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Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

bentasker.co.uk

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Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#121

Post by inopinatus »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #119
inopinatus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still the bizarre but all-too-common line of thinking in which someone talks themselves out of marshalling available resources. It’s negotiating against yourself, and a recipe for failing at life.

When you know before hand that it will 100% just waste time, then the value is in not making you and others more aggrieved and annoyed.

Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out, I feel qualified to say that is a sack of lies, and the OP has exacerbated their aggravation and annoyance by failing to contact the police and their insurance company.

Instead of asserting their rights, they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes. I struggle not to label that as vassal thinking.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#122

Post by anonymouskimmer »

inopinatus wrote: post #121
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you know before hand that it will 100% just waste time, then the value is in not making you and others more aggrieved and annoyed.

Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out, I feel qualified to say that is a sack of lies, and the OP has exacerbated their aggravation and annoyance by failing to contact the police and their insurance company. Instead of asserting their rights, they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes. I struggle not to label that as vassal thi…

> they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes

No, he's told Amex that he will take legal action against them under section 75 if they do not fulfill their obligations.

> Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out

By which kind of insurance and for what? It's important to note that for this transaction Amex is the primary insurance company (providing purchase insurance for things bought with it). Why would homeowners insurance provide coverage?

> I feel qualified to say that is a sack of lies

Prove it then.

Are you from the UK? I'm not.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#125

Post by ohdannyboy »

Gorbzel wrote: post #68
ohdannyboy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it varies by location because in Chicago it's extremely rare for things to take more than 2 days. In fact they've been stepping up next and same day delivery for a lot of items. That being said, I'm actually moving in the opposite direction since that creates a lot of waste. Unless I really need the item quickly I use Prime Day delivery so it all comes in one box. If my whole family didn't share the account I w…

The theft problem doesn’t vary at all in Chicago. I’m in a North (west) Side neighborhood and receive about 83% of Amazon packages, with the rest being stolen or just not delivered. Compare this with a 100% success rate for items delivered by UPS, USPS, or FedEx. I figure at some point I’ll fall below whatever metrics Amazon has internally, they’ll stop resending/refunding packages, and I’ll have to fight the same ba…

I live in a high-rise which has a mail room so maybe I'm insulated from whatever factors lead to that (porch piracy obviously, but something about Amazon specifically). I didn't realize it was that bad, only getting 83% is insane

Edit: though my family in Rogers Park and the suburbs have never complained about this issue so I'm not sure it's that common.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#126

Post by FireBeyond »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #17

Amazon (US) has really gone downhill in the past ~5 years. I signed up for Prime a over decade ago because of the reliable 2 day shipping. It worked pretty much as described. It was great. Shipping is no longer 2 days on most items - "Prime" shipping can now take 7 days. Amazon advertise same or next day shipping, but it's really only for big ticket, occasional purchase items. Most everyday purchases now take 3-7 day…

> Amazon advertise same or next day shipping

What's more is if you filter for "arrives tomorrow" you'll get a bunch of results, but there's no guarantee they will arrive tomorrow - you have to double and triple check at every step of the order flow.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#127

Post by kmeisthax »

Six years ago, I had my computer compromised by a remote access trojan. The hacker accessed my machine while I was asleep, used Chrome password manager extraction tools to get my Facebook password, then credential-stuffed it into Amazon[0] to buy as many PSN cards as they could before Chase's fraud detection tripped and started texting me for verification, which woke me up.

You would think that fixing this would be simple: revoke the PSN cards and reverse the credit card transactions. Turns out, they don't do that. At all. Amazon insisted that they wouldn't do shit without a bank chargeback. I of course had already started that process with Chase. About a month later, I get a call from Chase saying they need to "move the transactions to the new account"[1], which sounds like a stupid technical thing, so sure, whatever. A few weeks later I get a letter in the mail saying the dispute was closed because "it was a dispute with the merchant" - no explanation what that means. They give a phone number to call that goes to voicemail - I called at least five times and never got a call back, and all $400 worth of fraudulent transactions were right back on my statement.

