This isn’t exclusive to Amazon. I had it happen with friends build back in the Newegg days.
Devastated PC builder orders DDR5 RAM from Amazon, receives DDR2 and some weights — counterfeit 32GB kit a worrying sign of rising return and sales fraud
Submitted 1 month ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Newegg is still a thing, you just need to check the “Sold by Newegg” filter.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Oh it is, but is so enshittified nobody goes there anymore.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Newegg is a fucking open septic pit.
Fred sold it off to some chinese acquisition company and its almost a fucking scam now at this point.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
You can order friends on newegg?
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yea, but only open box or refurb. Not new.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 month ago
We’d need to know exactly how far back because NewEgg has for years been just like Amazon: a listing service for junky third party sellers.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Evga still made GPUs back then.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 month ago
16 GB DDR2 + 16 GB DDR3 makes 32GB DDR5, right?
Strobelt@lemmy.world 1 month ago
32 GBGB DDDDRR5 actually. Much better!
ragas@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
32 GB² DDR²5
brandon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Cost doesn’t seem to matter with return fraud. I recently received a “new” $6 item that had its contents replaced with a $4 item and then taped shut. Seriously, who wastes their time on this stuff?
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Probably the same people running Pokémon card hustles. I recently saw a guy acting all pissy he had to wait in line at target to buy some packs, started berating the workers “you work at target, you’re broke as fuck”. The workers actually went in on him, I was so happy to see it. They made fun of him for trying to hustle over cards for children and told him to go home and cry to his mom about it.
Thats the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Please sir, do you have a link.
chaosCruiser@futurology.today 1 month ago
If your time is worthless to you and everyone else, that profit margin can be very tempting. Sounds like a symptom of a serious problem to me though.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 month ago
have you seen r/pokeinvesting, or r/pokecollecting. so sad losers of adults, they arnt even collecting because they play it, its to flip it. all TCPI/TPJ have to do is increase the pull rates, and increase printing of the cards, or have the ability to buy the individual cards on a official shop, instead of issuing RARE CARDS ON stupid events with a limited number and time, and location.
punkwalrus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.
I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There’s a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 month ago
Maybe I haven’t understood your point but it sounds like you’re describing people both acting maliciously and being stupid about it., so I don’t see it as a case of Hanlon’s razor.
Exchanging the item for another one that’s cheaper, even if it’s only $6 total, is still dishonest. The fact that it may not even be worth it for them in the end doesn’t change the fact it was an attempt to mislead. They were listing a product, and delivered another one.
tomiant@piefed.social 1 month ago
I hate that saying. It’s not a law. It’s a funny quote. Absolutely do not base any judgment you make on it.
Triumph@fedia.io 1 month ago
Volume and slavery.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Find a $2 scum you can pull hundreds of times a day and you’re a third world billionaire.
immobile7801@piefed.social 1 month ago
Its amazon, just return it. That’s really the only good thing about amazon anymore, easy returns.
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Not really anymore for me. A few times this past year they snuck in the return shipping cost at about $10-$15 USD. The page showed the cost refunded then added back. I don’t know but it fooled me.
With this hardware shortage insanity, I won’t be surprised if they get more aggressive with return shipping fees.
roofuskit@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Return shipping fees? I’m guessing you live somewhere rural? Here we just drop it at a local store.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
amazon has been getting less generous with the returns for years now.
Especially if you have more than a few returns per year.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Except in the UK for some reason where you can email and message them for months and pay your own damn return shipping and get fucked about and never recieve a refund.
gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
They tried to fuck me on a return once and after a month of it sitting in limbo i filed and won a dispute though my card provider instead.
Matter of fact i think it was over ram too, but it was over a year ago.
immobile7801@piefed.social 1 month ago
Oh man, that sucks. Sorry, I wrongly assumed amazon returns worked the same everywhere
thejml@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
This is my theory. The kind of stuff I buy there is all electronics manufactured in china/Asia anyway. I could buy it direct or from ali express, but Amazon shipping is hella cheap and fast and they actually do returns quickly and correctly.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I stopped ordering tech on Amazon when I got a fraud twice in a month on back-to-back orders a few years back.
First was a laptop that wouldn’t start. I looked at the bottom and the scewes were mostly stripped, and once I got them out most of the components had been removed from the boards.
Second was a Spyder color calibrator. What I got instead was a iPhone 4 screen protector with a sticker slapped on with the UPC for what I’d ordered. When I tried returning it, they gave me flack for slap-tagging a return, but I was able to escalate in that case.
indyradio@kafeneio.social 1 month ago
@chiliedogg @themachinestops
Amazon will consistently facilitate fraud. I had sworn I would not order from them, but it seemed there was an exceptional deal on a certain type of tortilla.
