurb. Not new.
Newegg is still a thing, you just need to check the “Sold by Newegg” filter.
Newegg is a fucking open septic pit.
Fred sold it off to some chinese acquisition company and its almost a fucking scam now at this point.
Oh it is, but is so enshittified nobody goes there anymore.
The bad prices are what keep me away. Though, I can’t say I’ve looked at stuff sold by third parties. Why would I do that when Amazon, ebay, and Craigslist exist?
the exploding power supplies forced into bundles are what keep me away. cant return the catastrophically failed PSU without returning everything else, either. total scam.
