After years of denial and stonewalling, Amazon has admitted for the first time that they have a problem with counterfeit products. This primarily affects the Amazon Marketplace.
As a personal victim of getting counterfeit goods several times from Amazon (and eBay), I thought I'd help spread the word a bit farther. Apparently counterfeit board games is a big thing.
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Amazon Admits to Counterfeit Problem
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:45AM (1 child)
Amazon won't do jackshit as long as they get their cut.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday February 14 2019, @03:49PM
Amazon does care [about profits] enough to do something.
And they are doing something.
They have changed.
Amazon now has a policy to act as though they genuinely care about counterfitting.
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by black6host on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:45AM (8 children)
With third party sellers Amazon is becoming an Ebay type site that only has buy-it-now. I recently ordered a CD from Amazon and received the wrong one. Contacted Amazon and their response was since it was a third party seller there was nothing they could do but send an email on my behalf. Fortunately the seller was extremely easy to work with. Had they not been I don't know what my recourse would have been. Probably a charge back from my credit card.
I'm really wondering if I want to renew my Prime membership. I'm thinking not.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 14 2019, @03:30PM (6 children)
CDs are so obsolete anyway. Wasn't it available as a download from Amazon? Or from, well ... ;).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 14 2019, @03:52PM (4 children)
While I can find some very obscure things as mp3 downloads on Amazon, there are a few, very few, CDs that I can only find as actual CDs. In one of those cases leading into the recent Christmas season, I went directly to the seller, who had a store, and bypassed Amazon.
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:08PM (3 children)
Yeah, special editions and foreign releases in particular...there was one song I wanted recently where I bought the album on Amazon...only to discover that what they sell is a completely different version of the song. They apparently refuse to offer it for download in the original German, you can only get the crappy English translation where the lyrics are forced into place rather awkwardly...if you want the original you have to buy a CD.
(Score: 3, Touché) by AssCork on Thursday February 14 2019, @08:18PM (1 child)
"99 Luft Baloons" is such an awesome track! :)
Just popped-out of a tight spot. Came out mostly clean, too.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday February 14 2019, @08:33PM
Only song I thought of as well! ;)
The original is awesome because....German, lol.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday February 15 2019, @01:57AM
A cheaper alternative would be to go with Trump's reinterpretations, which are available for free online. He doesn't have the presence of the original German speaker though...
(Score: 2) by black6host on Thursday February 14 2019, @08:16PM
Well, it was available as a download. Those are hard to resell, though. :)
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:09PM
90% of why I have an Amazon Prime membership is because of The Grand Tour.
The other 10% is diaper delivery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @12:13PM (10 children)
are you talking about wooden boards, or cardboard boards? --- is durability the problem?
or are you complaining that the instructions were only in some obscure language not-your-own?
because I can imagine many scenarios where a "counterfeit board game" is the same thing, but made by different people.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday February 14 2019, @12:44PM
Board games are a pretty marginal affair. I feel sorry for folks who invest so much in game design only to have it ripped off by Elbonians.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 14 2019, @01:19PM (6 children)
This wasn't a counterfeit.
There's a particular Starbucks in Portland's highly-gentrified Pearl District - it was at first an unused railroad switchyard, as well as the site of some breweries that remain - that was a testbed for "Starbucks Evenings": they sold good wine, craft beer and expensive, unsatisfying yet tasty hot appetizers.
It's always been my favorite, even during my homelessness. But back when I had some cash I was sitting on the couch coding up Warp Life™ [warplife.com], my Real Soon Now iOS App, when some guy sat on the other end of the couch. As I was new in town I introduced myself then asked, "What do you do?"
"These days, mostly VC and serving on boards. But I got my start with an iPhone App that made two million because it was one of the very first in the App Store."
"What did it do?"
"It was an outright rip-off of a popular board game. Of course we got sued, but by then had established such a great reputation that our second product sold like hotcakes too."
