Amazon... more like SCAMazon - Fake SSDs

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At one point, Amazon was game changing and felt like the best place to shop online. Don’t have to worry about the scams and crappy quality on Ebay and Alibaba. But then something changed. Suddenly all you can find on the website is cheap garbage, or worse, complete scams. We take a look at one of the most prevalent scams on the platform, fake SSDs and hard drives. What do you get when you buy one of these, and how do they keep getting away with it?
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:37 What we Got
6:48 Going inside
9:45 How The Scam Works
12:08 How they get away with it
15:07 Why Amazon Can't Stop It
18:58 Outro

[@LinusTechTips]

Have you purchased a “scam” product from Amazon before? How did your experience go? Let us know below! Buy a SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD: geni.us/JBi36 Buy a SABRENT 8TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe PCie M.2 SSD: geni.us/kHt2h Buy FEEL2NICE Apple MFi Certfied 10ft iPhone Chargers (Pack of 5): geni.us/ASjWwhx Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

[@randylahey5107]

i work at amazon warehouse for over a year :(

[@Astralr]

idk

[@saltblood]

I got a shitty glasses cleaner with some, by my current self clearly, overblown claims about use on the iss, the thing a didn't work and b fell apart, so I left a scathing review which my dad was kind of annoyed at because it was his account I left it on

[@ayushagarwal9530]

SOLUTION: I have a solution if Amazon can start rewarding the buyer for finding this type of scams with a proof then people will start to find the scams by exploring a product like this instead of just trying to get a refund and more over some will try to search scams on Amazon which can lead to ultimately less money lost on compensating the victims and providing a better service at the same time

[@jerextalan]

What if they did edits like page versions, Old versions stay, but the edit gets 'pasted' over them. Then a customer could look back through old versions? like post-it notes on top of one another, or a flip-book effect?

[@emmasmith8367]

My sibling complained that I spent too much money when I purchased my parents an SSD for their photos. The same sibling owns a fake SSD 🤦‍♀️

[@Kholaslittlespot1]

Send them a huge-ass file and sit and chuckle to yourself ;)

[@asoka7752]

how much did you spend?

[@mickmccasker6401]

@@asoka7752 About tree fiddy

[@aleksazunjic9672]

Depends how much photos they have. For lot of people 64 or 128 GB are enough. Scammers count on that.

[@Yatukih_001]

Exactly. This has been used to target pensioners here in Iceland. They are told ´you´re so greedy, look at you. You caused all these products to become hugely expensive, go for the cheap thing. Buy this SSD. It only costs 2 dollars but it´s 220 TB´. The real issue here is, that politicians have made it so hard for some people to go out shopping that they can no longer afford necessary products, products like tooth paste, sweaters, new T - shirts, computer parts. Quit buying anything from these scammers and refuse to let them tell you that vaccines are safe. The scammer pyramid is huge and usually ends up in positions of political power where scammers have managed to be elected so they can make people buy scam products they would otherwise not buy.

[@lfla0179]

Brazil has a reverse public auction where several Federal services (police, transport) make a request proposal, and several suppliers make a bid to become suppliers for the lowest price... There was this bid for 8GB pendrives for the police, and the Police Officer brought his own drive and said: "I have a drive with eight 1GB video files, and if your pendrives fail to save them, I will put you under arrest." Half of the bidders dropped their offers.

[@Am_Yeff]

Most drives would fail that test due to formatting overhead

[@steveheist6426]

I assume there were still people who got arrested for that, just knowing Brazil's reputation

[@pocketbombs]

​@@steveheist6426yeah definitely

[@kevinwiley5325]

As someone who is hard of hearing and relies on lip reading a fair bit, I’m REALLY thankful to the editing staff for putting CC for someone speaking off screen. I’d never understand it otherwise.

[@RonWolfHowl]

Agreed! I don’t think those are Closed Captions though, just regular ol’ captions :-)

[@MCAlexisYT]

@@RonWolfHowl Yeah, these are "open captions".

[@joseramos2328]

I can hear good enough, but i like these captions, its very useful

[@mrbrisvegas2]

KZbin uses software to create the captions automatically.

[@nikkiofthevalley]

​@@mrbrisvegas2They're not talking about KZbin's captions, they're talking about the text the editors of the video put up on screen whenever someone's talking off-screen..