I gave up trying to fight shit because I don't want to sue my bank, nor do I want to fight Dread Pirate Bezos. I'm not suicidal[2]. However, it did teach me two things that have stuck with me:

- Amazon has a blanket opt-out with the credit card companies and issuing banks. I don't know how, it could be as simple as "don't waste time investigating likely false accusations of fraud", but they are able to win[3] chargebacks with credit card companies using explanations that look like someone just picked the first option on the form that denies the dispute.

- PlayStation Network cards are apparently as immutable and uncensorable as Bitcoin[4]. If you want to do crimes, do them with PlayStation.

[0] Yes, I was reusing passwords. Yes, I did change every password I had over the next few days. Yes, I completely wiped the machine and reinstalled everything. No, I don't think I should have been liable for fraud because of any of this.

[1] They had sent me a new card and card number at this point.

[2] I'm pretty sure the "slow and horrible" option in the suicide booths involves burying yourself in legal fees.

[3] Keep in mind that not-monopolistic merchants almost never win chargebacks or disputes.

[4] For an extra layer of irony, a few days prior, I'd written a long screed at a Bitcoin fanatic on Reddit about how credit card chargebacks are a feature, not a bug, and that immutable transactions are a design defect.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#128

Post by josephcsible »

tester756 wrote: post #117
neilv wrote: post #72

> and have even contested credit card charge-backs. Personally, I'd never do a CC chargeback against certain companies. Too much risk of being cut off from a crucial vendor by a "customers who do chargebacks aren't worth the trouble" automation/SOP. (For household consumer issues... if customer service was exhausted, I'd escalate to the CEO's office "?" email address, and if even that didn't work, but I really needed…

How they can cut you off? Aren't there various payment methods?

They don't just blacklist the credit card number you used, but also your name, address, email, and phone number. And it wouldn't surprise me if they also had some heuristic involving IPs, cookies, and device fingerprinting.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#129

Post by josephcsible »

upon_drumhead wrote: post #82

> Never buy anything of any meaningful value (if anything at all) from Amazon ever again Honestly, a single chargeback will cause Amazon to cancel your account and block you from the platform forever. It's the cost of getting your money back :(

Do they also delete all of your previous Kindle purchases and all of your data in AWS?

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#130

Post by kmeisthax »

cjaybo wrote: post #100
blagie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this saves Amazon money. They have a huge problem with internal, for lack of a better word, corruptions. * Packing people who don't care if high-value items are broken * Delivery people who fake deliveries and steal * Co-mingling of fake items with sellers ... and so on. Because the delivery person wasn't investigated, they'll steal again and again, and that will spread to others in Amazon culture. Good…

You posted the same theory above, except there you included the important disclaimer that you have no inside information — is this just a hunch that you have? Because it seems like a Hanlon’s razor type of situation to me. Without some sort of evidence of the fraud you speak of, it seems far more likely to be them simply struggling with challenges of scale. Every business deals with bad employees but the majority of…

Amazon systematically underpays all their employees. They do this by encouraging employee churn, like to the point where warehouses occasionally realize "shit, we're running out of new people to hire in the entire metro area". This means they have a high tolerance for a lot of things that would be considered disqualifying. For example, in a lot of workplaces, random drug testing is mandated by insurance, which means people who smoke weed are unemployable. Amazon will hire them anyway[0].

That's not to say Amazon has no limits - they do background-check for felony convictions, and having one would make it harder to get hired by an Amazon warehouse. However, they've still built a hiring system that optimizes for hiring the precariat[1] and underpaying them so they stay precarious. They've built all the economic incentives for them to be stolen from. We don't necessarily need to prove specific allegations of theft in the same way we don't need to prove that specific cracks in the road are caused by water getting in and freezing.

[0] For the record, this is a good thing, but Amazon is doing it for incredibly terrible reasons.

[1] The class of people in permanent precarity - i.e. people who you can get to do anything, including run a marathon across a poorly-organized warehouse filling boxes for eight hours for little pay.

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