Amazon shipped fake product, refuses refund until 'correct' item returned

Having spent many years in &quot;Outbound&quot; of Amazon Fulfillment, I&#x27;m skeptical that Amazon would ever know that they didn&#x27;t send a fake item.<p>Items aren&#x27;t inspected deeply when they arrive. Fakes can get in.<p>Items that are misplaced and later found are presumed to be good- no quality checks opening the package. If the barcode scans, the system just adds it.<p>The picker, sorter, packer all do a quick quality check to see if the box is broken. They sure aren&#x27;t opening it to see what&#x27;s inside.<p>All that&#x27;s left is the weight check as the package leaves the building. The putty the scammers use weighs exactly the right amount.<p>The only time the item might be checked for being correct is when it&#x27;s returned. And they do that because a lot of scammers buy the real item and then send back a box full of putty.<p>My guess? Someone didn&#x27;t do a complete check on a previous return- hey, associates have to make rate or they&#x27;ll be fired, corners get cut. The fake got restowed, resold, and then the second time it was returned someone did a real check.

I&#x27;ve spent ~100k on Amazon and have been a Prime member since introduction. Last month, I canceled my membership and stopped using Amazon altogether. I&#x27;ve never had a problem returning product. But Amazon pivoted from a discount retailer to a premium retailer of convenience. In some cases, products are 3-4x the price of local retailers. I&#x27;d rather spend the money locally than pay a premium to Amazon.

Just this week Amazon shipped me a tempered with product similar to the one in the article (although $21 not almost $700). Shipped and sold on Amazon, and then rejected my review where I warned others and provided photos (actually both of the last two, negative, reviews I&#x27;ve tried to post got rejected).<p>Ordered some LEGO for Christmas. On arrival someone had opened the box, removed the LEGO, replaced it with other random LEGO pieces (to make up the weight?) and re-sealed it. This then, I suspect, got sent back out to a new customer without Amazon tracking that it was a previous return (or there is some other issue with their supply-chain).<p>Either way hurts confidence with Amazon, and if Amazon are going to accuse the next victim of return-fraud, that isn&#x27;t ok. Amazon needs to start tracking previously returned items that get sent out again, so they can see the origin of the fraud.

In every US state there are small claims courts for precisely these issues.<p>Not that this necessarily helps this particular family which is in Canada. But that’s the way to deal with this kind of thing. The article appears to say that Amazon simply shrugged.<p>It is touching that the father says that they have been loyal customers. Like most big companies, Amazon doesn’t care about that, with their customers nor employees.

Some of Amazon&#x27;s policies are real head scratchers. Last year I bought a high end ultrawide monitor from them. I believe I paid about $1500 for it originally. Two or three days after it arrived, it went on sale for about $300 less. IME most companies have a policy in the fine print where if an item goes on sale less than a week after purchase they&#x27;ll refund the difference, if you ask. So I contact Amazon support. The agent insisted that no refund was possible but that I should return the monitor for a refund and order a new one at the lower price. It boggled my mind so much that I asked them explicitly if they understand that they&#x27;d be paying for return shipping (at least $50 given the size and weight of the monitor), they&#x27;d be getting back an open box item that would lose probably 20-30% of its value, and I&#x27;d get back the $300. They said yeah, that was just how the system worked...

I used to go to a local brick and mortar store and checkout a product and order it from Amazon. These days I go to a store and go to Amazon to check reviews and then buy it from the store. How tables have turned for Amazon.

I cancelled my membership a few weeks ago. It’s even more annoying now. So many ads. So many new steps where it asks you to upgrade.<p>I tried to use it and everything idles for a week before shipping so I’ll probably stop buying even the basics from Amazon.<p>And something I’ve discovered: many many other stores have caught right up. Buying from Walmart or Canadian Tire or Home Depot is just as easy.<p>I’m so glad that blacklisting Amazon isn’t actually a sacrifice I thought it might be. Tells me that competition is still somewhat healthy.

Looking at the video, this is a fake, 3d printed PCB<p>This might be OP, or someone got the same exact fake card.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linustechtips.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;1435830-did-i-receive-a-fake-gpu-or-im-missing-something-obvious-zotac-rtx-3060-ti&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linustechtips.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;1435830-did-i-receive-a-fake...</a>

