Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

coryklein.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 243 posts

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#31

Post by codecamper »

nkozyra wrote: post #25
codecamper wrote: post #22

Amazon could set up some honey pots.. whereby they themselves send out the product. They know its good. If a customer tries to scam that one... then Amazon has found their scammer. Also... I'm surprised that Amazon just hands out these sorts of refunds on big ticket items. If I were them I'd require some sort of biometric data for the refund.

But as the story relates, these people tend to set up new accounts each time. There's little risk here involved for the scammer.

When they come asking for their refund.. get some information about them. And then go after them.

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#32

Post by jseliger »

Interestingly, too, I noticed in 2013 that Amazon's general marketplace is rife for abuse: https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/16/is-amazon-coms-marketplac.... I assume that Amazon tracks the number of returns a particular account engages, but still, I wouldn't sell anything of real value on the site.

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#33

Post by mikehollinger »

soyiuz wrote: post #19
Scirra_Tom wrote: post #15

I wonder if the postal services could create an additional service which calculates a heat map of the weight distribution for the package. You could then very accurately I imagine determine if there is actually an iPhone in there, and if someone shows a photo of clay it will be obvious they are scamming if the weight distribution passed as an iPhone distribution during transit.

One could then return broken iPhones. There needs to be stronger verification.

Yep. This also wouldn't protect against the "it was damaged in transit" scam either. Depending on how much time you had, I could see someone swapping just enough of a working handset onto a broken handset to "prove" it is was broken, then returning it.

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#34

Post by dangrossman »

Animats wrote: post #11

Why is Amazon even selling new iPhones from sources other than Apple? That's eBay's job. Looking on Amazon, I'm not seeing any iPhone 6 sellers other than Apple.

Neither Apple nor Amazon sell iPhones on Amazon as far as I can tell. All the listings you see are third-party sellers. If you click on any of the listings, you'll see the list of sellers in the right-hand column under the checkout buttons.

Ex: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00NQGP3L6/ref=dp_ol...

The "by Apple" under each listing in search results identifies the manufacturer/brand, not who is selling the product or fulfilling the order.

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#35

Post by ci5er »

Animats wrote: post #11

Why is Amazon even selling new iPhones from sources other than Apple? That's eBay's job. Looking on Amazon, I'm not seeing any iPhone 6 sellers other than Apple.

> Looking on Amazon, I'm not seeing any iPhone 6 sellers other than Apple.

Look for "used" or "refurbished iPhone 5", there are many (many!) sellers like BREED and Vius. Most fulfill through Amazon, so this may be their way of trying to tackle this problem?

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#37

Post by aandon »

My guess is sellers absorb this as a cost of doing business. As long as fraud rates remain in low single digit percentage, it's probably not worth it for the seller or Amazon to fight it.

It is always fun to dissect these scams. There's an interesting e-commerce scam prevalent in India that popped up as the country embraced e-commerce without much credit card infrastructure in place (most online orders are paid to the delivery person in cash) https://simility.com/delivery-fraud:

"The fraudster businesses ordered hundreds of products from the victim’s website to be delivered on a daily basis. Meanwhile, if customers came into their store asking for an out-of-stock product, they were told it would be in stock later that day. Then the fraudsters paid the delivery person in cash for the small fraction of products they had pre-sold to customers, while returning the vast majority of unsold products without paying for them at the cost of the e-commerce company, thus completing the delivery fraud cycle."

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#38

Post by ChuckMcM »

Animats wrote: post #11

Why is Amazon even selling new iPhones from sources other than Apple? That's eBay's job. Looking on Amazon, I'm not seeing any iPhone 6 sellers other than Apple.

For a long time now Amazon has been taking over that part of Ebay's market. (I think of it as the Ebay 'buy it now' market). Its a pretty sweet deal for them, skim off the tasty transactional cost cream off the top, leave the buyer and seller to hold all the liability.

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#39

Post by yuubi »

hackerweb wrote: post #3

But a lot of the negative reviews for the linked seller seem to be about a locked or blacklisted phone, or one with the wrong amount of storage. Those customers would presumably have to send back their phones, so what's the buyer-side fraud there?

Buy phone, claim it's locked/blacklisted, return locked/blacklisted phone, get refund, profit?

Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay

#40

Post by profeta »

given the amount of garbage amazon sells nowadays, if it didn't favoured the buyer they would be gone by now.

Almost everything i buy that is not books i have to return once or twice until i receive the item from a seller that is not trying to fence a couterfeit version. This happens with $100 pro SD cards down to $15 arduinos clones (which i think amazon still do not carry the original, but all ads show the original in the picture)

Post reply on HN