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I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

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Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#431

Post by smsm42 »

fredophile wrote: post #412
smsm42 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think buying from Amazon itself is relatively OK, I'd have hard time believing Amazon would run any scams. But third party sellers, given no customer service beyond robots and robot-like script readers... yep, better to steer clear.

Buying from Amazon isn't enough to avoid scams. Amazon mixes their stock with 3rd parties stock.

If it's the same item, then it's already not a scam. At least not that one. The whole scam is that there is no item at all. And if Amazon doesn't check stock before mixing (which I have hard time believing) then you'd get much better luck getting money back from Amazon branded sale than from third-party one, IMO.

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#432

Post by InitialLastName »

joshontheweb wrote: post #306
haburka wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liking zero indexed lists is such a dumb programmer meme. Lists are for humans to read and therefore should use the natural numbers, which start at one. Arrays are zero indexed because the first item of the array starts with zero offset.

I found it interesting to see that building floors in Australia are zero indexed. The first floor there is what Americans would call the second. Not sure why they chose to do it that way but it works fine in the real world.

Due to hills, many of the buildings at my American university were 2 indexed: Due to hills, the apparent ground floor was usually labeled "2nd Floor".

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#433

Post by pwdisswordfish »

powercf wrote: post #204
haburka wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liking zero indexed lists is such a dumb programmer meme. Lists are for humans to read and therefore should use the natural numbers, which start at one. Arrays are zero indexed because the first item of the array starts with zero offset.

> Lists are for humans to read and therefore should use the natural numbers, which start at one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms#Formulation To address the content of your post: I agree, but humans aren't purely logical devices created by Dr. Noonien Soong, and we do enjoy playing with things and joking about.

Peano axioms can just as well be formulated with 1 as the smallest natural number, with little consequence as to the expressiveness of the resulting theory.

Not that there aren't mathematical reasons to start counting with zero, but this isn't a very strong one, at least not without further elaboration.

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#434

Post by pwdisswordfish »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #350
wongarsu wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Lists are for humans to read and therefore should use the natural numbers Depending on who you ask, the natural numbers do contain zero. Notably ISO 80000-2 is of that opinion. In university, half my professors included 0 in the natural numbers, half excluded it. For lists, starting them at 1 makes sense, but I would argue that's purely because that way the words "first", "second", "fiftieth" etc. line up with the n…

To be fair to floor labels starting with 1, I have never seen a floor with a negative number.

You haven't been around much, then.

The seven-segment display inside the elevator in my former dormitory labelled the ground floor as '0', and the one below as '-1'. There was also a voice announcer, but I don't remember what it said on floor -1; I didn't go there often.

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#435

Post by sombremesa »

bradleyjg wrote: post #299
rgbrenner wrote: post #7

filing the chargeback is a good idea... but also, the sender made a critical mistake sending it usps.. that makes it mail fraud. Talk to the US Postal Inspection Service, it's a branch of law enforcement, and I'm sure they would be very interested with all of the evidence youve collected. They can cross state lines and arrest the sender. https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/

I'm a little more skeptical of the claim that crossing the post office is a big mistake after nothing came of this case: http://www.postal-reporter.com/blog/usps-oig-investigating-a... The comment sections at the time were full of people talking about how it was a federal crime and the cops would be in deep trouble but the postal inspector seems to have been a paper tiger.

That's not remotely close to being the same thing. There isn't a grey area when it comes to fraud (if there is enough evidence), whereas there is plenty of grey area when it comes to making arrests in the field, which may involve some amount of human error and judgement and therefore has leeway.

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#436

Post by jashsu »

mikeash wrote: post #26

I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all. They dilute the Amazon brand to a tremendous degree. It used to be that buying from Amazon meant a certain level of quality and service. Now there are really two Amazons: the old one, and a new one that's basically a shitty version of eBay. I have to go out of my way to avoid these crappy third-party sellers when I'm searching for stuff on Amazo…

>I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all.

Generally the reason any for-profit entity takes a certain action (or inaction) is... yep, for profit. Sure Amazon can have tremendous scale just retailing for itself. But becoming a marketplace greatly increased its ability to compete with the likes of eBay and Rakuten.

I also go out of my way to select the sold by Amazon option if there is one, but often times FBA or completely third-party is the only option. Marketplace increases the surface area of Amazon's product offerings and more importantly makes it a true platform. That's the kind of thinking that can scale up to multibillion-dollar business.

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#438

Post by exikyut »

dizzystar wrote: post #369
snowwrestler wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have shifted all my budget and used buying from Amazon Marketplace to eBay. At this point it seems like there are new stories about Amazon Marketplace scams almost daily. Does anyone think Marketplace is a priority for Amazon leadership these days? Does Bezos even know it is still operating? It's not getting the A team, obviously. Meanwhile connecting sellers and buyers is all eBay does. They don't make devices, pr…

Both eBay and Amazon are "hackable" by both the buyer and seller. The available scams are different, but neither party of a transaction is 100% safe. In my experience, eBay is MUCH more slanted to the seller than Amazon. The real sophisticated scammers are truly unbelievable. Unfortunately, I can't say more on this stuff, but I'll hint that the most egregious scams use both eBay and Amazon, pitting the flaws of each…

Can you share any hints that could be used to red-flag a particular seller? Sophisticated users are surely not going to use the same account name on both platforms.

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#439

Post by exikyut »

vanderreeah wrote: post #386
dizzystar wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both eBay and Amazon are "hackable" by both the buyer and seller. The available scams are different, but neither party of a transaction is 100% safe. In my experience, eBay is MUCH more slanted to the seller than Amazon. The real sophisticated scammers are truly unbelievable. Unfortunately, I can't say more on this stuff, but I'll hint that the most egregious scams use both eBay and Amazon, pitting the flaws of each…

Curious whence comes your familiarity with the scams?

My guess is lawyer of some kind who has somehow managed to drown in this exact type of case, either by chance or deliberate job placement.

Re: I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon

#440

Post by triangleman »

fspeech wrote: post #329
leggomylibro wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy from third-party sellers all the time for hobby equipment/parts. Yes, they mostly resell bulk container-ship-specials from East Asia. But that's fine for hobbying around - sometimes you don't want to pay a lot for a bunch of M3 screws/nuts and you don't mind a poor shear strength and heads that easily strip. You know what you're getting, and the two-day shipping is very nice when you don't want to wait for an a…

"I do agree that they should at least make a search option to filter them out" They have a filter "Free Shipping by Amazon" under "Eligible for Free Shipping". It should filter out most if not all items not serviced by Amazon.

I believe the feature OP was looking for was to filter out 3rd party sellers regardless of who fulfills the order.
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