Devastated PC builder orders DDR5 RAM from Amazon, receives DDR2 and some weights — counterfeit 32GB kit a worrying sign of rising return and sales fraud
10 months ago by themachinestops to c/technology
It wasn't technology, but i ordered a new mad lib style book for my kid from Amazon. The book arrived with cellophane around it and a nice label that clearly said new. Once opened, it was very obvious the book was used, since the last kid had already filled out the whole damn thing including his name and address inside the cover.
I'm not mad at the kid, although his parents are probably bad people for returning the book at that point. I am livid that Amazon didn't flip to any random page in the book too determine if the book was used or not.
Fuck Amazon.
Iirc correctly, Amazon actually doesn't resell their returns. At least not through their storefront.
They have "return auctions" where returns are put onto a pallet and then people bid on them to purchase. Apparently this is cheaper than having a workflow for their returns, checking them to make sure they are resellable, and then stocking them back into their warehouse.
So are all these people who say they are buying from Amazon actually buying from 3rd party sellers on Amazon? I'm always confused by these stories with used items being delivered.
The principal issue is this, Amazon commingles stock. This means that there is one box for a particular SKU. If a seller sends product to Amazon for fulfillment it gets dumped into the bin with everyone else's.
This means that if a seller sends counterfeit or poor products to Amazon it gets mixed in with the real ones from other sellers or Amazon's own stock. This causes major problems as you can see.
Many years ago it used to be very obvious when you were buying from Amazon vs 3rd party sellers. Today the only difference is a small bit of text that says “Shipped and sold by Amazon”. The fact that you can even get prime shipping on items from third party sellers makes it so that people often don’t realize.
I bought a 3 pack of Corsair LL120 RGB case fans directly from Amazon-dot-com (as the seller) before and got a 3 pack of someone's old case fans instead (the old swapperoo). So Amazon told me to just keep them after I sent them many photos of the box and the LPN sticker on it, and they sent me another. Take a guess what was in that box? Yup, more swapperoos. But this was back in 2016-2017 so they may have changed up how they handle returns since then, or how they isolate their own products from 3rd party 'FBA' sellers
You don't know that Amazon is a marketplace? So is Walmart and Target. Com for example. You can open a store on any of these platforms and sell while using them for advertisement, warehousing, and shipping. You are responsible for fees and sales etc, but they handle everything else. Yes, they have their own products as well, but most their sales come from vendors on their platform.
I don't care if it was actually a store front. I blame Amazon for not doing oversight of its supply chain. So, it's their fault, or it's their fault.
Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.
Amazon Warehouse I believe is open box and returns. It also gets confusing that marketplace sellers are mostly outside of Amazon's control
Actually that cellophane was brand new, as the label indicated.
Recommendations?
Newegg has been shit for a decade now (new owners fucked it to hell) and I don't have a Microcenter closer than a 2-hour drive.
How did Newegg survive the outing from Gamers Nexus?
Supporting giant evil DOES sometimes get you free stuff… I know folks who have accidentally been shipped multiple of what they’re ordering (in two cases, the items were quite expensive) and when they’ve brought it up, they were told to keep the extras.
Maybe not worth the evil, but hey, free stuff is cool.
This isn’t exclusive to Amazon. I had it happen with friends build back in the Newegg days.
Newegg is still a thing, you just need to check the “Sold by Newegg” filter.
Oh it is, but is so enshittified nobody goes there anymore.
The bad prices are what keep me away. Though, I can't say I've looked at stuff sold by third parties. Why would I do that when Amazon, ebay, and Craigslist exist?
the exploding power supplies forced into bundles are what keep me away. cant return the catastrophically failed PSU without returning everything else, either. total scam.
Newegg is a fucking open septic pit.
Fred sold it off to some chinese acquisition company and its almost a fucking scam now at this point.
I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.
Yea, but only open box or refurb. Not new.
Evga still made GPUs back then.
Probably the same people running Pokémon card hustles. I recently saw a guy acting all pissy he had to wait in line at target to buy some packs, started berating the workers “you work at target, you’re broke as fuck”. The workers actually went in on him, I was so happy to see it. They made fun of him for trying to hustle over cards for children and told him to go home and cry to his mom about it.
That’s the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
Please sir, do you have a link.