There were supposed to be 12 bags of tortillas, but there were only 10.
I read there guidelines, and there is absolutely no recourse for something like this. I opened the box, now it's mine.I had decided quite firmly I wouldn't deal with them, and it was a serious mistake when I did.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Amazon Let Its Drivers’ Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink
Drivers urinating in bottles has been reported in the past, but what wasn’t known is that some claim they also get penalized for having those urine-filled bottles in their truck when they return to the warehouse.
…
To avoid penalties, they end up discarding the bottles by the side of the road. Butler searches the roadsides near Amazon warehouses from Coventry to New York to Los Angeles and more often than not strikes liquid gold.
From there, it’s laughably straightforward for Butler to get Release listed for sale on Amazon, with very few checks and balances in place to ensure the product he’s selling is safe and legal. “Releasing the drink was surprisingly easy,” Butler told WIRED. “I thought that the food and drinks licensing would stop me from listing it, so I started it out in this Refillable Pump Dispenser category. Then the algorithm moved it into drinks.”
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So what exactly did you do to piss off the Amazon Returns department? Because from my experience, they are the most lenient company when it comes to returns/refunds. I’ve had stuff arrive broken, or scuffed up, or it was the wrong item, or I just plain didn’t like a product and every time I’ve been able to submit a return without having to interact with a single person.
I feel like you either have to be lying about your experience, didn’t even try to return it, or did something that got your account flagged.
QuandaleDingle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No judgement…but why would you buy 10 bags of tortillas from Amazon?
Raiderkev@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah, if it’s not made by Amazon and sold by them, I typically won’t buy it. All the other stuff is just marked up stuff from AliExpress and temu.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They don’t make anything. You’re buying marked up stuff from AliExpress and temu that has an “Amazon basics” sticker on it.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
It’s sickening how little Amazon seem to give a fuck about this. They could easily tighten up their vetting of sellers, but heaven fucking forbid they only report a $50,000,000,000 profit this year instead of $50,003,000,000.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They’ve invested extensively in automating their supply chain to the point that humans aren’t looking inside these boxes anymore. And as customer support is increasingly replaced with AI, the ability to flag and report businesses for fraud has erodes even as the businesses themselves have grown more sophisticated in duping Amazon anti-fraud systems.
The quest to remove every actual thinking human from the inside of your business results in humans outside of your business exploiting the blind spots to the hilt.
veni_vedi_veni@lemmy.world 1 month ago
CEOs are probably hedging on LLMs adapting to scammers then video versa, however unless they make a fundamental breakthrough like what transformers did, adding more parameters to the model ain’t gonna do it.
Lexam@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think I will just go to Microcenter
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I miss Microcenter
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I wish I had a Microcenter less than 8hrs away. Best Buy is all I have and I am not buying there.
immobile7801@piefed.social 1 month ago
Same, i don’t have one less than 7 hour round trip drive.
folekaule@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Same. I’m lucky enough to have two within driving distance. I’m genuinely worried about them staying in business if PC building takes a nosedive thanks to the RAM/SSD prices.
LoafedBurrito@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
No sympathy for anyone who still supports and buys from Amazon.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I hate buying from Amazon and avoid it as much as I can, but one thing I’ve noticed in the last 5-10 years is that brick and mortar stores seem to have given up completely. It is shocking how many times I’ve wanted to buy something, often very common, from popular brands, and I try and find a local store to buy it from only for that store to be out of stock or just not stock it at all. It feels to me like these stores are filled with “stuff” but none of the things I want to buy.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
You can order direct from the manufacturer’s website, I’ve done that with most of my workshop equipment and audio stuff.
InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
On the one hand, I loathe feeling that way sometimes. On the other hand, for the better part of the past decade+ any criticism I had about Amazon was met with victim blaming white knight replies and basically no support. At best I’m probably more on the ambivalent side of things than the no sympathy side, not that there’s effectively much difference.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Apathy is valid, I just think it’s best to not be blind to it
Rhoeri@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“… from Amazon”
Well there’s your problem.
slappyfuck@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Is amazon not a good supplier anymore? I still order stuff from them occasionally and always get what I need.
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There is very little quality control. Amazon mixes supply from different sellers, so bad actors often supply garbage into legitimate listings.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 month ago
No. They do nothing to vet the sellers or product they are shipping.