[@cdbtheclaw]

Making it impossible to switch the product category might be one way to at least make it way harder to review merge, especially in the tech space.

[@AwakeningAspirations]

Yeah I think there’s a spot between “completely changing a product page” and “no changes at all” that would make sense. Like what you’re saying about switching categories, I can’t think of a reason why that should be allowed. If someone was selling socks they shouldn’t be able to change it to pc components. I think needing to update product info as a reason to be able to completely change the product page is a cop out. Like seriously just provide some sort of update annotations. And maybe if too many things are changed they should have to remove the reviews or ratings? I can’t stand how Amazon manages ratings and reviews when one product has several different versions that all fall under the same page. I was recently looking for 240AIOs and more than half the reviews were for 360, 280, or 120 aios because all the different models fell under the same page. All the reviews for every model were combined making it completely useless as a means to determine the worth of the product.

[@gesamtkuntswreck]

And the price to a certain extent

[@iskierka8399]

Switching category could be necessary due to mistake, or say if it's a relatively recent product and terminology changes (for the super specific subcategories). It would be pretty trivial though to measure the number of changes in the text by like, any kind of text diff, and mix the ones that change most in with support requests to ask the people handling those to verify whether they're legit.

[@TheCommanderTaco]

​@@AwakeningAspirations I feel the same way when looking at reviews for tv's lol. I am interested in this model, but the review is apparently covering this other model. How is that supposed to help me lol.

[@moonrazk]

Yeah, that's such an obvious limitation that I'm surprised they didn't mention it.

[@ezkymos]

Amazon doesn't let us easily report product. If they make it easier we could shut down those scammers easier.

[@JasonB808]

Problem is that the internet is savage now. People will falsely report legit companies for political, financial, or removing competition.

[@roadle11223]

That could also backfire. I've seen plenty of complaints on legitimate SD cards because the buyer decided to test speeds through the cheap readers built into their laptops as opposed to a USB 3 adapter.

[@Anankin12]

Also the buried the reviews, do you know how long do I need to scroll to find them?

[@gigitrix]

Why would they put any resources into cleaning up their store when they are basically a monopoly

[@trapfethen]

@@roadle11223 The point wouldn't be for the product to automatically come down with these reports, but that it would flag it for human review. A human can do the necessary research to determine whether the product is real or fake, or potentially pose a certification requirement to the seller if their not sure.

[@fallouthirteen]

Amazon really needs to do something about it. Like a few months ago I was like "Eh, I could use another SSD", checked Amazon, saw tons of obvious scams, and then went "I don't feel like trying to navigate getting a good deal vs avoiding any subtle scams, I'm just not going to bother."

[@namelessvoid1467]

That's a you issue. Stop trying to buy crap drives and just get the name brands.

[@Tahngarthor]

Or Amazon could go back to mostly selling things themselves instead of being an easily accessible platform fake chinese companies can spew garbage onto.

[@TenjinZekken]

Amazon is large enough to be a responsible marketplace. But also yea, just stop trying to cheap out. In tech, reliable brands are just that, reliable.

[@Code7Unltd]

@@TenjinZekken Amazon has too many dullards reviewing things, never mind the obvious 'review incentive' problem. When buying computer components, I personally start by searching parts on PartPicker first.

[@prawny12009]

​@@TenjinZekkenthe issue there is that if you buy name brand from amazon you may run into the issue of buying from nine approved vendors. Done tech will not honour warranty if you have purchased from grey/ black market vendors.

[@SergirothGames]

A possible solution for “listing merging” could be to make sure that it stays in the same category, and if it changes too much after merging, disable it until reviewed by some human or software.

[@colewelden]

