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

coryklein.com

231–240 of 243 posts

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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are so entitled. They want free guaranteed secure transactions without putting any effort into security. It's "Fuck Ebay" every time something goes wrong, and entitled complacency every time they get an awesome deal.

The seller is rightfully entitled in this case. eBay is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts — they are charging the seller a fee for conducting a sale on their platform. Given the fee, the seller has the right to expect reasonable service.

Yes, and a high fee at that. Between ebay and paypal, you pay about 16% as the seller. They could easily take the hit in these kinds of scenarios (which are still pretty rare when considering the whole ecosystem) and still be very profitable while they improve their fraud detection methods, but instead they'd rather just collect their rent, do pretty much nothing, and let someone get screwed.

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

#232
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…

Rode Microphones actually has a huge banner on their website warning people against buying on Amazon because of the sheer amount of fraud on there: http://www.rode.com.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When World of Warcraft was released, I had the same thing happen to me. It was a hot item and my local retailer happened to have it on the shelves, so I bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing. Almost half of the keys I sold were allegedly bought from Paypal customers who "had their accounts hacked", so ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers leavi…

bought for 10, sold for 30, lost 12, profit 8. So, fuck eBay for only enabling you get 8 profit instead of 0?

Well, kingnohthing did nothing wrong and then got scammed, and lost plenty of legitimate arbitrage profit. Yes, eBay is lazy and doesn't check up who's it is siding with.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sheer absurdity of anyone actually doing that is what works in the favor of scammers on both sides (buyers and sellers). Request shipping to post office, open package in post office while filling with smartphone. If you don't want to pay for a trusted retailed, you have to put in some work yourself.

No dice, you'd have to get specific permission from the Postmaster to record on the premises, otherwise video recording by the public for anything other than news media purposes is prohibited. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/usp...

"or installation head", so it's a roll of the dice.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sheer absurdity of anyone actually doing that is what works in the favor of scammers on both sides (buyers and sellers). Request shipping to post office, open package in post office while filling with smartphone. If you don't want to pay for a trusted retailed, you have to put in some work yourself.

No dice, you'd have to get specific permission from the Postmaster to record on the premises, otherwise video recording by the public for anything other than news media purposes is prohibited. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/usp...

Why couldn't the post office act as a trusted intermediary and verify what was in the package for a small fee.

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

#236
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When World of Warcraft was released, I had the same thing happen to me. It was a hot item and my local retailer happened to have it on the shelves, so I bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing. Almost half of the keys I sold were allegedly bought from Paypal customers who "had their accounts hacked", so ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers leavi…

> bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing > ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers Wicked karma :) When Nexus 4 was launched, I ended up with multiple devices (automated parallel purchases). It gave a lot of joy to sell them at cost (on craigslist) rather than cancel my purchase or pocket the premium they could've fetched.

Karma? That's just good business sense. Buy low sell high.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you think of the terms between artists and labels is not really relevant to the matter at hand. The grandparent wasn't opinion, it was correction of an inaccurate statement of fact in the great-grandparent, to wit, the false claim that record companies pay artists salaries, such that you could "steal from record companies" by piracy and hurt their income (and jeopardize the artists "employment" and "salary") s…

If you don't sell any copies, you usually don't owe the advance back; it's yours to keep and the label eats the cost. It's not a salary but it has a somewhat similar effect and I stand by my point. Nevertheless, I was wrong and I do stand corrected.

> it's yours to keep and the label eats the cost

Not quite. It's structured as a loan. As far as book-keeping goes, they write it off as a sunk cost, but you still owe them. The contracts usually tie you to them for a period of time (or something like X albums). If you make a single album and it flops, you are still tied to them. If they decide not to give you the money to make more albums your music career is basically over.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, anything that challenges Google's "Don't Be Evil" propaganda is hard for some to swallow. Thankfully, at least some of us don't fall for that kind of bullshit.

We're disagreeing about how Google/YouTube is bad, not fighting over whether it's bad or good. I'm saying that YouTube's Content ID system is overzealous, and you're claiming that it's underzealous.

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

#239

I doubt it would ever work in practice, but in theory this kind of thing could be solved by having both parties deposit an additional say 20% of purchase price to an escrow account. So buyer deposits 120% and seller deposits 20%. Once buyer confirms receipt, 120% is sent to seller and 20% back to buyer. If there is a problem, buyer can send the item back to the seller, and once seller confirms (re-)receipt, they each…

how about the item has to get opened in front of a third party such as the post office and confirmed that its ok

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

#240

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.

how about the item has to get opened in front of a third party such as the post office and confirmed that its ok
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