Amazon Infected with Scam Sellers

by: DingDong

AyyyyY!
The other month, I was looking for a new camera since the local stores are not stocking them.

I refused to pay for the camera and wait for 5 weeks to received the item. - So this is why -

by: iheartjacksparrow

I was very surprised to read this: "A seller opens a new merchant account on Amazon, which is incredibly easy to do and does not entail any sort of vetting process,...." I was under the impression that Amazon put each new seller through a screening process.

If they have a known scamming seller, I would think that they would shut down the ISP for that person to keep them from starting over with a new account.

by: mcposty

Amazon makes money either way they do not care.

This has been going on forever. A new seller opens up and in 5 minutes has 20000 skus online. Obvious scam bit amazon refuses to deal with it.

by: angryllama

Serious topic, but my very first FUNNY TAKE-AWAY is that the LONE Positive this example cited in opposition to 497 NEGATIVES is surely one of those Brain-Dead buyers who leaves POSITIVE FEEDBACK .... INSTANTLY without waiting for their $$$purchase to even SHIP.... let alone WAIT to see their purchase pop up on their doorstep.  Sad!  

by: eXtinctBay

Amazon has a strict rule: One account per IP address (with very, very few exceptions).

But when these addresses can be spoofed, it is simple for scammers to open multiple accounts with a myriad of internet identities.

The folks from the big continent with the highest world population are ahead of the game. And, since there are many others in line to replace those who do not complete transactions (and their accounts closed, at least temporarily), it is a daunting task for the River.

The A-Z Guarantee claims filed must be enormous, and a massive drain on Amazon resources, since they have to issue full refunds for all the items never received.

Just imagine if this happened to eBay as well. Could they keep up with this many failed transactions and Money Back Guarantee claims? Scary thought.......

by: Ina

"Amazon makes money either way" - if Amazon pays the seller in 2 weeks and get an A-Z claim from the buyer after that, Amazon would have to refund the buyer.

Wish there was hard data about the scale of this problem.

by: Frank F

Ebay has a lot of this too, although I don't know if its to run with the money or a different scam.. And I think its all foreigners doing it..

I bought a shelving unit that normally is $99 with $25 shipping for $15 and free shipping. I know too good to be true! They sold 1500+ of these in a day, and then ebay cancelled all the sales.. My paypal was not refunded though, it was unclaimed like the seller had not even set up an account in paypal..

Really odd, not sure what they were up to, maybe just trying to collect personal info, or it was a scam gone wrong...

by: Frank F

There are all sorts of scams on ebay. Last fall, the Chinese were putting up NFL jersey accounts with links to their websites and HTML that redirected you to their sites. They were not trying to sell on ebay, just out to market and steal customers.

Ebay would shut down the fake listings, and in minutes new ones were back up under new ids (and I guess with spoofed IPs). It went on for weeks and weeks...

And what was funny is that the damn fake stuff was at the very TOP of best match for ZERO feedback sellers.. Thanks ebay for giving the 'nobody newbies' and SCAMMERS visibility, and relegating your long time established sellers and customers to the bottom...

Don't understand why they have such strict controls on us, and let the scammers run rampant...

by: vk

This has become a massive problem. It's not just the ''Just Launched'' sellers, it also seems like the scammers are using old dormant accounts that had 1-3 positive feedbacks years ago - my guess is because those accounts have been grandfathered in for daily disbursements.

Seller forums are blowing up, yet not a peep from Amazon or forum moderators - extremely suspicious.

To get a sense of the scale of this issue, check out these three accounts and the amount of negative feedbacks:
https://www.amazon.com/sp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=
&isAma
zonFulfilled=&isCBA=&marketplaceID
=ATVPDKIKX0DER&orderID=&seller=A3E9QSWYTBCETQ&tab=&vasStoreID=

https://www.amazon.com/sp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=&isAmazonFulfilled=
&isCBA=&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&orderID=&seller=
A1NYSS0KSYPFPQ&tab=&vasStoreID=

https://www.amazon.com/sp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=&isAmazonFulfilled=&isCBA=
&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&orderID=&seller=A1KTUNW3ZSKTP9&tab=&vasStoreID=

Now, do the math - since only small percentage of buyers bother with the feedback, I'm guessing tens if not hundreds of thousands of customers have been scammed by these three ''sellers'' alone! And feedback keeps rolling in! And there are hundreds more of these sellers! It's really unbelievable.