I agree with the latter. Personally I think Amazon should, at their discretion, have a list of the definitely legitimate brands like Samsung Official, HP, Dell, etc.. But the smaller sellers should have to request approval if they try to change more than one part of a listing. This would allow them to easily update a description of an existing product with no approval needed. But to completely change the title, pictures, description, and product soecifiations, they would require a human approval. I also find it hard to believe that Amazon does not possess AI good enough to flag obviously fake company names. If it's has 20 characters without any spaces, or 6 letters in a row without any vowels, or returns no results on the internet, it should need human review to even be posted in the first place. They could flag accounts that have X amount of changed listings over X periods of time. They could ban sellers who obviously are abusing the category system by selling electronics labelled as beauty products. They could flag sellers for review if their products have generally sleeved 5 stars, but get a large influx of negative reviews across listings. Any very irregular behavior could be targeted, flagged, and reviewed. It would definitely require more employees, but a lot of this could be automated up until it is flagged by the system. The other thing is that they even block you from leaving a seller review after a certain period of time. I got my dad a nice set of headphones that looked legit out of the box. Well, about 5 months later I personally sat down and used them and immediately knew they were fake. I went to leave a review on the seller page to warn others, only to find I could not. On top of that the original seller was a gibberish name, and I purchased the product from the seller Amazon had reccomended. The product and it's listing was entirely correct, and legitimate. Amazon had just ran out of stock so when I clicked the link it was not sold by Amazon, but WAS shipped by Amazon. So the seller as soon as I clicked on the product was a scammer and there were definitely another 15 legitimate sellers they could have reccomended. Point is I see about 500 things Amazon could attempt to do, and have not. This has been a problem for years, probably more than a decade. They choose to accept returns before 30 days, and not actually deal with the heart of the problem. It seems obvious to me that they actually just don't care. When your company gets to the size of Amazon you could dedicate 10 million dollars to the problem and it would be a drop in the bucket, far less than they pay in advertisements. Improving the overall experience of your site should be a higher priority than having 25 sellers for a single product.

[@matrixmodexp]

A way to get around that is just to sell a actual product in the same category that is actually good for a while, like selling a samsung ssd cheaper then even samsung sells it. Maybe at a loss even. Then once you get all the people coming in because your product is cheaper and you get reviews. Just sell a ssd (scam ssd ) that looks almost identical and you recoup your losses and now profit. With this you barley changed the product page maybe one image or you make your product just look as close as possible to a samsung ssd.

[@bouncer67sh]

Amazon tip: avoid product brands that sound like cans thrown down the stairs.

[@deadpianist7494]

which brand is legit?

[@divineokon1244]

@@deadpianist7494 Samsung fs.

[@deadpianist7494]

@@divineokon1244 too late i already bought Sansung XD

[@yourwallet4219]

I would only apply that to computer and networking hardware. A lot of these brands with names that look like keyboard smashes can really deliver on other types of products, definitely never skip out on reading the reviews for fair criticisms though.

[@IrfanKhan-ze4yx]

There was another video explaining those names

[@classicrockonly]

Amazon has gotten so dodgy. I can’t even find the legitimate name brands anymore on many product types. I’ve been spending less on Amazon because it’s gotten frustrating

[@Daniel-dj7fh]

You just look at who the seller is and can kinda cut out a bunch of products. Let's say the AKG headphones by samsung, if the Samsung official Store on Amazon isn't selling it, I just wouldn't look at it. And if it's a rando product I look at the reveiws, the starcount and read through some reviews from each rating.

[@CRneu]

it's because a lot of brands no longer sell on amazon. Amazon mixes product from different sources so product fraud is rampant even when you purchase directly from a store's amazon page. So now you'll only find the fraud products.

[@andymoran8007]

The only, ***only*** upside to shopping on amazon these days is A) Products are still significantly cheaper than retail stores, and B) Their customer service is pretty excellent and can issue refunds at the drop of a dime if called upon. Otherwise, you're basically rolling the dice as to whether the product you're going to receive will be legitimate or not, but especially so in the electronics section where shit products like this are shipping to thousands of unsuspecting customers every single minute of every single day.

[@RWDtech]

Chinamazon

[@classicrockonly]

@@Daniel-dj7fh But like LTT pointed out, a lot of the reviews can very likely be bogus. I think if you are savvy, you can roll the dice and see if it's good or return it. But the real problem is, if you are looking for some nice headphones, you'll get 90% bull crap up front before you hit a real brand. When looking for cables I had to go in 3 pages before I hit anyone like Monoprice, a name I actually recognize that isn't HTNY or YLTLF or whatever

[@robertrichter3033]

As someone who grew up in a TRS-80 and Atari -800 era, us older people are already of a mindset “it’s too good to be true”. I have a legitimate 4tb spinner that holds more data than those disks laid end to end across the entire US. So us older folks have trouble with the line of “too good to be true”.