I’ll see if I can find it later
Edit: found it
Thanks, appreciate it
If your time is worthless to you and everyone else, that profit margin can be very tempting. Sounds like a symptom of a serious problem to me though.
have you seen r/pokeinvesting, or r/pokecollecting. so sad losers of adults, they arnt even collecting because they play it, its to flip it. all TCPI/TPJ have to do is increase the pull rates, and increase printing of the cards, or have the ability to buy the individual cards on a official shop, instead of issuing RARE CARDS ON stupid events with a limited number and time, and location. instead they are just trying to limit how often its being bought.
opening/buying them is one thing(steamings do this kind of asmr thing).
Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.
I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There's a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.
Maybe I haven't understood your point but it sounds like you're describing people both acting maliciously and being stupid about it, so I don't see it as a case of Hanlon's razor.
Exchanging the item for another one that's cheaper, even if it's only $6 total, is still dishonest. The fact that it may not even be worth it for them in the end doesn't change the fact it was an attempt to mislead. They were listing a product, and delivered another one.
@tomiant @punkwalrus Applied to interactions between strangers, "Hanlon's Razor" is a recipe for getting scammed.
16 GB DDR2 + 16 GB DDR3 makes 32GB DDR5, right?
Its amazon, just return it. That's really the only good thing about amazon anymore, easy returns.
Not really anymore for me. A few times this past year they snuck in the return shipping cost at about $10-$15 USD. The page showed the cost refunded then added back. I don't know but it fooled me.
With this hardware shortage insanity, I won't be surprised if they get more aggressive with return shipping fees.
amazon has been getting less generous with the returns for years now.
Especially if you have more than a few returns per year.
Except in the UK for some reason where you can email and message them for months and pay your own damn return shipping and get fucked about and never recieve a refund.
They tried to fuck me on a return once and after a month of it sitting in limbo i filed and won a dispute though my card provider instead.
Matter of fact i think it was over ram too, but it was over a year ago.
Oh man, that sucks. Sorry, I wrongly assumed amazon returns worked the same everywhere
This is my theory. The kind of stuff I buy there is all electronics manufactured in china/Asia anyway. I could buy it direct or from ali express, but Amazon shipping is hella cheap and fast and they actually do returns quickly and correctly.
I stopped ordering tech on Amazon when I got a fraud twice in a month on back-to-back orders a few years back.
First was a laptop that wouldn't start. I looked at the bottom and the scewes were mostly stripped, and once I got them out most of the components had been removed from the boards.
Second was a Spyder color calibrator. What I got instead was a iPhone 4 screen protector with a sticker slapped on with the UPC for what I'd ordered. When I tried returning it, they gave me flack for slap-tagging a return, but I was able to escalate in that case.
@chiliedogg @themachinestops
Amazon will consistently facilitate fraud. I had sworn I would not order from them, but it seemed there was an exceptional deal on a certain type of tortilla.
There were supposed to be 12 bags of tortillas, but there were only 10.
I read there guidelines, and there is absolutely no recourse for something like this. I opened the box, now it's mine.
I had decided quite firmly I wouldn't deal with them, and it was a serious mistake when I did.
Amazon Let Its Drivers’ Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink
Drivers urinating in bottles has been reported in the past, but what wasn’t known is that some claim they also get penalized for having those urine-filled bottles in their truck when they return to the warehouse.
...
To avoid penalties, they end up discarding the bottles by the side of the road. Butler searches the roadsides near Amazon warehouses from Coventry to New York to Los Angeles and more often than not strikes liquid gold.
From there, it’s laughably straightforward for Butler to get Release listed for sale on Amazon, with very few checks and balances in place to ensure the product he’s selling is safe and legal. “Releasing the drink was surprisingly easy,” Butler told WIRED. “I thought that the food and drinks licensing would stop me from listing it, so I started it out in this Refillable Pump Dispenser category. Then the algorithm moved it into drinks.”
@UnderpantsWeevil
they need to be shut down
Nationalized and folded into the USPS. Idk about shutting down the biggest commercial retailer in the world.
Isn't that a plot in Moral Orel?
So what exactly did you do to piss off the Amazon Returns department? Because from my experience, they are the most lenient company when it comes to returns/refunds. I've had stuff arrive broken, or scuffed up, or it was the wrong item, or I just plain didn't like a product and every time I've been able to submit a return without having to interact with a single person.
I feel like you either have to be lying about your experience, didn't even try to return it, or did something that got your account flagged.
No judgement...but why would you buy 10 bags of tortillas from Amazon?