My honest believe is that this issue must be brought to media attention, because I don't see Amazon doing anything to combat this without public pressure applied to them.

Ina, if you are reading this, I'm sure you have good contacts in various media outlets, so please forward this story to them.

This is fraud on a scale never seen before on Amazon.

Thank you!

by: vk

Since my first link appears to be broken, here you go again:
https://www.amazon.com/sp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=&isAmazonFulfi
lled
=&isCBA=&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&orderID
=&seller=A3E9QSWYTBCETQ&tab=&vasStoreID=

by: vk

Well, seems like the second try didn't work either..

In any case, I forgot to mention one of the more important aspects of current phenomenon - somehow these "Just Launched" sellers are able to bypass restriction on categories that require approval - such as Clothing.

This means that either they found a loophole in API which allows them to list in categories without any approval, or Amazon's servers have been breached. The potential ramifications of the second possibility are enormous.

by: Tiffee Jasso

I think if you are an American seller, you have to jump hoops to sell on Ebay and Amazon. If you are an Asian seller you can get away with anything as being a thief is considered an honorable profession in that part of the country.  

by: Gemz

This has been going on forever with Ebay as well. Specifically from Foreign sellers in Asian countries. Malaysia is a prime culprit of this. Almost anytime you see a seller advertising something well below market and even showing some completed (paid for) auctions for insanely low prices, this is always a scam.
They take the payment (happens by the 10's of 1000's of listings per day at Xmas time),the item doesn't show up, and having you wait until the 45 day window where you can't charge back the seller.
If you complain where the item is, then they try to give you a fake tracking number or some excuse. If you complain again, some sellers will refund you thinking they will make it up on the ones that are going to wait and lose completely or you won't hear from them again providing if it's close enough to the time where you don't have any recourse with paypal. They don't want too many complaints to be issued so if you complain to them about where your item is closer to the purchase date, the better off you will be and the better your chance to get a refund from the seller rather than run it through Ebay and have flags raise on them.

Cameras, Ipods, Ipads, Go-Pro cams too. Even super low prices on generic go-pros where  they can sell 500-1000 pieces in no time at all for 9 or 10 dollars each when average is 30-45 dollars for the model. They can rack up an easy 10,000 dollars if they screw everyone but they will settle with half that amount since they know that some of the people will complain and ask for their money back before the drop dead date and that's on just 1 of their listings! They run 100+ listings at a time and can cheat to the tune of millions of dollars before they are stopped! It wouldn't take much at all to stop these people from doing this but....You have to care about it first and obviously the venues don't. Not until their stock prices take a hit and then their ears perk up like pulling a steak off the grill in front of a hungry dog!

This goes on every day of every year for the last few years and so far I don't see any signs of them stopping. These people open accounts and shell shoelaces or some 1 dollar items to get 10 to 50 feedbacks and then they let the accounts go dormant. They have 100's of these dormant accounts just waiting out there. They close one, another 1 or 2 open and start selling again but this time a seasoned account with no holds or waiting times until the money is theirs upon payment! Plus, for 10 or 20 dollars, paypal doesn't look too hard at all.

The above is all about Ebay, I'm sure that Amazon is being played the same way with slight changes to accommodate the way sellers work the system on Amazon.

by: frustrated

It's all over the seller forums.  Thousands of items appearing overnight at 6.99 or lower (items that retail for hundreds) and Amazon appears powerless to stop them from popping back up.  