Consider that despite his conviction on ten counts, with one being "Operating A Criminal Enterprise", itself composed of twenty-six other felonies including Conspiracy To Commit Murder, many of the Mexican people - especially farmers in the mountains - remain grateful to El Chapo because he created so very many jobs.
That particular Starbucks as well as the quite tragically out-of-business Backspace have always been places to meet to Discuss Deals. I think the chances were pretty good he wanted to talk about maybe funding my startup, but the whole reason I wound up homeless is that I'm quite blunt about the Software Industry being A Den of Iniquity [warplife.com]:
Far from policing themselves or setting standards, I've actually had recruiters send me hate mail to accuse me of stealing food from their hungry childrens' mouths.
The Mind Simply Reels.
I'm building Soggy Jobs for the specific purpose of De-Iniquitifying the practice of hiring.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:28PM (1 child)
So, you're really a Republican? Or a lawyer? Or both?
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:49PM
There are all kinds of ways I could make six figures, but I prefer while away my hours, days, weeks and years - yea, even my lifetime! - to fapping to my Muse Euterpe.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)
I'm confused...
(Score: 3, Informative) by DutchUncle on Thursday February 14 2019, @08:34PM
I understood it as: hors d'oeuvre sized portions at meal-sized prices.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 14 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)
My take on copyright is that people will eventually get over it and the pirates will win. But it will take a while yet.
Copyright is brilliant in its evil and wrongness. Pushes people's buttons. Plays on the fear of loss. All the time, authors and collectors fall for the "copying is stealing" fallacy. There are also enough fans who fall for it to keep the system limping along. Those among the latter who dream of becoming authors themselves can be some of the most rabid supporters. Sympathy for the "authors' starving children" (everyone has starving children, no?) and the higher friction or absence of other ways to compensate authors also props up copyright. On that last, we really need more and better options, better crowdfunding, and such things as more digital notaries to squelch plagiarism.
As for board games and counterfeiting, I think board games are overpriced. I haven't visited computer game retail stores in a long time, but I hear that prices have really come down? Used to be $60 for a typical new title, and now it's, I don't know, $30? Maybe even $10? Anyway, board games are still at the equivalent of the old $60 price point of computer games. They're so expensive that with 3D printing coming down in price, it can be a lot cheaper to print than to buy a copy. While the quality of such items as automobile parts and handbags can matter and counterfeits can be vastly inferior, it's much harder for board game components to be too cheap, and not be obvious about it. Still possible, sure, but like writings, the value in a board game is more in the design and playtesting, not the physical components.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 14 2019, @05:40PM
I don’t worry about piracy, I worry about publishers. Consider the multiply-bestselling writer Steven Pressfield now owns his own publishing company, Black Irish Books, in partnership with his editor at their former publishing company.
Since living in the pacific north left I’ve met many who simply do not want computers or the web to be a part of their lives. Not one of them cited money or lack of computer skills as their reasons. One was a Clark County Custody Division Deputy who uses computers all day long but never when he’s off work.
Others prefer ebooks; one of my very best friends has never read one word of mine because I don’t have any audiobook editions.
For these two reasons I will crowdfund a press run of my collected essays on mental illness.
That will be at GoFundMe because I’ll give every last one of those books free as in beer to First Responders.
In the front of the book I’ll solicit donations to give away even more books to them.
My second book I’m keeping a lid on as it will be a for - hopefully - profit technical book. That one I expect to sell like hot cakes; my technical articles have always been exceedingly popular.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:27PM
Breadboards I get from Amazon are cheap, but they seem to work okay.
I doubt that MAX7219 chips are counterfit. Maybe. But if so, they work, even if they are unexpectedly cheap.
They still work even when I drive them slightly out of spec, from Java (yes really) on a Ras Pi 1 with 512 MB! (Not a 2, not a 3. This is for fun, not for work.)
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @06:47PM
Counterfeit board games, as in counterfeit copies of games like Splendor and Ticket to Ride. If you really want to know you can search online, but the short summary...