[@jaminova_1969]

Jeffe retired (he came back briefly during the pandemic) and Amazon hasn't been the same since Andy and the corporate dweebs have taken over. What bothers me most about scamming customers is they don't get it. Sears Roebuck was the Amazon of the 19th & 20th centuries and they died a horrible death because of terrible customer service and replacing quality with crap. So thank you for posting these videos and remember, "Buyer Beware". I do wish Amazon would try harder policing their website!

[@Dampney_]

Amazon Prime is starting to become a joke - searching for everyday products like a fan is a tricky task. You’ll find a dozen fans with the exact same design but with a different brand name. Amazon is taking us all for a ride here

[@teixense]

exactly. I hate so much that I try to search stuff online in a country I'm relatively new and it's all Amazon and it's so hard to find anything useful in it

[@MrVidification]

I used to think they were all counterfeit until I noticed western stores doing made up brands too. appearently it's legal as long as it's not counterfeit. the first time I noticed was on wayfair. same item, different name, different price..

[@anotheratreyu742]

You just need to know what to look for. Watch the reviews and their ratios, and if something seems obviously to good to be true, don't be silly about it :)

[@anon_y_mousse]

It's easier to search DDG for a product than to search most of these websites such as Amazon. Even if you still end up buying it from Amazon, DDG still finds more relevant entries.

[@ZodakZach]

all those dropshippers on tik tok ruined amazon tbh because all they do is buy products and sell them on amazon for more money and so everyone is doing that and most are selling the same products so u have so many different people selling the same products all for different prices

[@eusamuel]

Amazon can fix this by not allowing sellers to change the category of listed items, mainly when they have already been broadly sold. They can go even further in this and remove the ability to change titles when passed a certain length of time. Or they can keep older versions of the same item so buyers can go through what has been changed and what has not.

[@mltamarlin]

They could show the change with a strike-through. Or provide some other easy way for the masses to see that things were changed. Or give a link to what the page looked like when a review was written.

[@eusamuel]

@@mltamarlin With this many suggestions, we can clearly see that amazon isn't fixing this issue solely because they don't want to.

[@CRneu]

what's crazy is there are 3rd party websites that track this kind of stuff. So if they can do it then amazon certainly can do it but choose not to.

[@Elmojomo]

@@CRneu Such as? I'd love to see that.

[@TheHollowBlade]

@@CRneu That costs money, amazon cannot afford to spend any money on improving parts of the business that are already running. You know amazon is just a small indy company run by a small family.

[@Lolsashalol]

My gf's dad bought one of those 16TB drives literally today. He was trying to convince me its real. Thanks for saving me the trouble of explaining it

[@chalor182]

Man I really want to have witnessed that conversation lol

[@dfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdf3569]

💔

[@KaRaTeLoRd11PS3]

Wow what are the odds lol

[@blackstar-genX]

That's sad

[@flamespirit1]

Take a hammer and destroy the 16tb fake hdd, while he is watching you destroying it 😂

[@QuiGonJa]

My favorite thing about these products are the generally off topic reviews and sometimes askew lettering on the case. My brothers friend fell for one of these scams around two months ago but was refunded a few days later. The worst part is that the same scam is still for sale on amazon.

[@finderskeepers7293]

Amazon also refuses to put up negative reviews about products. They usually say the review did not meet its guidelines or some nonsense.

[@Camexplode]

This is Amazons biggest issue. I see myself avoiding Amazon because it becomes more and more like Wish or Alibaba.

[@vueport99]

Amazon is getting worst than Wish and Temu

[@bobmurphy2216]

Not just scams, but now a lot of counterfeits too. If the company name is (adjective) (noun) in all caps then it's a cheap knockoff of low quality. I also find it increasingly difficult to shop on Amazon because I'm unsure what I'll actually be getting. Most of the tech stuff I've bought recently has been very underwhelming. At least with bigbox stores you can see it first.

[@YourLordMobius]

Fucking dropshippers.

[@bhoutdoors507]

Same. I’ll stick to ebay (also can be bad), brick and mortar retailers, FB marketplace, and craigslist

[@tedkaczynskiamericanhero3916]

My mom got a bigger SD card for her phone. It wouldn't work at all once is got to the 8 gig storage (it was like 7.4 gigs or something like that) so I had to explain she got scammed. I got her a terabyte SD card for Christmas to save her the trouble.