@QuandaleDingle
I paid for 12. and it was supposed to be a good deal. why do you ask?
d'Oh
I'm just curious. You probably go into a hispanic food store and get them for a similar price, or better. And you know what you're getting then. shrug
But you saw a good deal and thought they'd honor that. So it really sucks that happened. I mean, it's tortilla! ToT
They don't make anything. You're buying marked up stuff from AliExpress and temu that has an "Amazon basics" sticker on it.
I miss Microcenter
I wish I had a Microcenter less than 8hrs away. Best Buy is all I have and I am not buying there.
Same, i don't have one less than 7 hour round trip drive.
It's sickening how little Amazon seem to give a fuck about this. They could easily tighten up their vetting of sellers, but heaven fucking forbid they only report a $50,000,000,000 profit this year instead of $50,003,000,000.
They've invested extensively in automating their supply chain to the point that humans aren't looking inside these boxes anymore. And as customer support is increasingly replaced with AI, the ability to flag and report businesses for fraud has erodes even as the businesses themselves have grown more sophisticated in duping Amazon anti-fraud systems.
The quest to remove every actual thinking human from the inside of your business results in humans outside of your business exploiting the blind spots to the hilt.
CEOs are probably hedging on LLMs adapting faster to scammers then video versa, however unless they make a fundamental breakthrough like what transformers did, adding more parameters to the model ain't gonna do it.
We are reaching a convergence of accuracy, and once a critical mass of investors realize it, this whole thing implodes. Demand for AI tech will plummet, and all these asshole companies will have to backpedal. Maybe not Amazon, but the small cap companies fo sure
Scam software will never replace scam artists.
CEOs are probably hedging on LLMs adapting faster to scammers then video versa
Racing towards the Singularity, a thing that is definitely real and exists and is achievable in our lifetimes.
We are reaching a convergence of accuracy, and once a critical mass of investors realize it, this whole thing implodes.
Industrial dinosaurs have a way of sticking around in strict defiance of market forces. The O&G industry is a great example. They've been able to outrun more efficient and cost-effective methods of production and application of energy for decades, in large part thanks to lobbyist-lead state investments in long-term infrastructure and buying out / shutting down of competitors.
I do think the AI boom is facing bigger headwinds than the automotive or airline industries, in large part due to their bloated balance sheets and highly speculative asset prices. But in the same way the big 2008-era investment banks were saved by a multi-trillion dollar bailout from the Fed and the Treasury, I have no doubt Silicon Valley is simply Too Big To Fail in the long run.
It is like a cat and mouse game between scammer prevention and scammers.
And just like with piracy, the scammers will always be one step ahead of the corporations. Because Amazon may have some giant nerds working in it, but the sheer amount of nerds outside of Amazon will bypass them easily.
Is amazon not a good supplier anymore? I still order stuff from them occasionally and always get what I need.
Amazon is a platform for different kinds of vendors. Of course there's the scam artists who do the bait-and-switch.
No sympathy for anyone who still supports and buys from Amazon.
I hate buying from Amazon and avoid it as much as I can, but one thing I’ve noticed in the last 5-10 years is that brick and mortar stores seem to have given up completely. It is shocking how many times I’ve wanted to buy something, often very common, from popular brands, and I try and find a local store to buy it from only for that store to be out of stock or just not stock it at all. It feels to me like these stores are filled with “stuff” but none of the things I want to buy.
On the one hand, I loathe feeling that way sometimes. On the other hand, for the better part of the past decade+ any criticism I had about Amazon was met with victim blaming white knight replies and basically no support. At best I'm probably more on the ambivalent side of things than the no sympathy side, not that there's effectively much difference.
I buy and maintain about $20K of computer equipment a year for my lab. We learned around 2020 Amazon is a nest of scammers, from the suppliers to the delivery people.
There has been a significant resurgence of local computer supply retail because millions have been ripped off and only now buy in person.
Yeah, I got burned on some hard drives in like 2018 and won't use them again. They took no action when I reported the issue with the seller. Thankfully I have a microcenter close enough that I can source most of what I need there.
My local retail supplier has seen revenues double in the last 4 years. But, they are under constant threat of scam by buyers.
It's not just sellers, buyers return swapped items all the time.
I ordered 2x32GB DDR5 on Amazon two years ago and received 1x32 and 1x8 in the same package.