People (especially China, but in general) create counterfeit products, including board games. There are numerous ways, but they including photocopying cards and printing them on lower quality, taking 3d scans of plastic miniatures and creating injection molds off of them, and all the standard ways of counterfeiting. They will create lower-cost-to-manufacture (including possibly toxic materials, who knows as there is no oversight or reputation risk), and then sell them cheap. They get extra money because they don't pay the actual copyright owners any money.
This is a problem for multiple reasons.
1) The creators of the product don't get paid for their work. Moreover, they are subject to reputation damage ("People say good things about Days of Wonder, but when I tried it myself, it felt really cheap.")
2) It also damages the industry, in that people who would potentially be interested get turned off by low quality product, as per number 3 below.
3) The overall product is inferior. Cards are thinner making them harder to shuffle and subject to warping. Boards don't lay flat. Plastic models are some 10% smaller (due to how they need to make copy injection molds). Inlays don't hold the components correctly and tear. Actual mistakes in the counterfeit copy making some cards mis-marked and the game actually unplayable.
Typically the errors are small enough that unless you really know games you won't actively notice them (could you really tell a fake Rolex from a real one?), but there is a noticeable quality degradation that you will emotionally feel. It just doesn't "feel good" to hold the cards, for example. And that's ignoring the safety issue (e.g. paint made from lead is cheaper), and the moral issue.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 14 2019, @12:59PM
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:06PM (10 children)
What scammers who are going to pull the "sell counterfeit goods" con are looking for is a marketplace where:
1. There are tons of potential suckers. Amazon certainly qualifies.
2. There is no way for the goods to be checked before purchase. Amazon, like all online locations, hits this one out of the park.
3. There's enough sellers it's near-impossible for anyone to know your reputation. Amazon is big enough that this one certainly happens.
4. It's a pain in the butt to undo a purchase, so the sucker is going to decide not to bother and just eat the loss. I'm not sure how Amazon handles this.
5. Little-to-no consequences for breaking the rules. Amazon might remove you from its marketplace, at which point you change the name of the business, re-register, and you're right back. Or customers might give you bad reviews, but then you set up a bunch of good-review shills and you've changed that average back to something good.
The same kind of stuff happens on eBay, Craigslist, and any other place that sets itself up as an open marketplace. The solutions are:
1. Make returns cheap and easy.
2. Go after people for criminal fraud after a certain number of offenses. Don't advertise how many offenses this is, because otherwise the scammers will use the "business name change" approach after every, say, 14 scam sales to come just under the 15-scam-sale limit. Don't go after them in civil court either, because businesses like this have a pattern of having disappearing the moment anyone gets suspicious.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:34PM (5 children)
Ebay is better than Amazon, in that, if you're scammed, Ebay will refund your money.
First time, I purchased ten LED lightbulbs, but only recieved 8. I asked twice for the guy to send me two more bulbs, he replied in Chenglish (Chinese English) and never did admit that he understood what the problem was. Ebay refunded my money, and I kept the 8 bulbs.
Over the past holiday season, I was ripped off TWICE, nondelivery. Ebay refunded my money in both instances. There have been a couple others, I'd have to look at the details, but I always get my money back. Ebay isn't bashful about enforcing their rules.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:59PM
I bought a PC on eBay, but then the seller (with a long standing good reputation) refunded the paypal funds, I paid again, refunded again, then wanted to get paid via a different paypal account. I refused and lodged an eBay complaint. The seller closed shop and disappeared.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:15PM (3 children)
This is also why the standard use case of "sell my used ___" of Ebay is no longer popular. With Ebay siding with the buyer typically, the seller can easily get screwed if the buyer claims the item is defective/not received/etc. If you are selling something worth a couple hundred dollars, the risk of losing the merchandise with no compensation is too high on Ebay.
I don't have a good solution to this problem; there will be scammers selling and buying from any service.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:25PM (2 children)
> I don't have a good solution to this problem; there will be scammers selling and buying from any service.