I strongly suspect prioritized handling or some other points-based system that classifies customers and the quality of care they &#x27;deserve&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;ve had 1 or 2 issues before (things late, wrong things etc) and all of them were handled nearly instantly and pleasantly, where I got the benefit of the doubt and left deeply satisfied.<p>Fast-forward to a week or so ago. I had a shipment coming in, paid extra for 2-day delivery. It was late, but I really needed it by a certain date because I was traveling after. First rep I got said they&#x27;d pull some strings to get it routed earlier, offered some refunded shipping etc. Awesome service like I was used to.<p>I looked later and the updated shipping wasn&#x27;t shown, so I wasn&#x27;t sure it went through. So I contacted again the next day and got... slightly less good service. They actually said the rerouting <i>might</i> happen, and <i>maybe</i> I could get a pickup, but to check again the next day if it moved. I contacted them a third time the next day and this was the worst service I had ever gotten. The rep said there was nothing to be done... no discount for inconvenience, no expedited shipping, no early pickup options, literally nothing. They actually even kept the chat open after we were done talking so I couldn&#x27;t leave negative feedback. I was floored. After years of amazing service I couldn&#x27;t believe it... it didn&#x27;t even feel like the same company.<p>In the end, it <i>did</i> come early (looks like the first rep did what they promised, just took a while to show up) but in the meantime, contacting them several times about the same issue downgraded me to &quot;not worth helping&quot; customer status.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed (like others mentioned) that the quality of goods available on Amazon has downgraded significantly recently, so I suspect that means more people contact more frequently with issues.<p>Rather than interpreting it as a quality-of-goods problem, I suspect they&#x27;ve interpreted it as a quality-of-customer problem; that is, they&#x27;ve decided more and more customers have downgraded themselves from &quot;generally good customer we should keep happy&quot; to &quot;customer who will complain about anything -- not worth keeping happy&quot;.<p>Let&#x27;s hope they fix their algorithm.

Don’t ever buy any high end electronics from Amazon. The counterfeit issues are rampant, and for the high end stuff they won’t take the fake back.

At the start of the article it cites Amazon’s “declining profits,” but later it says Amazon’s $386 billion a year in profits is growing at a slowing pace and might start growing by less than 20% year over year. What hardship.

Comingled inventory FTW! As a vendor, Why send in the real product to FBA when i can send a fake one and get paid the same amount? It even lets me undercut on price!

I&#x27;ve recorded every Amazon unboxing (including a full recording around every angle of the unopened shipping box) I&#x27;ve done for every large ($100+) purchase I made with Amazon for years when I first heard claims like this arise, and it actually proved fruitful when Amazon shipped me a counterfeit 2080 Super mid pandemic. They refused to believe me until I sent an unlisted YouTube link of the unboxing.<p>I don&#x27;t have prime anymore. Why would I?

They shipped me an LED bulb... <i>in a padded envelope</i><p>It was absolutely destroyed in shipment. They accepted the return, but what a waste of my time, and now I can&#x27;t trust anything remotely fragile to be shipped successfully from them.

Wow this is still happening? I actually wrote about a similar phenomenon of <i>replacing iPhones with clay</i> back in 2016 and apparently Amazon still hasn&#x27;t figured out a way to stop this.<p>This poor customer is actually paying the price of a scam played by someone earlier. You buy an expensive product, Amazon ships it noting the weight, then you replace the product with clay and &quot;return&quot; it back to Amazon who is none the wiser.<p>Then when <i>this customer</i> cries foul, Amazon has no way of knowing for certain whether this customer is the scammer, or whether it was a prior individual! So many crazy downstream implications of their &quot;free&quot; return policy, and of course it&#x27;s usually the customer that foots the bill in the end.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;coryklein.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;scammers-replacing-iphones-with-clay.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;coryklein.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;scammers-replacing-iphones-w...</a>

Just FYI if this happens to you email jeff@amazon.com and it gets sorted in a few weeks. Happened to my despite being a long time customer with over £20k orders.

Recently cancelled my prime membership. Not a huge expense in the grand scheme of things but I could no longer justify the cost for only expedited shipping. Have also tried to cut back on my spending on amazon with sheer amount of crap that gets sold on the platform at elevated prices. Definetly had me thinking about my own level of consumerism and realizing there was just no need for that level of Amazon in my life.<p>Not sure how many others have gone through that thought process or if the average consumer thinks about it even. With most stores offer instore&#x2F;curbside pickup I wonder if it will eventually eat into any of Amazon&#x27;s marketshare.

I completely believe that story.<p>Amazon seems to be &quot;leaning into&quot; being a souk for counterfeit and scam merchandisers. They make a lot of money from it, and it appears as if they have not received enough brand damage to stop it.<p>I&#x27;ve had a couple of issues with receiving fake (or gray market) stuff from them, to the point, where I no longer go to Amazon for many purchases, and, instead, go directly to the manufacturer&#x27;s sites (they may route me through their own Amazon store, though). I don&#x27;t really care, if I spend a bit more. At least, I&#x27;ll get what I paid for.

