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Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
2. Amazon kind of sorts them onto pallets that they eventually auction off, blindly. A lot of sellers buy these, like prepackaged storage lockers. They then sort through the junk, see what they can make a buck on, and resell on eBay or elsewhere.
That's the ultimate lost bet when bidding on Amazon returned merchandise. A pallet full of dirt likely in the boxes of expensive brand name items.
Based on the people I’ve seen doing it, they actually make quite a bit of money. You’ll find a few bad apples in the world, sure, but most of the time you’re not going to get people like this guy doing return scams at a scare large enough to impact the sheer size of Amazon’s operations.
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#43I just ordered a MyQ garage door hub from Amazon Warehouse (listed as missing or damaged original packaging). When I opened it up it felt a little off. The protective film on the device had obviously been removed and reattached and nothing fit very well in the designated slots in the packaging. The device itself had faint scratches and dust on it. I decided to check the model number and sure enough, it was the previo…
Similar experience with a sawhorse. It was clearly a used item when I opened it. I got a replacement no problem, how is it more cost effective to pay shipping twice than to pay someone to check it once?
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#44This is so bizarrely stupid, but it does lead to some questions: 1. What did this man think was going to happen? That Amazon would never open the boxes he returned? Certainly after 370k worth I'm surprised he didn't get flagged much earlier. 2. What normally happens to Amazon returns? The article makes it sound like they are rarely opened. That seems bizarre to me. I would have thought they'd have a system for proces…
> What did this man think was going to happen? That Amazon would never open the boxes he returned? To be fair Amazon actually sells bags of dirt, so if there is just a bar code and a bag of dirt then the person opening the box might not think anything of it.
He just had the wrong scam.
Buy high grade dirt, return low grade dirt.
Buy high purity reagents, ...
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#45I just ordered a MyQ garage door hub from Amazon Warehouse (listed as missing or damaged original packaging). When I opened it up it felt a little off. The protective film on the device had obviously been removed and reattached and nothing fit very well in the designated slots in the packaging. The device itself had faint scratches and dust on it. I decided to check the model number and sure enough, it was the previo…
Similar experience with a sawhorse. It was clearly a used item when I opened it. I got a replacement no problem, how is it more cost effective to pay shipping twice than to pay someone to check it once?
The people that process the returns make next to nothing and run off a script of yes/no and anything weird gets escalated.
A Q/A person to validate a range of products for authenticity (or at least more so than now) likely costs more per hour.
They have their supply chain so efficient, it's likely very cheap for them to move physical items across the globe.
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#46This the kind of thing you could probably get away with once or twice... I don't know why he thought he could get away with it for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re amazon returns: either sent back to the third party seller or tossed into return pallets. If you watch some videos of them it becomes pretty clear amazon doesn’t check. A lot of electronics swapped out.
I've had multiple Amazon returns in which I dropped off the packages at a physical Amazon location, had them scanned, and received a paper receipt with the confirmation number. A few days later, look on your account and there has been no return. Try to look it up using the confirmation number and it doesn't exist. Open a customer support ticket, go back and forth a dozen times before they understand what you are tryi…
For me returns and refunds consistently take over a week to register after the carrier tracking number shows delivery to Amazon returns center (Amazon provides no prepaid return labels for Finland).
I don't really mind, though.
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon, I believe, checks for the weight of the package to ascertain if the contents are what they were supposed to be.
A missing DVD cover discovered by a weight discrepancy? Who’s to say it was returned in the original envelope? Perhaps more likely the extremely light items weight is hidden in the variance of the return packaging weight and so those packages have to be opened?
A missing cover sounds like it would be visible without opening the product packaging (which would be the cover itself, no?), i.e. they can easily notice the omission by comparing the returned item against a reference image.
In the OP case the product packaging was filled with dirt, which is not as easily discoverable without opening product packaging.
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#49I just ordered a MyQ garage door hub from Amazon Warehouse (listed as missing or damaged original packaging). When I opened it up it felt a little off. The protective film on the device had obviously been removed and reattached and nothing fit very well in the designated slots in the packaging. The device itself had faint scratches and dust on it. I decided to check the model number and sure enough, it was the previo…
Similar experience with a sawhorse. It was clearly a used item when I opened it. I got a replacement no problem, how is it more cost effective to pay shipping twice than to pay someone to check it once?
Depends on the rate of the fraud. If, for example, 2 out of 10,000 returns are fraudulent, probably it costs lesser to process 2 replacements than check 10,000 items.
Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt
#50I've encountered another scam regarding Amazon returns where the seller would ship from overseas. The item I ordered would be nothing like the description. So I filed for a refund and the seller was like "sure, here's the form and you can pay for shipping". As you can imagine because of the postage rates differences, it was a lot more expensive for me to send it back vs. the cost to them to ship to the US. In fact th…
>> Amazon's customer service is a huge part of the reason I order so much through them.
Do i have time to go through multiple cycles of "get crap / return" until i get item I ordered?
That's why I check more reputable stores first such as B&H first before succumbing to AMZN hit-n-miss-n-get-refund store.