Amazon... more like SCAMazon

[AdamFromLTT]

At one point, Amazon was game changing and felt like the best place to shop online. Don’t have to worry about the scams and crappy quality on Ebay and Alibaba. But then something changed. Suddenly all you can find on the website is cheap garbage, or worse, complete scams. We take a look at one of the most prevalent scams on the platform, fake SSDs and hard drives. What do you get when you buy one of these, and how do they keep getting away with it?
 

 

[marcgii]

I'm glad Linus finally got around to highlighting this problem.  But one big problem Linus failed to mention is the lack of ability for users to report fraudulent listings.  That's part of the reason these obvious scam listings can stick around for so long.  

Also I don't see why Amazon doesn't proactively investigate sketchy products that make it to the front page.  For the category of portable SSDs, where this scam is most rampant, you'd think they see ROI if they had a guy at least investigate the ones at top of search results.  I guess barely anyone is filing A-to-Z claims on these.

[Bitter]

USB 2.0 is High Speed tho!

[Ricotta Elmar]

Also , not all scam products is bad, like phone cases and screen protectors, most of the time retail is worse and /or face same defects, im happy with my 5 buck scam screen protector and case  vs a retail one that is 30-40 bucks and break faster , 

cables, well it work if they do, i buy alot of amazon, and sometimes i may even keep the product and get a full refund, because shipping is probably more expansive, well sort off, i bought a electric meat cutter, the blade had a dent and i may keep or while getting a new or full refund

[bluehawk]

I've seen some now that have just given up on any branding 

[xnamkcor]

Amazon should dedicate some CPU cycles to automatically sussing out sellers based in China and making it a filter option when searching for products.

 

Edit:

"But what about legit sellers from China?".

An acceptable loss.

"You're racist."

I'm willing to accept that criticism in exchange for a better shopping experience.

"Nobody actually said these quotes.".

Don't interrupt me while I'm talking to myself.

 

Edited March 7, 2023 by xnamkcor

[dogwitch]

4 minutes ago, xnamkcor said:

Amazon should dedicate some CPU cycles to automatically sussing out sellers based in China and making it a filter option when searching for products.

 

Edit:

"But what about legit sellers from China?".

An acceptable loss.

"You're racist."

I'm willing to accept that criticism in exchange for a better shopping experience.

"Nobody actually said these quotes.".

Don't interrupt me while I'm talking to myself.

 

they been hacking,hijacking,buying usa based accounts in the recent year.

[mykeworthy]

As a person who works for Amazon, I know a lot of the product they sell is stored at Amazon warehouses before going to the customer. So couldn't they send a sample or two to a real tech person to "review." Sure they couldn't do everything, but having a "certified by Amazon" option could help a lot of people.

[HenrySalayne]

It doesn't matter if it's an obvious fake our not, you should ALWAYS test storage devices with something like h2testw to verify everything is working as intended (and the speed makes it even usable). A 16 TB drive running at 10 MB/s would take around 19 days to fill and another 19 days to read out. That's unusable. 

 

[xnamkcor]

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

It doesn't matter if it's an obvious fake our not, you should ALWAYS test storage devices with something like h2testw to verify everything is working as intended (and the speed makes it even usable). A 16 TB drive running at 10 MB/s would take around 19 days to fill and another 19 days to read out. That's unusable. 

 

If the storage exists, it's definitely usable. If I had a floppy that held 9Gb, it would be usable.

[HenrySalayne]

Just now, xnamkcor said:

If the storage exists, it's definitely usable. If I had a floppy that held 9Gb, it would be usable.

Sure... A car without an engine running by a hand-crank next to the steering wheel can also be considered "usable". "It drives, doesn't it?".Or a 56K modem connection to the internet can be considered "usable".

 

But for 99.999% of the population it isn't usable, so we just call it "unusable", ok?

[Radium_Angel]

Please remember the old adage "If it's too good to be true...." seems to cover all kinds of online stores these days

[Mister_Magister]

Bruh it's the same with usb sticks. I bought 4x nice kingston 3.1 5Gbps usb sticks to use as a boot device, and they do max 1MB/s and with little of read at the same time it goes down to 100kbps. Literally unusable garbage.

[xnamkcor]

7 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Sure... A car without an engine running by a hand-crank next to the steering wheel can also be considered "usable". "It drives, doesn't it?".Or a 56K modem connection to the internet can be considered "usable".

 

But for 99.999% of the population it isn't usable, so we just call it "unusable", ok?

10MBps is probably usable to more than 25% of the population.