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Amazon is a platform for different kinds of vendors. Of course there’s the scam artists who do the bait-and-switch.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I buy and maintain about $20K of computer equipment a year for my lab. We learned around 2020 Amazon is a nest of scammers, from the suppliers to the delivery people.
There has been a significant resurgence of local computer supply retail because millions have been ripped off and only now buy in person.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Yeah, I got burned on some hard drives in like 2018 and won’t use them again. They took no action when I reported the issue with the seller. Thankfully I have a microcenter close enough that I can source most of what I need there.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
My local retail supplier has seen revenues double in the last 4 years. But, they are under constant threat of scam by buyers.
AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
I ordered 2x32GB DDR5 on Amazon two years ago and received 1x32 and 1x8 in the same package.
Luckily they replaced it for me completely, still wild. Can only imagine it’s going to get worse.
Ydna@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Buying electronics from Amazon is really rolling the dice. I’ve received so many inadvertent open box returns… it’s just a matter of time before you get burned.
winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Newegg is also shit and so is bestbuy. I don’t have a microcenter near me. What else is there? I guess buying direct. Is there anything I’m missing?
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 1 month ago
suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Depends on what you’re buying. Wiredzone and Provantage are solid, and for anything storage or camera-related B&H is my go-to.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Best buy resellers are worse than eBay.
KiloGex@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Don’t order from Amazon. Easy fix.
Shayeta@feddit.org 1 month ago
Hold sellers accountable. Actual fix.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
They put a lot of local retail out of business.
kamen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So they don’t have the resources to check returned goods or what? Or they simply don’t care enough?
sexy_peach@feddit.org 1 month ago
Yup this isn’t a fraud problem. Just an Amazon problem
jonathan@piefed.social 1 month ago
I ordered a 4tb SSD, received an SSD heatsink in the box.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Play the long game. Chargeback.
pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Just ordered some digital photo frames for xmas gifts, and neither one of them work. One is apparently an opened box return. Trashy!
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Don’t buy expensive shit off Amazon. They don’t do anything to prevent fraud.
kboos1@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Why put a weight? DDR2 weight vs DDR5 weight difference wouldn’t be noticeable until they put the weight in because now it would weight 3x what it should. I suspect the person claiming fraud is the one committing fraud or this is a fake article.
hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
My headlight connector got a little melty, just enough to get loose and stop working, just wore out I suppose.
I bought one on Amazon, along with new bulbs, installed it, and within an hour the new connector had catastrophically melted and shorted out enough to blow the fuse.
I should’ve known, the wire felt cheap, copper clad aluminum. But I thought it would be fine, it’s just a headlight 🤷♂️
Now I’ve got a replacement from the local auto parts. So far so good.
demizerone@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I have some 128gb ddr5 kit I bought a few years ago. Want to sell it back I’m not going to use it but the scammers be scamming.
NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I have long read reports of amazon reselling used or opened & returned pc-components. We really need a more trustworthy source of pc-components that isn’t a regional micro center store.
ryrybang@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
toiletobserver@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It wasn’t technology, but i ordered a new mad lib style book for my kid from Amazon. The book arrived with cellophane around it and a nice label that clearly said new. Once opened, it was very obvious the book was used, since the last kid had already filled out the whole damn thing including his name and address inside the cover.
I’m not mad at the kid, although his parents are probably bad people for returning the book at that point. I am livid that Amazon didn’t flip to any random page in the book too determine if the book was used or not.
Fuck Amazon.
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Iirc correctly, Amazon actually doesn’t resell their returns. At least not through their storefront.
They have “return auctions” where returns are put onto a pallet and then people bid on them to purchase. Apparently this is cheaper than having a workflow for their returns, checking them to make sure they are resellable, and then stocking them back into their warehouse.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Actually that cellophane was brand new, as the label indicated.
Beacon@fedia.io 1 month ago
Yeah this stuff is why i never buy tech from Amazon, you never know if you're gonna get a counterfeit item
FinalRemix@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Recommendations?
Newegg has been shit for a decade now (new owners fucked it to hell) and I don’t have a Microcenter closer than a 2-hour drive.
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Supporting giant evil DOES sometimes get you free stuff… I know folks who have accidentally been shipped multiple of what they’re ordering (in two cases, the items were quite expensive) and when they’ve brought it up, they were told to keep the extras.
Maybe not worth the evil, but hey, free stuff is cool.
titanicx@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Pretty much any of the retailers have this happen. They’re isn’t anything special about ordering from a different site or even picking it up ina brick and mortar store.