[@ids1024]

I think the biggest problem is that Amazon pretends to be a "safe" site, when it just isn't. Ebay isn't perfect, but at least it emphasizes that sellers could be any random people and you might want to look at their reviews to see if they can be trusted. Amazon does list sellers and have seller reviews, but it's very de-emphasized, particularly the difference between "sold by Amazon" and "fulfilled by Amazon". Despite the fact the latter may be a counterfeit, fraud, and possibly genuinely dangerous. Or I see a review that says someone got a counterfeit... but the reviews don't show what seller someone bought it from, so does this tell me anything relevant, or do I just need to avoid buying anything from any third party seller I don't specifically know to trust?

[@ignoto82dr]

and let's not talk about amazon search engine that show you a single result with your search term and 300 "similar" while ebay stick to it.

[@manason2776]

I love ebay

[@kuebby]

eBay also has excellent buyer protection, so even if the seller does send you rocks--you'll get your money refunded. eBay has really improved in the last couple years, they're better than Amazon for some things now (often books, movies, and video games ironically).

[@HydratedBeans]

Amazon used to be safe

[@I.____.....__...__]

Yup, and the problem isn't just with Amazon either, all sites that now allow third-party sellers are subject to this problem. Many people don't realize that Walmart and Best Buy and others stores now show lots of third-party items, many of which are garbage at best, scams at worst. 🤦

[@Arth11905]

my brother once got fooled by this scam. he bought a "2 tb Seagate" , but when i oppened the enclosure it was a hitachi with 160 gb size

[@lonelyone69]

One of the more terrifying parts of this is that contrary to popular belief these operations will often have massive financial backings with organised crime. Not only do these listings generate income for some really bad people but they can often be used for money laundering and even black market dealing.

[@paulbrooks4395]

Please remember that returning a product is your greatest strength with Amazon. If you must issue a chargeback-and I wouldn’t recommend going that route with Amazon-use the option “product not as described”. This is useful with other vendors.

[@LanceWinston]

Well said Paul.... take it back to Kohls so they get the message.

[@tonn333]

Why don't you recommend getting your money back?

[@ali10163]

@@tonn333 Because issuing chargebacks can get into complicated legal issues, especially with certain TOS, sometimes they can ban that card or your account altogether and they might just charge you again later.

[@WereCatStudio]

Does Amazon pay for return shipping?

[@JackTheAwesomeKnot]

​@@jonsnow2555 Wrong.

[@MooTaters]

Worst part about this scam for those who fall for it is that they'll be assuming their data is all there, but then they'll go to try and retrieve their data that has been deleted only to finally notice the issue...on top of the fact that they almost certainly don't follow best or even decent backup practices.

[@jpxyUA]

They did the same to PS2 memory cards back in the day. All 64/128mb cards on ebay were 2--4Mb ones with forced compression.

[@Schmuly]

Imagine it's old family videos and photos or what not, that would be devastating to alot of people.

[@1stRanger]

Worst part about this scam is that someone can be stupid enough to not only think it's legit and buy it, but put precious data on it.

[@RandomGuy-om1vy]

Major skill issue.

[@mr.cookie8265]

@@jpxyUA omg that was the reason why my memory card made problems when i was a teen. i thought i broke it somehow.

[@joshmaday1462]

It seems like the fix for the edit hack would be to restrict the scope of edits that can be made at one time. Like, only allow 20% of the text of the product listing to be edited within a week. That allows for corrections, but prevents wholesale swapping out the listing.

[@javidg96]

For years now, I've been wondering why Amazon hasn't copied eBay already and added a country filter to their search engine. That helps massively when filtering knockoff and scam products out if you already know what you're searching for.

[@Thermalions]

Except Ebay's country filter is useless. I've lost count of the number of products I've purchased which the listing specifically claims are located in my Country or even State, but turn up posted direct from China.

[@Pyroteq]

They don't care. eBay and Amazon both LOVE Chinese sellers. They don't care if they're scammers or legit, there are a billion of them. They know that many buyers don't want to buy stuff from China and putting a filter would mean they lose profit from those sales. The eBay filter is 100% useless. Chinese sellers will just use a local contact to divert the package to you. You'll notice many products have a shipping time estimate of 2-3 weeks or something despite the fact it should be just a few days. This is the first indication the item isn't local as it has to get from China first and then get shipped to you. After a few days the local re-shipper then creates a shipping label and a tracking number so they can say "look, we sent it!", but in reality you won't see a tracking update for another week. Wouldn't surprise me if Chinese sellers were putting factory made crap on Etsy too doing the same thing.

