I used to be an Amazon customer service rep. I know for a fact that replacements can only be sent to the original address. However, you can change the address after the order's been made. Calling into customer service to change this address is going to be risky, so doing it self-serve online is probably what's being done here. These hackers had access to your account I suspect.
Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
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Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#42I found it also pretty odd that I could use my Prime account to order things for a friend using my address for shipping and billing and his bank details for direct debit (which is the most common means of payment here on Amazon.de, I guess).
The other way around (his address, my bank details) also works without any further verification.
So I could basically just enter someone's bank details and hope the order ships to my anonymous forwarding address before they notice. The victim will then order her bank to refund the fraudulent direct debit transaction (thanks to SEPA she now has 13 months to file the request). Amazon will probably suspend the account but the perpetrator will obviously not care.
Even if it's less convenient (because not instantaneous) Amazon should be doing something similar to what PayPal does: transferring a few cents together with a verification code to the account for verification.
This scenario would hopefully only work if the account itself was compromised. But when looking at how overcredulous customer support seems to be it might well be possible to pull this off without actual access to the account.
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#43It happened to me in a brick and mortar shop : I went to the shop to have my laptop repaired and they told me it was impossible since I had been reimbursed when I gave them the laptop back 6 months ago (the same laptop I had in my hands).
They never told me what happened but I suspect someone in this shop took the money and declared the laptop returned.
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The wifi on the replacement Kindle stopped working though... been too lazy to figure out why though. It's worth raising that within the first year, after that they stop doing free replacements.
Pretty certain the free replacement thing lasts more than a year does it not? I replaced one of my older kindles because of a screen issue recently
Didn't for me. Though that may be because they no longer sell that model in my country.
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#45Are Amazon actually making money on these? Do they charge costs and shipping back to the supplier above trade price?
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#46The way this is played up makes it sound like a security issue, but it's a social issue above all else. A story I've been meaning to write for a while, but aligns well with this: I bought a kindle a while back, with the (kinda expensive) case because I knew I would break the screen if I didn't. I broke the screen anyways (some badly aligned books in my bag I think). I sent a kinda annoyed email at amazon about how th…
Oddly, someone else in this comments section mentions an, according to them well-known, issue with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882436
Yup, it's me. The issue is mentioned many many times on Amazon forums,and everyone reports the same thing. Sometimes it's enough to change the name of your wifi network,sometimes it won't help. I also found a post somewhere talking about how the Wi-Fi kernel driver of the Paperwhite actually crashes in presence of certain networks, and nothing helps except for a reboot - and obviously if that network is still there it will crash again.
It seems to be mostly triggered by BT/Virgin Media routers here in the UK:
To give you an example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=...
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#47Amazon themselves have actively recommended this reship.com when I asked about delivery before for certain product.
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#48I found it also pretty odd that I could use my Prime account to order things for a friend using my address for shipping and billing and his bank details for direct debit (which is the most common means of payment here on Amazon.de, I guess). The other way around (his address, my bank details) also works without any further verification. So I could basically just enter someone's bank details and hope the order ships t…
I do this frequently, the use case is ordering things for my father, who's certainly capable of doing this on his own, but since I buy so much stuff from Amazon, starting a year after they opened, it's the most convenient way.
Only difference is I'm in the US and charging it to a credit card of his. And a Prime account is not required (we recently split the difference on getting one). And if they're looking for fraud, that we have the same last name, and his billing address is about a mile away, could reassure them.
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The wifi on the replacement Kindle stopped working though... been too lazy to figure out why though. It's worth raising that within the first year, after that they stop doing free replacements.
Pretty certain the free replacement thing lasts more than a year does it not? I replaced one of my older kindles because of a screen issue recently
It's free for a year but Amazon customer service is usually pretty generous.
I had a kindle break after about a year and a month and they still sent me a free replacement. My father had his break after 2 years of heavy use, called Amazon and they offered him a discounted price on the Paperwhite.
Re: Amazon orders subject to replacement fraud (still)
#50Here's a working hypothesis: | Why is Amazon's security for replacement orders so lax? Amazon values customer satisfiction above their fraud write-off. | Why would they send a replacement to an address that has never been associated with me, and is in a wholly different state than the one the original item was sent to? Because the time between ordering an item, and defect can be sufficiently large to cover moves: peo…
> Amazon values customer satisfiction above their fraud write-off.
I doubt this is the case. I've had to place chargebacks against Amazon to get my money back for purchases that were not delivered due to Amazon screwing up and telling the vendor that the software key(s) were not purchased.
For anything software related, they offer no refunds even when they and/or their vendor screw up to the point the product is unusable.