My favorite bit: “Amazon has asked for … the defendants to be barred from affiliation with the company, including via shopping on Amazon.”
If Amazon can’t uniquely identify individuals to bar them from their own platform, then (a) all of their talk of their ability to stop fraud is so much horseshirt and (b) how is the DOJ going to enforce account registration on Amazon? Out-bribe the bad employees to tell them when a bad actor has returned?
The craziest bit is that so many people (including many sellers) believe the Amazon PR machine without flinching. I suspect it’s because it’s easier than shopping elsewhere, and people are more prone to believe what they want to believe, but that’s just sad.
For my own part, I’m pretty-much an eternal optimist - Dum Spiro Spero, and all that - but Mama didn’t raise no fools, so I remain rather trepid that #IdiocracyISComing.
I believe the PR machine when it says it’s “doing stuff”.
I do not believe that the “stuff” is meaningful, comprehensive, preventive, or enough.
When it comes to fraud, Amazon has just enough in place to catch a lot of wanna-be, inexperienced, amateur, small time criminals. And the PR machine shows off those stats.
But when it comes to preventing coordinated crime or proactively searching out compromised employees–naw. Amazon is reactive and narrow in its scope.
I appreciate your use of “Soviet” as we are old enough to remember the cold war and the atrocities that were going on back then. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
What’s funny is the only people named are the idiots who used this service, and the idiot employees who responded to their scam pitch text messages.
The actual people behind the scam are just “Doe 1-20” and will likely never be found since they probably used stolen paypal accounts to move the money.
The “users” here will likely be able to settle this by paying back what they owe, but the employees who did this are all going to be bankrupt after this, because each of them is liable for tens of thousands of dollars in damages – every single return they falsely processed. And there’s zero defense here.
I found this snip interesting. (I am only on page 15 so far)
Another pinned post on REKK’s Telegram channel links to REKK’s “store list,”
which provides instructions on REKK’s refunding service, its fee (the minimum order fee is $100) and instructs customers to contact REKK before placing an order.
Remind me to keep all inventory below $100 on Amazon. Now wonder it has become the “Oriental Trading” marketplace.
So much more to unfold. I converted it to Kindle and adding to my reading list.
The idea of selling ipads or macbooks on Amazon is nuts to me. You’re basically begging to get scammed. Apple products are some of the highest value targets for scams/theft/etc in general. I wouldn’t sell any kind of expensive brand name electronics on Amazon, it’s just a headache.
I noticed a while back when shopping for a new laptop that Amazon itself was absent or nearly so from the ranks of sellers. They have ceded that part of the business to 3P sellers who bear all of the risk.
There’s a reason why Amazon, albeit grudgingly in the early stages during the previous decade, decided to offer opportunity to the expert refurbishment operators in the Consumer Electronics categories.
Sadly, TPTB, pleased with the remuneration garnished from taking that stance, and under the guileful sway of the graduates of the so-called “MBA Revolution” who ever-increasingly proliferate in boardrooms far and wide, doubled-down on the bet with the ill-fated extension of an offer to utilize its own in-house services - in both categories of goods which intrinsically lend themselves to such a boon, AND to categories which do not - a factor which the Refurbishment Community by and large failed to see coming down the pike, despite the admonitions from the Patch Management Community in the common discussion venues where said twain tend to congregate.
Hence the various iterations of this or that “Normalization” Initiative deployed by this and that of Amazon’s deeply-siloed teams in recent years, come hell or high water.
And now Amazon is apparently pulling out the rug from underneath them; this is not the first time I’ve seen mention of the notification quoted in the NSFE discussion linked below - but it is the first time that I’ve actually seen the text of what was received:
