A recent report from Appriss Retail and Deloitte found that the total value of merchandise returned in the US reached $685 billion in 2024. Fifteen percent of that — $103 billion — was fraudulent, the report said, meaning the product shouldn’t have qualified for a refund under the retailer’s policies.
(Bolding in the above paragraph is mine)
I was just posting this but you beat me to it.
One thing this article fails to mention is a practice Amazon sellers have been experiencing for years: Automatically requesting a return for every online purchase in hopes of receiving a returnless refund. I believe that is often what is happening when I get a very short message that says item not received, I respond with the usual template and never hear from the buyer again. Guess that DVD that was delivered a week ago according to the carrier just magically appeared, huh?
And Amazon plays a large roll in it.
An inadvertent pun, I surmise. Amazon is making a big bankroll.
This article is getting wide distribution.
I read it this morning on the local ABC station website.
Business Insider is pushed heavily by Bing and MSN.
I am never quite at ease with their articles. The facts are usually accurate so that makes them better than some sources.
The analysis of motives are often simplistic and conclusions unsophisticated.
I’d be happier if they actually provided some perspective on the size of the businesses who are suffering. And whether those businesses were thriving or just getting by when this increase in fraud occurred.
It might be a Darwinian event, and if it wasn’t this problem, it would be another. On a human level, it might be a tragedy, but tragedies occur every day.
I don’t preach about morality, and am unlikely to, but I cannot disagree that immoral behavior appears to be on the rise. Of course, we can all argue about what is immoral, and who should be punished.
This article makes it seems that third party services tracking who is guilty of returns fraud are new. They have existed for at least 25 years, and are regularly used by major chains like Staples to choose customers whose return privilages are limited.
The fish rots from the top.
Megan Wyatt, the owner of Wit & Whimsy Toys, a brick-and-mortar retailer in California, says the lax return policies the big guys offer customers have been a headache for her. “They’ll just take pretty much any return, it feels like, these days. And so customers feel like they can do that at small businesses as well,” she says. Her store has to essentially “train customers that you can’t expect to return things at a small business the way that you would at Target, Walmart, Amazon, places like that.”
Preach it, Megan Wyatt 
Lets not leave out the Hanlon’s Razor. Most Americans are too stupid to understand the difference on the right side of the screen that says “Sold by” versus the logo at the top that says “Amazon”.
Couple that with an increase that many people think it is justified to steal from big corporations or government, because of some absurd moral view that they are somehow owed something in society. It goes along with the perpetual victimhood theme in society where everyone is entitled to their garbage behavior for one of a million reasons.
I pay too much in taxes, or I pay more in taxes therefore…
The color of my skin means…
The location of my reproductive organs means…
My magical book says XYZ are bad and you are bad for not believing it therefore…
Corporations are evil…
Government is evil…
Aliens probed my tush in 1997 and now I have a need to wear an aluminum foil hat to keep the mind control waves out …
Greed and ideology have pushed us beyond simply being good people, because boundaries have been crossed in many peoples minds.
I was disappointed that the article didn’t really clarify that when people do this “at Target, Walmart, Amazon, places like that” that they aren’t taking from Target, Walmart and Amazon, in many cases, because they’re taking from people like us.
I think Amazon is single-handedly responsible for retraining consumers to think that stealing by mail is OK, while shoplifting is still not. That they’ll get rewarded rather than punished for that evil is yet another proof of the lack of universal justice.
This is why I think Amazon will eventually start culling sellers. I know how angry we get when customers abuse the system, and I am not going to mislead anyone into thinking I have not thought about swapping the item in the return box with a different item and stick Amazon with the reimbursement.
As I stated previously on the OSFE, 3 companies ago and nearly a decade, another Amazon seller down the street made it blatantly clear that if Amazon returned a used FBA item, they would use one of their numerous personal accounts and buy and return the FBA item for an Amazon sold one, and keep the Amazon inventory (I assumed they did RA/OA). They got away with it for a long time and even bragged. Not 100% sure if that got them or the OA/RA business model but I do know they eventually got suspended.
Looking at the amount of rentals we see with a 3-4% return rate, I can only imagine how less scrupulous sellers with higher return rates, abuse the reimbursement program. I know Amazon doesn’t actually look at returns, as many times there is only one piece of tape on the box with the original return slip inside, so Amazon for the most part does not monitor their FBA returns to vendors/sellers so they wouldn’t know if a switcharoo as they called it happens.
I don’t abuse the return program per se
I make Amazon follow it’s own policy instead of forcing the expense on us.
Like I said in another thread 99% of my returns result in Safe-T-Claims. Most of them are Amazon buyers abusing the system.
Even then you can rarely get more than a 20% restocking fee unless they returned a completely different item.
Yup! I have had to explain to a lot of people that when they fraudulently return items to Amazon, they are hurting small companies and it isn’t Amazon they are stealing from. When my daughter was in college, she used to be guilty of “renting” clothes… buying them and returning them after she wore them once. She said she didn’t think it was a big deal because “Amazon can afford it”. And this was even knowing that I sold on Amazon… she didn’t understand how that works. I would guess that 80% of the people shopping on Amazon have no idea that their return scams are hurting small sellers… they just think billionaire Bezos can afford it and and their fraud is harmless.
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