I had something similar happen to me in Germany. A FireTV stick LAN cable adapter, which didn&#x27;t work. I returned both the Ftv stick and the adapter in the same package. The stick was marked as received, the adapter wasn&#x27;t. I wrote then 4 times. No response. The 5th time I wrote an angry mail threatening to go to the police. Literally the next day I received an apology email that it was a mistake on their end. At least it was resolved. But the nerves it cost me... no compensation for that. I don&#x27;t appreciate being called a fraud.

I use this fancy 3M “Velcro” called Dual Lock a lot. It’s expensive but awesome. I order it from 3M on Amazon. In 2020 about half of the time it was counterfeit. The adhesive was slimy, stank, and would fuck up anything you put it on. The packaging varied widely. I never tried to return it, I just kind of collected them.<p>Now that I think about it, the same thing happened to me with some modular dewalt storage bins. The yellow dewalt logos are a different color on two of them and they are a little off in fit spec.<p>What a fascinating problem.

A few months back I ordered an Xbox Series X from Amazon but a large box arrived with nothing but some plastic picnic forks in it. Luckily I managed to get the driver to pose for a selfie with the box showing there was no Xbox. In this case I think they had sold out and decided to ship &quot;something&quot; instead of cancel the order as they didn&#x27;t even ask for photo proof that the box was empty.

This happened to me. Bought AirPods Pro a couple of months back for £250. I received a cheap garbage speaker worth ~£10. I spent ridiculous amount of stress and time trying to get it sorted with Amazon to no avail. Amazon kept telling me to return the AirPods I never received. It was the fourth Apple product I bought from Amazon in twelve months yet they still refused to help me after they had delivered me the wrong item.<p>It is happening to so many people at the moment in the UK so stay away from Amazon. See here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edp24.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;23150437.uea-students-macbook-amazon-order-replaced-weetabix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edp24.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;23150437.uea-students-macbook-a...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walesonline.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-news&#x2F;man-ordered-569-ipad-amazon-25351207.amp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walesonline.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-news&#x2F;man-ordered-569-i...</a><p>I’m never using them again after this experience. It has been an absolute nightmare. Joke of a company.

I had a very similar experience except it was a 1st gen MS surface book packaged in a 2nd box. They look nearly identical. Spent months getting gaslighted by Amazon support. My coworker who&#x27;d previously worked at Amazon Fulfillment suggested I email jeff@amazon.com directly. The case was picked up by a higher-level CS rep and they reversed the charges. No apology or concessions for the horrible experience otherwise. I truly hate this company.

Happened to me - was buying a warehouse deal used Apple TV 4k, have gotten an old &quot;normal&quot; HD version instead. After sending it back, they said its an old version and recycled it. Had no chance to get my money back nor the apple tv back.

I put Amazon on my eternal shit list a very long time ago, when they only sold books.<p>The reason for this was their bait and witch regarding their privacy policy and since then I have never bought anything from them.<p>This decision seems to be better by the day.

Ebay is not better. I was in Spain and our servers were in a datacenter in the States. One of the HDDs in RAID1 failed, and the array was in the critical state on our master DB. It was critical correcting this failure as soon as possible. I ordered a new HDD from ebay from a seller with 100% positive feedback directly to the datacenter and organized remote hands there to install it. When RAID rebuilt, smartctl showed that the HDD has more than 40k powered on hours. I am afraid the days if high trust society, where services like ebay could function, are over.

One of the best things about Amazon has always been their returns. They shipped me a faulty GPU (actually I suspect it might have broken when the delivery guy slammed the box down after refusing my help carrying it up the stairs when I saw him struggling)<p>It wasn’t broken in an obvious way but when it maxed out the PC would just freeze every single time. Asked for a return handed it over to a random shop drop off point and they refunded $1000 right away before the item even went back.

I can see how the shitshow commenced though. Instead of contacting Amazon via chat and providing a few photos to document the process the family did a regular return which off was in turn picked up as fraudulent.. No one&#x27;s fault in particular but annoying situation for sure!!<p>Reality for me has always been that Amazon is rather flawless on return policy (in the UK anyway!)

Anything that I buy from a Facebook group or something similar over $x, I set up a camera and record myself opening the product. Anything that I sell over $x, I record evidence of packing and shipping. I don&#x27;t really have a set value for x, but it&#x27;s definitely under $690. That might not have made a difference with Amazon, but it can&#x27;t hurt.

At least this time they didn&#x27;t suffer any injuries because of it :<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;lawsuit-amazon-sold-eclipse-glasses-that-cause-permanent-blindness&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;lawsuit-amazon-s...</a>

Unrelated, but does anyone know someone in Amazon? I was searching for something and ended up finding many firearm accessories very clearly intentionally mislabeled, and at suspiciously low prices (less than 1&#x2F;5 of retail price at a normal gun store) that they&#x27;re either of dubious and unsafe quality, or stolen.

