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Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

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Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

#71

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

wpietri wrote: post #29
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #8

This 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? I think you're giving him too much credit. People try things. They repeat the things that work. Most thinking happens when the behavior stops working. That's why long/broken feedback loops in systems are so dangerous. E.g., a big reason the Challenger disaster happened is NASA ignoring warning signs because they had gotten away with it before. If a zillion NASA engineers…

Was Theranos a bad deal, or did the people who worked there get paid handsomely for their part in the fraud?

Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

#72

Post by ryanlol »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #8

This 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…

I’m sure he got flagged many times and used several accounts for this scheme.

Amazon bans you very fast for high return rates like this.

Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

#73

Post by ryanlol »

Trias11 wrote: post #50
hangonhn wrote: post #35

I'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.

This comment would make much more sense if AMZNs fuckup rates were much higher.

Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

#74

Post by AFascistWorld »

hangonhn wrote: post #35

I'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…

You are lucky it's ordered through Amazon, had it been ordered on their own websites full of English errors, it will be the same response but no easy refund, after lengthy back and forth hassle with Paypal and credit card company you'd be lucky to have your money back.

While for these scammers, it's a super lucrative business, their whole cost is no more than 1 dollar, that means they can make money as long as not every single order was refunded.

Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

#76

Post by pas »

wpietri wrote: post #58
stefco_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a zillion NASA engineers didn't really think it through when lives were on the line The in-depth investigation following the Challenger disaster [0] actually reached a slightly different conclusion: engineers tended to estimate ~1/100 launches would end in failure, while management estimates were about 3-6 orders of magnitude lower. The engineers did think it through; it was management that failed utterly and compl…

Thanks for the correction. But I'm not sure I agree with your diagnosis. I suppose it depends on how one thinks of engineers and software developers. Are we professionals, like doctors, with a bedrock responsibility to society and our users? Or are we just very well-paid gofers, who do whatever the bosses say? In my view, responsibility isn't a zero-sum game. Sure, the managers failed. But the engineers also failed,…

> Several of the [...] engineers stated their concerns about the O-rings and urged a delay, but the concerns didn't get communicated beyond the Level III Flight Readiness Review (FRR).

I think this is partially a fault of engineers, and/or the development/project model. They were not able to clearly state that no, it's a no-go, or yes, it's a go, they had "concerns". But that is probably useless. Therefore the problem is they lacked the conceptualization framework, a risk model, to state the severity of their concern, what is it based on, and someone should have been able to aggregate it and determine how this estimated risk influences the mission's overall risk.

That said, it is entirely the management's fault that they lacked this critical expertise/competence to manage risk and the project, and the engineers. (And naturally some of those managers themselves were engineers.)

Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

#79

Post by ldoughty »

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #45
irrational wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would cost them $20/hr per validator (burdened).

If only 5 items an hour are bad returns, that's $4 per item identified.

It's likely cheaper to have you, the customer, do the valuation because you might not even realize the issues... And if you do, you might be too lazy to return it. Which further let's the value of hitting a validator.. so the employee would now be to probably find twice as many bad returns per hour for the company to break even.

Re: Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

#80

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #8

This 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…

Given that they got away with it for long enough to scam them for $370k worth of merchandise, I'd say their assumption of what was going to happen was more accurate than most people's assumption of what was going to happen.
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