If the item is popular enough to sell locally, use Craigslist and complete the deal face-to-face.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @08:40PM (1 child)
I'd rather take the risk of losing money via eBay than getting murdered by meeting someone via Craigslist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @02:46AM
http://craigslistkillings.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Hadn't heard about this before, but it won't affect my usage of Craigslist -- I'm not buying/selling guns or anything illegal. These two categories seemed to be the majority of what was listed. I've sold all kinds of things including a couple of cars this way, taking the obvious precautions like not being alone and doing the meetup during daylight.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:49PM (2 children)
I agree with most of your points, but I don't think you've actually shopped on amazon or done returns. I've been with them since day1, when I left ebay because of paypal.
1. There are lots of suckers. They go to the store as well, so I'm not sure how that makes amazon different. In fact, we have it pretty well here - go to an official apple store in eastern europe and you're likely to get fake chinese crap in an apple box.
2. There's no way to check goods for any online order. I don't see your point.
3. It's not only possible to check seller reputation, it's right there in your face when buying something. I and most people don't buy from anyone without thousands of orders and a very high satisfaction ratio.
4. I don't know what you mean by undo, but whatever you mean, you're lying. You can undo a purchase with one click if it's not shipped. You can return a purchase for free after it's shipped. UPS picks it up at your fucking house for free if you want. You don't even need to print a return label - they bring it, and a box.
5. Consequences for breaking the rules are losing your business completely, and is very important to sellers. 3rd party sellers always refund you. Half the time they don't even want the product back. If you leave a bad review, they personally email you, refund you, give you extra amazon gift cards just so you can add to the review that they fixed the issue in a good way. Good review "shills," even if you set up tens of thousands, only improve your star rating. They do not take down bad reviews, which describe the seller and give a little story. There is no way for a seller to remove that, and it's stuck with them for life. They will do literally anything to remove those.
You described ebay and craigslist. This does not apply to amazon, even with 3rd party products.
Now to actually get to the point of the article, which you completely avoided in order to post false bullshit you made up. There are counterfeit items. It's the buyer's job to check for that, and that can be annoying indeed. This however applies to anything you order online anywhere. I've gotten clearly returned-repackaged electronics from newegg and best buy. Batteries - look up the official spec and check the weight. Fake batteries have different weight. Electronics, vitamins - buy from a place that sells thousands a month and does not have reviews that they ship fake shit. Designer clothes and bags - I don't buy those, so I don't know how to check it, but I'm sure a place that sent fake shit and sells a thousand a month will have a review in there saying it's fake. When you get the fake item, which I have gotten a few times, I usually just keep it and use it, because they refund you immediately and never want it back.
I seriously don't think you've ever used amazon in your life. Hey, I got a question about the new spaceship tesla is building. The toilets - are they soft to sit on? Let me know please, and use an authoritative tone. There are people - people like you - who say things in a strong confident voice if they don't know something. This, as teenagers, makes them look cool. Those who as teenagers are a bit on the ugly side are neglected by their peers and become loners. This lack of social experience eventually makes them into adults who act like teenagers. Unlike other teenagers however, other adults just see a grown man bad at bullshitting, and laugh. Now dance for me clown - dance!
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday February 14 2019, @03:24PM (1 child)
There is one way to at least check visually: Post photos of the specific item you're getting, as it is. I've seen a site which allowed free classifieds for the genre of equipment the site discussed do this - you had to post at least one *original* photo of the device, and if you posted a stock photo they found it quickly and killed your ad. Show me 'the item' I'm getting, not 'an item' of what it is. Sure, somebody could have the item, post a photo of it and then not send it to you - the site in question had other ways of verifying you were actually you. This, too, could be done in more than one way, including posting a bond for your performance.
But all that takes labor time on the part of the listing hoster to actually verify these things. Amazon would rather just take the profit.
There's also the opposite question: You are perfectly legitimate but your competitors on the platform bomb you with bad shill reviews.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Thursday February 14 2019, @05:39PM
What is a reason for this immense extra cost though? A photo of an item does nothing to tell you whether it's counterfeit. Putting a battery on a cocaine-precise scale does. What problem are you trying to solve with this? Right now, you don't like it, you return it and you don't pay shipping. I don't see a use case for what you propose.