Luckily they replaced it for me completely, still wild. Can only imagine it's going to get worse.
Newegg is also shit and so is bestbuy. I don't have a microcenter near me. What else is there? I guess buying direct. Is there anything I'm missing?
Depends on what you're buying. Wiredzone and Provantage are solid for enterprise/workstation gear, and for anything storage or camera related B&H is my go-to.
Best buy resellers are worse than eBay.
Yup this isn't a fraud problem. Just an Amazon problem
I think, if the seller used Amazon shipping, it's not actually the seller's fault. Doesn't Amazon pool all items from the same SKU together from all sellers and ship whatever they can get to the buyer the fastest/cheapest?
Yes. If you sell on amazon, and have amazon fulfill the shipping.. you ship your stuff to amazon, and its just put in teh big pool with all the other items of the same kind.
Even returns get put back into the pool.
its the absolute most pants on head stupid fucking way possible to manage inventory to the point that shit like this seems almost intentionally designed for rather than a consequence of.
Which is why anytime you order anything from amazon, you should record the entire box to show its untampered with, then film the entireity of the opening and confirming everything inside is actually inside.
THere was a famous case of a guy who bought a 10 thousand dollar camera and got a box of rocks, and amazon sent him a replacement and got a box of bricks, before finally getting the camera on the 3rd try.. I think recording his second opening saved him from having amazon call him a scammer.
My boss used to sell on Amazon, until one time they royally screwed him over using this method. He had a product where he was given exclusive online rights to sell. Somehow it disappeared in the Amazon warehouse, but at least they provided a refund. Less than a week later, the same product showed up back on Amazon under a first time seller.
They put a lot of local retail out of business.
Working for a small business, Amazon has absolutely allowed for the collapse of local retail. But let's be real, people put local retail out of business. People chose convenience over community. They'd rather have it delivered to their door, or to their trunk, instead of actually taking the time to walk into a store that's not a Target or Walmart.
We caught a driver on camera take a picture of a $2000 PC on a doorstep, then move it back into his truck. Took a month to resolve with Amazon. If you have to deal with these clowns, use the local pickup option from a locker.
Just got a retro handheld for a gift. Package looked a little suspicious with no way to tell if it had ever been opened. SD card reader broken. Sad to return it a few days before Christmas with no chance at replacing in time.
Play the long game. Chargeback.
Stockholm syndrome...
So?
Some people have extensive libraries there. I have over 1k books, and probably half that in audiobooks. I do have them all DeDRM'd but still it would be an annoying loss
A prudent strategy would be a 2nd account for orders, maybe?
Why put a weight? DDR2 weight vs DDR5 weight difference wouldn't be noticeable until they put the weight in because now it would weight 3x what it should. I suspect the person claiming fraud is the one committing fraud or this is a fake article.
The article that this article is based on (found here) has pictures showing that the DDR2 sticks had fake heat sinks put on. The weight is behind the fake heat sink to make it feel more authentic. I had the same initial thought as you, but heat sinks add a decent amount of weight.
Maybe they ordered a kit of 2 sticks and they put 1 stick and a weight in there
My headlight connector got a little melty, just enough to get loose and stop working, just wore out I suppose.
I bought one on Amazon, along with new bulbs, installed it, and within an hour the new connector had catastrophically melted and shorted out enough to blow the fuse.
I should've known, the wire felt cheap, copper clad aluminum. But I thought it would be fine, it's just a headlight 🤷♂️
Now I've got a replacement from the local auto parts. So far so good.
They got away with it. I bought the part months ago after bodging a fix on the stock connector. By time the bodge failed, the return window closed. It was $5 so unfortunately not worth my time fighting it.
This is a problem with all auto parts, even from NAPA supplying to garages. Mechanics are going broke replacing defective "new" parts.
Makes sense. I work at a different type of repair shop, we just had a brand new $400 battery go up in smoke on first power up. Ridiculous.
I have some 128gb ddr5 kit I bought a few years ago. Want to sell it back I'm not going to use it but the scammers be scamming.
So uh... How much you want for it?
I have long read reports of amazon reselling used or opened & returned pc-components. We really need a more trustworthy source of pc-components that isn't a regional micro center store.
In the UK we're super lucky to have Scan, in-store if you're in the North West or online otherwise, but for the US I guess it's too big for a single good store to cover nationwide, then when you get too big you inevitably lose the quality that helped you grow
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Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
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