Scammers are still a serious detriment to Amazon

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,256   +192
Staff member
Editor's take: Amazon has become a one-stop shop for a wide array of consumer goods. Heavy investments in transportation and logistics have made it more convenient than ever to shop from home and have orders arrive in a timely fashion. One area that Amazon could stand to improve, however, is in the product authenticity department.

Matt Hanson from TechRadar recently experienced how bad the issue can be when attempting to purchase a microSD card for his Nintendo Switch. As he recounts, Amazon is littered with a mix of branded and unbranded cards across a range of capacities and price points.

The first red flag he picked up on is the fact that if the price is too good to be true, it probably is. When you spot a 1TB microSD card from a no-name seller commanding just $25, pass. A legitimate 1TB card from a trusted brand like SanDisk or Lexar starts at a minimum of 5x that price.

That said, I'd recommend avoiding generic cards entirely and sticking with units sold directly by Amazon or a reputable third-party seller. It's also a good idea to check Amazon's customer review section to see what other buyers are saying. Specifically, filter by bad reviews and look for trends like cards shipping with incorrect capacity. And if a card has zero reviews, move on.

Hanson discovered that some scammers do ship real micrSD cards, albeit with less capacity than advertised. It seems some sellers use custom firmware to make their cards appear as if they have more memory than they actually do. If you exceed the card's true capacity, data is usually just deleted or becomes corrupted.

TechRadar reached out to Amazon and received the following statement.

We work hard every day to protect our sellers and help them grow their business. Bad actors that attempt to abuse our systems make up a tiny fraction of activity on our site.

We use sophisticated tools, including machine learning, to combat them, and we are making it increasingly difficult for bad actors to hide. We block bad actors before they reach our site and we work with sellers and law enforcement to hold them accountable by withholding funds and pursuing civil and criminal penalties.

These bad actors show a flagrant disregard for our community, our policies, and in some cases, the law, and do not reflect the flourishing community of honest entrepreneurs that make up the vast majority of our sellers.

Image credit Samsung Memory

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Amazon is a serious detriment to America. I much prefer smaller distributors who actually appreciate my business. I never buy from Amazon, and I never will.
 
Amazon is a serious detriment to America. I much prefer smaller distributors who actually appreciate my business. I never buy from Amazon, and I never will.
I buy from Amazon a lot. I've never had an issue with Amazon or their support. If something is wrong with the product, they will take it back. They refund me the minute I drop off at the local UPS store. Hell, they don't even know if I put the same product back in the package, but I get the refund. And, they've even gone to not requiring putting things back into a box to ship.

Best Buy, on the other hand, has been less stellar. I went down, in person, and bought about $10K worth of appliances. That was a cluster-f*ck to say the least. They promised a delivery date, claimed that everything was in stock and reserved for me, because I bought that day, and then failed to deliver everything when needed.

In addition to that, they had to send out multiple installers and that was it's own cluster. Since one guy did his thing, BB decided that all devices were installed, when some of them hadn't even been delivered.

As for small, local guys. Well, after doing a home remodel and using local, small businesses, I will tell you that I will never do that again. These guys were flaky and did poor work. So much so that I had to have some of them come out multiple times. Amazon my not "appreciate" my business but I've always gotten good service from them.
 
Would you really buy a 1Tb card from a no name seller?- 99% of us wouldn't .
I could understand maybe 64Gb as someone who off got a cheap dumping consignment of old stock .I have never had a problem - always Amazon- Samsung etc as seller .
I only used cheap cards for transfer or backups - don't travel at the moment - but would get a bunch to post home - over and about the big boys and girls and a portable drive ( for photography )
 
Would you really buy a 1Tb card from a no name seller?- 99% of us wouldn't .
I could understand maybe 64Gb as someone who off got a cheap dumping consignment of old stock .I have never had a problem - always Amazon- Samsung etc as seller .
I only used cheap cards for transfer or backups - don't travel at the moment - but would get a bunch to post home - over and about the big boys and girls and a portable drive ( for photography )
That and there's only 1 review.
I generally avoid unproven products unless what I'm looking for is cheap, or hard to find otherwise.
 
Main Street USA is making a slow comeback. The pandemic helped. My daughter gets pop delivered for a price, from the local mini-mart just like delivery from Marty's Butcher Shop in the olden days.

Amazon has it's uses but overall if I can get it in town I do. Target is a great alternative to Amazon for household essentials. They always get me my coffee and kitty litter on time
 
I don't mind the "we're cheap and random and we say so" take your luck options, but I hate that there's basically no way to ever be 100% sure you're getting a genuine article vs. a counterfeit. Reviews for a given SKU are pooled together from all sellers so that's no help. I've heard the warehouses even mix together stock for the same SKU from all sources, so the "ships from and sold by Amazon" Apple Lightning Cable could have come from Apple or it could have from Ripoff Central and you won't know until you open it (and maybe not even then if you're not an expert.)

Check out the Dave 2D review of a knockoff the Apple Headphones. You don't want to own these, but you have to admire the lengths they went to fool you into thinking they came from Apple:


 
Amazon is a serious detriment to America.
As is your comment.

I much prefer smaller distributors who actually appreciate my business.
There's nothing wrong with that. Promoting local businesses is a good thing. However, they can not stock the HUGE variety of items available on places like Amazon and Ebay. Support your local businesses, do, but don't ignore the utility of a larger resource.

I never buy from Amazon, and I never will.
That is as much a mistake as it is narrow thinking. As stated above, support local businesses, but when they don't have what you need, seek elsewhere.
 
I've never had an issue with Amazon or their support.
Neither have I. There have been mistakes on my orders in the past, but they always fix it up.

The scamming discussed in the above article was a much bigger problem in the past on Amazon as well as Ebay. Both companies have made great strides in making things better. They still have a ways to go..
 
Neither have I. There have been mistakes on my orders in the past, but they always fix it up.

The scamming discussed in the above article was a much bigger problem in the past on Amazon as well as Ebay. Both companies have made great strides in making things better. They still have a ways to go..
I see far more scammers advertising on Facebook than I have run into on Amazon. In fact, I haven't run into any "scams" on Amazon, but I've seen a lot of "me-too" products coming from China. I do make sure I know who the seller is and what their return policies are and will sometimes pick a different seller with more reasonable return policies, even at a slightly higher price.
 
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