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Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
91–100 of 243 posts
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're draconian in some other areas, too, which affect regular customers. I was blacklisted from Amazon Payments, which I've only ever used to fund a few Kickstarter Projects. They will not tell me why, will not consider an appeal, and will not respond to further inquiries anymore. From reading online, this is due to their use of Experian for identity verification. But if you don't have any credit history, as I do…
I hate to say this but you basically have to trust these types of authorities when it comes to this type of "trust." You wouldn't believe how many people are out to scam. It's endemic in anything that involves money. I'd say "few bad eggs" but it's mostly shit eggs amongst a few good eggs.
So for those of us who simply don't meet their definition for an identifiable individual (e.g. someone who borrows money and allows their borrowing history to be monitored by commercial and government entities), what, we're just shit out of luck? Credit history being a requirement for identity verification is becoming more and more pervasive, and I am increasingly locked out of participating in both private and government services because of this shit.
Amazon's was especially bad because it allegedly had an appeal process that allowed submitting other forms of identity documents to bypass Experian's failure, but it never functioned correctly and attempting to verify my identity would fail because I had not yet verified my identity, and then the fact that I wouldn't verify my identity manually sent up a bigger red flag that permanently blacklisted me from the service with zero recourse now, even as I explained that I was unable to because their system wouldn't let me. Their customer support people would just say "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You are not allowed to participate in this service anymore." I lost a lot of respect for Amazon at that point.
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Artists have historically made little money on the music itself, turning instead to franchising and concert tickets to really bring in the big bucks. This isn't the best article for explaining it, but it's better than nothing. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/9-ways-musicians-act... Why are songs on the radio played for free? Because copyright in music actually hardly matters. "Real fans" end up buying piles o…
How about hurting the record companies, who front most of the capital for artists, pay them salaries, etc.
> pay them salaries
You must not know much about how the recording industry works. The record companies "pay" artists by giving them lending them money, the payments for which are deducted from their royalty percentage (e.g. the record company take 90% of the cost of the CD, and the artist gets 10%, then the "loan payment" comes out of the artist's 10% royalty).
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the same deplorable ethics that Youtube used to rise to where they are today. It was probably the biggest copyright heist in history. Almost all of their traffic was to illegally uploaded music videos and they knew it. They put up so many procedural barriers to effective takedown that content owners gave up and accepted YouTube's licensing terms, because you'd rather make something than nothing. (Of course, now…
> They put up so many procedural barriers to effective takedown that content owners gave up and accepted YouTube's licensing terms, because you'd rather make something than nothing. Lol what? Have you not experienced the Content ID stuff taking down completely unrelated items and routing ad traffic revenue to the claiming company with little to no appeal process? There are even groups out there fraudulently claiming…
Lol what? Did you not read the next paragraph of my comment?
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#95Interesting conclusion to the article. I stopped buying Apple items off Amazon a really long time ago because they let counterfeit chargers list as real Apple products and did jack shit about it. To some extent this has begun flowing in to other product categories for me as well. "Meanwhile, the product page is flooded with fraudelent (sp) reviews, poisoning the well and moving future customers away from Amazon and t…
They've begun restricting more and more products to approved sellers, which helps.
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#96There are a couple hypotheses the author hasn't considered. It's possible the buyer stole the phone, yes, but it's also possible that it was a warehouse company employee, a shipping company employee, or a previous buyer who made a return.
It's true, there are other possibilities. I found the given explanation most likely though: iPhones are all sold by 3rd party sellers on Amazon, so the alternatives you suggest likely wouldn't present as several buyers reporting on a single product that has multiple seller locations.
If they were fulfilled by Amazon, it could be people returning, Amazon not opening the box and then shipping it to the next buyer.
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#97Interesting conclusion to the article. I stopped buying Apple items off Amazon a really long time ago because they let counterfeit chargers list as real Apple products and did jack shit about it. To some extent this has begun flowing in to other product categories for me as well. "Meanwhile, the product page is flooded with fraudelent (sp) reviews, poisoning the well and moving future customers away from Amazon and t…
Buying Apple brand products on Amazon at this point is just essentially impossible.
Buying printer ink I have found to be essentially impossible.
And there are more examples, those are just two obvious ones. It really doesn't seem like it would be all that hard for Amazon to distinguish between things they themselves are selling and things they are brokering through third parties.
The site claims to do this but in reality it doesn't. For one simple example, all reviews for a specific product are in common, so the reviews for off-brand fake printer ink and OEM real stuff are just all in the same product listing page because they have the same SKU presumably.
These problems are obvious, and it seems like Amazon is more than capable of fixing them, so you have to assume they don't by choice.
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if there was an EBay like action site where you couldn't just sign up, and rather someone had to "vouch" for you? When fraud starts happening, you can see who vouched them in and shut down the network. If people start selling vouches online, then you suspend both them and the person who had the bad judgment to vouch them in originally. (maybe they can keep using the site, but not vouch, etc.) The site would also…
This sounds like something that social network sites such as FB could get into.
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Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#99I can't believe that this works at all. I imagine that between an established seller and a brand new buyer, Amazon would be on the side of the seller. In the cases where the buyer wins, who pays the cost of the device (the seller or Amazon)?
This would allow sellers to carry out selective scamming: send buyers with longstanding accounts genuine iPhones, send new buyers boxes with clay and pocket the cash. Not so common on mainstream sites because it's hard to get away with currently, but apparently used to be rife on darknet marketplaces.
Do sellers know the buyers history with Amazon?
Re: Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
#100Amazon is complete crap these days. It's becoming more and more difficult to figure out who you are buying from, and as a result there are outright scams sitting on Amazon's store at this moment that they continue to do nothing about: https://www.amazon.ca/ORIGINAL-MACBOOK-Magsafe-ADAPTER-CHARG... See that? That's the infamous "dangerous" counterfeit Apple Macbook charger that made the rounds[1][2] a while back. Noti…
How can you tell from the picture and listing that it's counterfeit? Is the picture of a real one? If not, you should be able to report it as not OEM.