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Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

blog.aboutamazon.com

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Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#41

Post by snarf21 »

rckoepke wrote: post #11

The categories of things that I've received counterfeit versions of on Amazon have been truly mind-blowing. It's been replacement HEPA filters, cat toys, even breakfast cereal. It's not just earphones/mics, batteries, usb cables, flash drives, extension cords, and other electronics. Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And i…

The issue is so simple to solve and they don't have to have a crimes unit to do it. Simply segment reviews and ratings based on seller. All you have to do is have each seller put a scannable sticker on each product based each batch going through intake. You can even still colocate. Then all the returns and bad reviews go to the right person and they can just get banned. This is not rocket surgery.

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#42

Post by jedberg »

rckoepke wrote: post #11

The categories of things that I've received counterfeit versions of on Amazon have been truly mind-blowing. It's been replacement HEPA filters, cat toys, even breakfast cereal. It's not just earphones/mics, batteries, usb cables, flash drives, extension cords, and other electronics. Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And i…

My number one rule with Amazon is that I don't buy anything that is supposed to go in my body. I don't trust it enough to get legit safe items.

Anything else I figure if it's counterfeit but still works it's not the end of the world (although I'm pretty cautious about which electronics I get).

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#43

Post by draw_down »

rckoepke wrote: post #11

The categories of things that I've received counterfeit versions of on Amazon have been truly mind-blowing. It's been replacement HEPA filters, cat toys, even breakfast cereal. It's not just earphones/mics, batteries, usb cables, flash drives, extension cords, and other electronics. Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And i…

If people can make a quick buck counterfeiting it then they will.

For me it doesn't work to say "who would do that??", I'd rather focus on "Why has Amazon let the problem get this insanely bad?"

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#44

Post by ciarannolan »

gwittel wrote: post #27

Are fake listings a problem? Absolutely. But is it the primary issue? I'm not so sure. It seems like Amazon is doing all sorts of things but not actually addressing the root -- inventory co-mingling + sketchy 3rd party sellers that can come back overnight. Simply ending inventory co-mingling would likely handle a substantial portion of counterfeits since Amazon is sourcing their stock through standard channels. Amazo…

>It seems like Amazon is doing all sorts of things but not actually addressing the root -- inventory co-mingling + sketchy 3rd party sellers that can come back overnight.

Right, and for the reasons you listed, they simple do not care. They care only about appearing to care.

As someone else linked in this thread, they announce some bullshit "investigative team" like this every 6 months or so.

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#45

Post by nytesky »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #30
rckoepke wrote: post #11

The categories of things that I've received counterfeit versions of on Amazon have been truly mind-blowing. It's been replacement HEPA filters, cat toys, even breakfast cereal. It's not just earphones/mics, batteries, usb cables, flash drives, extension cords, and other electronics. Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And i…

Oh my god you ordered food in the mail. Did you put it inside your body? Are you okay?

In times pandemic I’ve been ordering from Target, CVS, and Costco. Do is this a bad idea?

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#46

Post by raverbashing »

throwaway_jobs wrote: post #34
rckoepke wrote: post #11

The categories of things that I've received counterfeit versions of on Amazon have been truly mind-blowing. It's been replacement HEPA filters, cat toys, even breakfast cereal. It's not just earphones/mics, batteries, usb cables, flash drives, extension cords, and other electronics. Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And i…

Here is one (plus the story of a defective product lawsuit behind it). A water slide. The type that bolts down into concrete for use with pools. If the first thing in your mind is...isn’t that something from the 70’s/80’s...yes it is. So the counterfeiter must have molded the entire slide (complete with the company logo that was embossed into the slide itself) thing is that company was dissolved back in the 80’s. So…

Edit: theory probably doesn't work, see comments below

> So the counterfeiter must have molded the entire slide (complete with the company logo that was embossed into the slide itself) thing is that company was dissolved back in the 80’s.

I have a simpler explanation for that. Someone bought the tooling (injection moulds?), in an auction maybe, didn't bother to change the brand and is out there manufacturing slides.

It's not "counterfeit" per se they just didn't give a f. (to use the technical term) and are selling it. Maybe outside branding is theirs but not the plastic one.