Let's forget about the sellers for a second, they are stealing millions of dollars from naive people who cannot understand that it is NOT POSSIBLE to sell a 6 person hot tub for 7.99 and 5.00 shipping.  So they order the item thinking they found a "mistake".  Little do they realize they are NEVER getting any hot tub, and good luck getting their money back.  Now this scammer in China has all of their info except the physical CC number.....

by: lisapar

There is a very obvious reason why Amazon has not publicly addressed this issue:  bad press.  And bad press = buyer abandonment.  It's the same thing that happened to Ebay years ago when news got out that there was a huge rise in scammers on Ebay selling knock-offs, or just collecting your money and not shipping anything.  Ebay became an immediate “buyer beware” shopping venue.
So, Amazon has kept a tight lip on this fraudulent seller epidemic on their platform.  If they make any comment, word will spread and shoppers will start re-thinking that purchase fearing they may be scammed.
I sell home textiles on Amazon, and this issue hasn’t been prevalent in the bedding department like it’s been in electronics…until a few weeks ago.  Almost every ASIN I’ve listed has a “just launched” seller now offering a $30 wholesale item for $5 or less.  I have reported these sellers, and surprisingly they are taken down overnight, only for new ones to appear the next day.
An easy fix would be for Amazon to demand Asian sellers to ship standard USPS Priority mail.  No more “2-3 weeks” shipping times, but who am I to advise Amazon?  I’m sure Amazon is scrambling behind the scenes trying to figure out how to handle these scammers – even if the press isn’t reporting it, bad shopper experience is your worst form of advertising.

by: Chicago48

I have things listed at Tradesy and we don't get paid until 4 days after the order is marked "delivered".  At first I didn't like it, but I can see why it makes sense.  First, it gives the buyer time to try on the outfit; second tradesy wants to be sure it was received.
Maybe AMZ should follow that policy?  Obviously, the payout policy they have now isn't working for the buyer.

by: lostsoul

Ina,
the scale of this is enormous. Dozens of phony seller accounts appear each day. Each with tens of thousands of items. It has to be seriously eroding buyer confidence in Amazon sellers.
Amazon's inability to stop this (it's been going on for months) is bewildering. It's hard to come up with a reason why Amazon wouldn't want to stop it. If Amazon can't figure out how to stop it, it's scary for us third party sellers.  

by: VV

When I started on Amazon it was several months before I got full payments every two weeks. Not sure why that has been changed. Made perfect sense at the time.

by: Moonwishes

There are so many scams going on Amazon it is crazy. I fell for one as the seller had 98% Positive. When after several emails, my item showed up after almost a month - Amazon had been told it shipped two days after the order but no tracking # given, I got a box with tracking showing it had been shipped 5 days before I got it, nothing on the box from Sam's Club indicated that it was an Amazon order and it was shipped 110 miles from my home. Why did I wait a month for it? Then things got really interesting. I left a factual negative feedback and for some reason a few hours later felt the need to check on it. It had disappeared. I monitored the seller for the next two months. Of the ones I caught with negative feedbacks, all were for pretty much what I had gone through and every single one of them disappeared within an hour or two. This joker should have had at the best a 40% positive feedback. Instead they still had 98%. I wrote email after email to Amazon and got back such stupid responses it wasn't funny. Even sent one to Jeff. No change. With the obvious help of an Amazon employee, this guy was scamming folks constantly. Last I saw, his feedback was at 99%! In all the things that I sent out I've only had about 5 orders go missing. Of the ones I saw, about every third feedback said they were told that the item had gotten lost in the mail - apparently the 'seller' couldn't find a drop shipper to send them an order that they could make money on. I've seen other scams where everything is listed in mass in a wrong category at prices that are out of sight, yet the seller's feedback indicate that they are selling plenty of 8 piece crayons boxes for $25! Amazon needs to fix a lot of broken things. I know that if I got 3-4 negatives in a row I would in all probability be suspended from Amazon for life!

by: go-figure

@Moonwishes

Was this questionable seller out of China or did they mysteriously have that blocked as well?

I agree with you 100% It's not a wonder our sales are down between the scammers and the Chinese that apparently have license to break whatever rules and policies they need to break without any consequences.