I like to record a video when I am opening parcels that a contain a valuable product to try to avoid these kind of discussions. Worked once with Amazon<p>I bought an iPhone 14 a while back and they &#x27;lost&#x27; the first two times. Third attempt it finally arrived but they appeared to use a different delivery service

Amazon did the same thing to me recently. They shipped me the wrong socks, and are refusing the refund the money unless I send back the ones they sent me, despite the fact that it&#x27;s blatantly illegal in the U.S. for a company to force you to return something mailed to you that you didn&#x27;t order.

A friend of mine recently ordered a Chromebook which was on sale during the black friday week. Some days later, he gets a message from Amazon that the computer got &quot;lost in the mail&quot;, but they refuse to send him a new device for the same price.

Amazon Prime has become a prime (haha) example of how capitalism is failing. It&#x27;s not the best price, it&#x27;s not faster anymore, it&#x27;s not good quality and you can&#x27;t trust anybody.<p>Amazon is being flooded with the cheapest of the cheapest stuff from China and alike. Either with ripoffs of well-known products or just 25 items which look the same but are from different &quot;brands&quot;. Finding &quot;good stuff&quot; for a topic you don&#x27;t know about is getting harder and harder.<p>Those items also aren&#x27;t cheap though, I&#x27;ve found better quality items at a local store for nearly the same price. Lazyness just made me buy it quickly on Amazon, because I thought it was the easiest (as in &quot;cheapest + fastest&quot;) way.<p>You also don&#x27;t whether those items are good after all. Reviews are 50&#x2F;50 mixed with people who were paid by the manufacturer for a positive review or by competitors who want to make a product look bad. My personal favorite for the last time probably was a &quot;is this any good?&quot; question where somebody responded with &quot;I&#x27;ve made you a quick video&quot; and posted a hiqh quality, advertisement video. These reviews and answers are so blatantly fake but there&#x27;s no way to report them. Amazon doesn&#x27;t care after all, too. So, the trust is gone.<p>Ok, but we&#x27;ll receive the items quick and be able to judge them by ourselves then? No. Prime regularly takes 3-5 working days for me now. I don&#x27;t know what thei problems is, but does anybody remember the times when you received a month of Prime for free if your item was not delivered on time? That&#x27;s long gone.<p>Prime, at this point, is just &quot;free shipping&quot;, nothing more.

I had a similar experience ordering the original Xbox Elite controller. In the case was a very beaten up standard controller someone must have returned in its place. I reported it and thankfully they took it back without issue.

Something similar happened to me in 2000 on eBay. I was 16. Entering college and bought a desktop computer from eBay. I got a case with nothing inside. eBay didn’t do anything to help. Never shopped with them since.

Question, how could Amazon protect itself from customers buying and receiving a real GPU and sending back a fake one?

Curious what a credit card chargeback would accomplish, I have had mixed results with that

Power to the corporations.<p>I remember buying a Google Nexus phone way back, having it delivered to my home. Only to find an empty box, someone had stolen it in transit.<p>All I did was report the theft to the police so I got a case number, then sent the case number to the vendor and a new phone was in my hands within a week. That&#x27;s how socialist sweden works.

Was it sold by Amazon or a third party? The only times I had issues with returns was with third parties

I am not a lawyer but in the USA at least, if I understand correctly, if someone sends you something didn&#x27;t request it&#x27;s yours to keep for free<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;business-guidance&#x2F;resources&#x2F;business-guide-ftcs-mail-internet-or-telephone-order-merchandise-rule" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;business-guidance&#x2F;resources&#x2F;business-gui...</a><p>Search for &quot;unordered merchandise&quot; on that page. Also see &quot;Substitutions&quot;<p>As I said, I am not a lawyer, but I&#x27;ve always took that to mean if I order X and receive Y then I received Y for free. The company that sent me Y still owes me X and I have zero obligation to return Y. I never asked for Y, it&#x27;s unordered merchandise.<p>So, if I ordered a PS5 and the send me a PS4 I get to keep the PS4, they still owe me a PS5. I ordered a 256gig iPhone and they send me a 128gig iPhone they still owe me a 256gig iPhone and the 128gig iPhone is mine to keep.<p>Now of course if I don&#x27;t return the item, at their expense, they may refuse to do business with me in the future but at least as far as I can tell the wrong item is not what I ordered, therefore it is an unordered item. They still have the obligation to provide the item ordered or refund the money, and I have zero obligaton to return the unordered item.