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#47

Post by bcassedy »

jacques_chester wrote: post #39
boulos wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Target of all places seems more curated than Amazon. Isn’t this going to be true of any “pure” retailer? The nature of FBA and third-party sellers just means there will always be at least some percentage of fraud and so on that’s higher than “trick various people in the retailer to sell fake goods”. Particularly as it’s much easier for insiders at a retailer to steal from their employer (and then resell via whateve…

> Isn’t this going to be true of any “pure” retailer? No. First-party retailers don't generally commingle stock with other third-party retailers. They typically have few suppliers, often one supplier, for each good. That's for many reasons, but it also makes it easy for them to identify who sent them counterfeits. Amazon is discovering what old-fashioned retailers learned long ago: customers do not give a fuck who, u…

Walmart's online store is a mess of 3rd party options now too. I went looking for hair clippers at the start of the pandemic and all I could find were no-name brands offered by third party vendors on their website.

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#48

Post by rckoepke »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #30
rckoepke wrote: post #11

The categories of things that I've received counterfeit versions of on Amazon have been truly mind-blowing. It's been replacement HEPA filters, cat toys, even breakfast cereal. It's not just earphones/mics, batteries, usb cables, flash drives, extension cords, and other electronics. Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And i…

Oh my god you ordered food in the mail. Did you put it inside your body? Are you okay?

I thought this was hilarious personally but in general, this kind of comment doesn't really add to the discussion and feels not very appropriate for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should be more thoughtful and substantive, not less.

However, I will absolutely take the opportunity to plug a food-by-mail company that is very near and dear to my heart:

https://www.zingermans.com/OnlineCatalog.aspx

Prices are obviously a bit high, but the quality is amazing. They treat staff incredibly well. They do lots of employee training so people really can work their way up from Janitor to whatever they want. Pay has always been above average. All finances are essentially open-book to employees and they go through each businesses (it's a conglomerate now) monthly/quarterly finances on a whiteboard with the team members so that everyone understands where they're at.

Sometimes ordering food by mail is awesome.

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#49

Post by jbay808 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #20
jbay808 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company got a counterfeit textbook. On the cover was the book we had ordered, about control theory. The printed pages were a veterinary textbook by a different publisher.

I'm curious about the incentive that leads to this. If you're going to print and sell counterfeit textbooks, why not use the actual content? Surely nearly every copy with a random other book will be returned. Is it possible that they meant to include the right content, but they counterfeit lots of books and have low quality control? My best guess is that they can easily grab a copy of a book's cover online, but actua…

I was also very confused. If you're going to sell a fake book, why not just fill it with blank pages? Why go to the extra effort? Did they really think I wasn't going to notice when I opened it and it was full of information about hamsters? Were they hoping I'd just put it on my bookshelf and never actually read it?

We concluded that they probably run some kind of big automated print-on-demand counterfeiting operation, and have a database of textbook PDFs from several publishers. They probably had the wrong entry in their database for this title, and linked it up with the wrong contents. Perhaps next time you order a small-animal veterinary handbook from Amazon, you'll find it full of block diagrams and transfer functions.

I imagine that if they had printed the correct PDF, I never would have noticed. The book was printed on high-quality paper and well bound.

For what it's worth, this wasn't a cheap purchase.

Re: Amazon establishes new Counterfeit Crimes Unit

#50

Post by rckoepke »

julianozen wrote: post #19
rckoepke wrote: post #11

The categories of things that I've received counterfeit versions of on Amazon have been truly mind-blowing. It's been replacement HEPA filters, cat toys, even breakfast cereal. It's not just earphones/mics, batteries, usb cables, flash drives, extension cords, and other electronics. Who counterfeits breakfast cereal??? I've had this issue with both Quaker Oats and Raisin Bran. The scale of fraud is magnificent. And i…

Really interested to hear how you figured out the breakfast was fake

Yeah, great question. Basically wrong flavor and texture. Visually looked quite similar but just had a cardboard consistency. Repeatedly compared vs. grocery store bought over a few months span of alternating purchases to confirm.

It was somehow both immediately obvious and also subtle. My girlfriend eventually confirmed that something didn't seem right with it, so we started buying back-to-back orders alternating from grocery stores vs. amazon. Every once in awhile we'd get non-counterfeit cereal from Amazon but mostly it was "fake". Or at least diverted from another global region where the recipe/ingredients are somewhat different.

I always wanted to do some quantitative analysis like density or fill size or precise box dimensions or spectrometry of the ink on the boxes. But at the time I was just trying to convince myself that I wasn't crazy, and eventually I was 100% sure so I stopped experimenting before bothering to collect quantitative data.

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