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

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

#131

Post by tehrei »

anon1234321 wrote: post #64
bdrool wrote: post #48

Amazon 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…

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…

Resisting copyright is not deplorable ethics, quite the opposite in fact - copyright itself is deplorable ethics and anything done to kill it is just and honourable.

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

#132

Post by jaynos »

lsaferite wrote: post #78
lfowles wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, "Man sued for $30K over $40 printer he sold on Craigslist" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11847858

In person, cash transaction, crowded place? Pfft, then you get arrested because the cops think you're selling stolen goods.

Lots of police stations now have "Safe Exchange" places either in the station or in the parking lot. Cameras in place and well lit.

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

#133

Post by effingwewt »

anon1234321 wrote: post #101
pyre wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

What you think of the terms between artists and labels is not really relevant to the matter at hand. No one is forced to sign with a big label. If you want someone's money, then you have to be willing to play by their rules. If the contract terms are too one-sided, then other labels would undercut the competition by offering better terms. This is what happens. But again, totally irrelevant to YouTube's massive copyri…

It's incredibly obvious you have a dog in this fight and are incredibly biased. It's well known almost every recording artist gets screwed, and that it's easier to fight fans than their bosses. Take what you've written about startup youtube, and applied it to TODAY'S youtube, but flipped it to be 100000% anti-consumer, you'd be on the right track. Thanks to your record companies, I can no longer broadcast my gameplay if the game itself has coded-in music, because my video will get flagged as stolen content. If I'm recording a 3 hour video, and a friend walks in and his ringtone goes off and happens to be 4 secs of a song....I now have my entire video removed for content theft, though I've never done such a thing.

This all happened thanks to the Viacom lawsuit[1], which forced youtube to be the most pro-recording industry, and anti-consumer popular site ever. Now, an automated bot trolls everyone's videos for any knid of match, and if flagged the video is automatically taken down unless you file an appeal. In other words, guilty until proven innocent. Unless you are a record label, then it's innocent until proven guilty.

Did you miss the Family Guy fiasco[2], where they used a 7 year old video of Nintendo gameplay footage in the show, the bot saw it as "Fox Owned", and had it removed for copyright infringement.

The youtube era you describe was for a few months-years. We've been dealing with the bullshit youtube became EVER SINCE. Forgive me if the complaints of a record company insider (in whatever capacity you may be), falls on deaf ears.

This is reminiscent of Lars Ulrich complaining about Napster and the internet in general. Only even he admitted he was wrong about that.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-lawsuit-idUS...

[2] https://consumerist.com/2016/05/20/fox-swipes-youtube-clip-o...

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

#134

Post by coredog64 »

AJ007 wrote: post #27

Interesting 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…

Why not pick an item that is both sold and fulfilled by Amazon?

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

#135

Post by hh2222 »

r00fus wrote: post #88
AJ007 wrote: post #27

Interesting 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…

Same situation with "authentic" Apple earpods (which run about 30-50% of the Apple MSRP). I'm surprised Amazon hasn't been sued by Apple for still allowing these to be sold.

Watch out for counterfit memory cards too. The jerks openly label them Sandisk, Kingston etc., but of course they are junk. I am puzzled why Amazon can't "follow the money" and completely shutdown these crooks.

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

#136

Post by tehrei »

anon1234321 wrote: post #84
striking wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

FUCK the record companies. If I were in a room with Cary Sherman, Hitler and Stalin and had a gun with one bullet, I'd throw the gun away and kill Sherman with my bare hands so it would take longer.

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

#137

Post by metalliqaz »

pizza234 wrote: post #113
ndesaulniers wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said for eBay. Buyer of my MBP opened a claim against me cause I didn't include the OS install disks (which Apple stopped shipping years earlier). Had to bend over backwards to prevent this con artist from keeping the laptop and money. Now I don't sell shit on eBay.

You are identifying eBay with Paypal. If you accept, say, only bank transfer, the worst thing that can happen (in "regular" conditions; of course there are exceptional cases) is a negative feedback. I've sold hundreds of items on eBay, almost all payable only via bank transfer/cash, and never had serious problems. If I get a smaller audience, well, that's an acceptable compromise in the long term.

Doesn't eBay actively try to prevent payments with anything but Paypal?

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

#138

Post by effingwewt »

anon1234321 wrote: post #94
pyre wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

To be fair, based on the first paragraph you wrote, especially from a just-made throwaway, it's probably kind of hard to choke down just to get to the next par. I wrote a reply, most won't bother as it's another beaten horse.

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

#139

Post by ChuckMcM »

thebokehwokeh2 wrote: post #62
ChuckMcM wrote: post #46

As others have pointed out, dealing with fraud at scale is really really difficult. As a result its cost are often priced into sales (either transaction costs or product costs). While the privacy implications are large, it is an area where the more data around the transaction can identify systemic fraud. (which is to say organized group that spread their activity across a wide area to keep it below the radar of fraud…

> So perhaps there is a startup idea for a private investigation group in large cities that would go get scammers and recover merchandise. Such action would quickly reveal if the scammers were part of a larger organization or acting independently. You mean the police?

I would, if the police were filling that particular niche. As most police departments have limited funds, simple economics steers them to putting their resources on the highest impact cases. So "Some guy defrauded me when {buying|selling} an iPhone." is below the activation threshold for the police.

But investigating these "small time" frauds benefits from scale. And like the company that was fixing parking tickets (normally a time consuming and costly exercise for the ticket receiver) by apply resources across a lot of people with parking tickets, I could imagine an equivalent "fraud fighter" business where the "fee" was 1/2 the recovered value. So the company investigates 1000 fraudulent amazon sales in the greater New York area, lets say they can prove half the time that it was fraud and get the appropriate fraud protection coverage to kick in. If they keep 50% of that value, they have now a revenue stream that is 25% of the defrauded value.

The mechanic here is that small time fraud allows millions (maybe billions) to be siphoned out of the commercial shopping stream. That burden is generally born by the sellers who raise prices to cover their losses. If a startup can mitigate those losses by 50%, and the seller is willing to split the mitigation 50/50 with the startup, then the seller has 25% less "loss due to fraud" and the startup has 25% of revenue from defeating fraud. It takes money out of the fraud pipeline.

When larger fraud rings are uncovered by the startup they can hand them off to the police who are willing to go after multi-million dollar criminal enterprises.

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

#140

Post by simcop2387 »

metalliqaz wrote: post #137
pizza234 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are identifying eBay with Paypal. If you accept, say, only bank transfer, the worst thing that can happen (in "regular" conditions; of course there are exceptional cases) is a negative feedback. I've sold hundreds of items on eBay, almost all payable only via bank transfer/cash, and never had serious problems. If I get a smaller audience, well, that's an acceptable compromise in the long term.

Doesn't eBay actively try to prevent payments with anything but Paypal?

They used to. But lately as they've spun off paypal they've been trying to distance from it because paypal takes a seperete cut of the transaction too.
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