If a seller gets shill reviews, the seller reports it, and they are taken down, and accounts posting them are investigated. If you have an amazon account who bought one thing and posted a hundred shill reviews - it's clear it's a shill account, and all its reviews are taken down.
I for example like to look at a seller's bad reviews that are a few months old. They do check those, as for high-star high-volume sellers there aren't many bad ones, and they get in touch w/ people to resolve them.
Of course Amazon would rather make a profit instead of doing useless things. I would also rather pay less and be able to send the item back a month after I receive it, for free, if I have any issues.
Now, if you order from new sellers, who have low volume - problem - they might not refund your. If you don't read reviews for a seller (not the product) - problem - they might not refund you. How is this different compared to walking into a random little pawn shop and buying a stereo? Do stupid shit, get stupid fake shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @03:10PM
I see an opening for Walmart, as follows:
Ship to store from Walmart-online allows instant return/credit at the time of pickup, I've done this, works fine. This is an option for anyone living close to a store -- and there are a lot of Walmarts.
To make this work, Walmart needs to require that all their 3rd party sellers offer ship to store. As things stand now, I only order items that ship to store...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:58PM
I've made a lot of money over the years, printing counterfeit monopoly money. I guess they're on to me now. Kiss that third income good-bye, I guess.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:18PM
Happened to me/my parents recently. Even worse because it was a gift...thankfully just from my parents. But they pulled a phone off my wishlist, prominently listed as "UNLOCKED INTERNATIONAL EDITION". What the seller sent me was the locked T-Mobile variant. Not even compatible with my carrier. Seller refused a refund. Disputed with Amazon who said they couldn't do anything because it was a third-party seller. Issued a chargeback on the credit card, and the merchant finally agreed to accept the return. Sent it back, then they asked to remove the bad review. My parents couldn't even figure out how to do that, but didn't particularly want to anyway since we'd noticed that a large number of their positive reviews were all posted from one single account. Brought this up to Amazon, they didn't care about that either. The seller then re-charged the credit card because we didn't remove the review and claimed they never received the return...which the tracking information disputes... (didn't send with signature required as other reviewers indicated that this seller would simply refuse to sign for it and send it back.)
Eventually Amazon refunded the cost of the order...as Amazon.com credit....which was split in half and credited towards two completely different transactions. That was after a second chargeback on the credit card too though...so now she's worried that they're going to complain that they gave a double refund, although according to Amazon support their refund is not a refund and is not associated to that order so I guess it's NOT a double? Nearly two months later and we're STILL trying to sort that shit out...
(Score: 4, Informative) by MrGuy on Thursday February 14 2019, @05:19PM
You mean "We may be unable to prevent it without cutting into our profits"
The podcast Reply All [gimletmedia.com] did a great piece of reporting on this problem - worth a listen if you want to know more about how scammers operate and how clever they are.
While it's not the sole source of counterfeiting, there's a date when this got a lot worse, and it's 2015. Prior to 2015, Amazon had a policy where every US seller had to have a US presence in some way. This meant overseas goods (for example, goods made in China) had to have a US middleman, but also someone subject to US laws on one side of the transaction. In 2015, Amazon changed that policy, allowing direct selling from overseas in the Amazon marketplace. This was to ease access to the huge market in China, but it opened [forbes.com] the floodgates [cnbc.com] for scammers [forbes.com] and fakes. [cnet.com]
It's not as simple as flicking a switch would eliminate the problem, but a specific business decision by Amazon greatly worsened the problem. Amazon could reverse that decision, but chooses not to (and does not, as far as I can find, even consider that an option they'd consider).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @08:31PM
Cpunterfit goods are a problem... but a product that get's a "fresh new look" after getting thousands of possitive reviews is not a problem? Worse yet are the ones who do not even advertise there has been any change to formula or process...