[Lurick]

14 hours ago, dragonkyng said:

As a person who works for Amazon, I know a lot of the product they sell is stored at Amazon warehouses before going to the customer. So couldn't they send a sample or two to a real tech person to "review." Sure they couldn't do everything, but having a "certified by Amazon" option could help a lot of people.

The issue is would the seller know or not. If they know then just have a couple legit products and then send in fake junk afterwards. It would have to be random for sure.

[HenrySalayne]

51 minutes ago, xnamkcor said:

10MBps is probably usable to more than 25% of the population.

I drew a Venn diagram for you:

 

 

 

[Nystemy]

To be fair. Perhaps there should be a bit more liability placed on these marketplaces. _{(as to encourage them to actually do something about the problem.)}

 

However, some of the issues here is rather trivial to fix. For an example changing the product information/category could require some degree of oversight, at least as far as keeping reviews goes.

 

Burner accounts is likewise a problem to deal with. _{(Here I think Ebay actually does rather well, since one can see how many things the seller has sold, and how many percent were "bad" from the customer's viewpoint. A seller with only a few hundred sold items has a lot harder time selling anything compared to a seller that has sold thousands of things. And the one selling thousands of things have a much harder time getting by scamming people.)}

 

In regards to the Chinese legal system being a bit harsh for outsiders. Yes, this isn't trivial to deal with. _{(Ebay though put up a max revenue limit for Chinese/eastern-asian sellers in general, one has to build up trust with the platform over time.)}

 

In regards to the money problem of scammers fleeing the site as fast as they made their profit. Here the solution is to simply wait. Few sellers on a platform would care that the platform holds their money for a week or two. This though doesn't fully fix the issues, but it does ensure that when the scammer decides to run, any money still in the pipe wouldn't get to them, but rather returned. Making it more costly to just run when one is risking getting caught.

 

Another very simple thing that marketplaces could do _{(and a lot of other companies too)} is to simply hire scam baiters. After all, it doesn't take much effort to look for obvious BS products and see if they actually are what they say on the tin. _{(Together with the solution to hold transactions for a few days would make it rather cost effective from the marketplace's standpoint. If the product weren't a scam, well the seller still gets their money and the marketplace now owns another cheap commodity product.)} It after all doesn't take much subject specific knowledge to find such scam items and seeing what the seller actually delivers isn't hard either. Especially in the case of Amazon that might even have the exact product in their own warehouse already.

[Bitter]

Amazon needs to stop allowing listings to be swapped between items while keeping the reviews and stars. Not really rocket surgery here but they have zero incentive to change anything.

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, Bitter said:

but they have zero incentive to change anything.

Reposted for truth.

 

ANY corp will ONLY change when money (or more accurately, loss of money) is on the line. Until then, it's business as usual.

[AgentB]

This is a " Seagate HDD " my friend got and asked me why it was not working , turned out it was bought off eBay . It was a good fake, branded and looked like a real drive even had a fake serial number and product number .  This is a reminder that unfortunately, people who are not well-versed in technology can easily fall for these types of scams.

 

 

 

 

[mykeworthy]

15 hours ago, Lurick said:

The issue is would the seller know or not. If they know then just have a couple legit products and then send in fake junk afterwards. It would have to be random for sure.

Yeah all the Chinese brands would fall through, but i mean the more repputable ones would get the little stamps, and not just the WDs, Samsungs and Kingston, but the other ones who are still good deals, but good products as well.

 

If it was a selectable option like "prime" or "Capacity Size," then when your Grandma comes on the selects "trusted by amazon," then the third party scams just disappear

[jessie3985]

Besides physically taking apart the drive, are there any easy ways to tell if the firmware has been modified to show a bigger size than it actually is?

[HenrySalayne]

8 hours ago, jessie3985 said:

Besides physically taking apart the drive, are there any easy ways to tell if the firmware has been modified to show a bigger size than it actually is?

h2testw

 

It checks the integrity of the entire storage. So it will also find other defects and it will report how much it could successfully verify.

[Dianoetikos]

I just wanted to add, that at 6:25 when you talk about the weird string of letters being a burner account, it's actually the pinyin for their Chinese Address. Foshan City, Shunde District. The rest of it is probably the industrial park it is located and the company name (GongSi) being Company or Business. So... Yeah. You could actually use that to find the company exact address. My Chinese isn't good enough, but someone with decent enough Chinese could find the exact location.

[KB9GXK]

I know this is an old topic, but I use a free service called FakeSpot.  They have a Chrome addon and both IOS and Android Apps.  For the IOS and Android apps, just "Share" the item to the FakeSpot app and it will look at the reviews and will use AI to determine if the reviews are for another product.  I use this service for everything I buy online on the stores that it supports.

 

https://www.fakespot.com