[@AceStrife]

For all the stupid things Trump did, taking action to restrict China was the one of only good things he ever tried to do. Wonder what things will be like when he wins the 2024 election.

[@cjbtlr]

Everything you want is made in China and imported. What good would this do?

[@verygoodbrother]

@@Thermalions I've never had this issue. All items have a product location written under them.

[@ozmer]

Amazon has totally ruined their website with third party sellers. Buying old books is practically impossible because for every book there's 50+ print on demand versions which make finding versions from real traditional publishers extremely difficult.

[@RobinDale50]

And this is not helped by Amazon's completely, and I mean completely, useless filters. I have never seen a major retail website with less useful, and just less overall, filters for what you have searched for. The filters emphasizes jink that isn't relevant, and only has a few categories at all. You cannot "Drill down" in any meaningful way like you can on, say, Newegg or even Microcenter's websites.

[@r8gg]

yes but they make more money this way.

[@One-Crazy-Cat]

I bought my Johnson on Amazon. Was described as 14” massive king size dongle and it turned out to be a 2” micro dongle

[@Red0Ray]

I always intentionally ignore the Part of the Video where the sponsor is mentioned, BUT this time I decided to listen to it completely as a respect for Sponsoring such an important and informative Content Thank you very much.... 💪👏👏

[@thexgamer8240]

I see this all the time on Amazon. We need people like Linus to help the consumers distinguish between the rights and the wrongs.

[@Gatorade69]

Amazon should be more proactive on selling junk like this, but they're making money and they don't care.

[@Nickie102]

@@Gatorade69 how can they reasonably do so. They aren’t going to reasonably test every product themselves before approving it. What even would be their limit on quality compared to another user. They can shut down bad reviews but how many is enough? What happens if the product is at good but gets review bombed by those who just think it will be funny. Or Scammers who manage to delay their bad reviews long enough to cash in and start over.

[@Code7Unltd]

Amazon is only a common target because they *are* the Spotify of shopping. If you don't know what I mean when I say "Spotify of shopping", then you may need to ask why every musician and music label cares about being on Spotify when their returns are the weakest of the lot? _For the record: Groove Music Pass (what used to be Xbox Music) had the best revenue share for music before Qobuz launched and took the top spot._

[@FinlayDaG33k]

AtomicShrimp.

[@Thurgosh_OG]

@@Nickie102 Just preventing any Chinese company from selling on Amazon would be a big start.

[@arrone7]

I was suspicious of these merged reviews years ago because I had seen them and they made no sense, and basically nobody believed me, saying "that wouldn't happen on Amazon". Yeah it does. It has done for years and they aren't even TRYING to stop it.

[@aluisious]

Jeff Bezos doesn't give a shit about anything as long as he's getting rich.

[@AraiDigital]

Thing is, they likely are, but it's *so easy* to try and sell shit on Amazon that it's trivial to ban all these listings

[@arrone7]

@@AraiDigital i think you mean non-trivial! You'd have to have an army of people to try and get rid of all those listings... Or I don't know use some AI to scan all the listings and see if the products that are unique have reviews that do not correspond to the current product

[@haleseason9728]

I think it's all excuses and cop-outs. And real profits for Amazon, as these scams pay for sponsored listings. It's not hard to flag a storage cubby listing that changes to an SSD listing, which is a hotbed for scams. An intern could figure it out.

[@Nagromthewhite]

8:45 Linus really became the LockPickingLawyer xD

[@lol-xx9kn]

So I will say those weird brand names aren't necessarily a problem: some legitimately decent products also have those strange brand names. For instance I recently got an activated charcoal air filter + essential oil diffuser with a brand called "PARTU". I then later saw the exact same air filter with a different trademark. It was cheap, but it does the job I expected it to (it's a fan and a filter in a plastic shell, not exactly rocket science). I think sometimes it's just as likely they're using the weird branding because they're a small distributor for a white labeled product. If you're particularly good at deal finding: sometimes you can find decent HDR monitors that other companies mark up even though it's the same factory.

[@veindesigns]

Making it clear and obvious that a product has had changes to its product page and having the ability to see what was changed could help significantly I would think, shouldn't hurt real products but would be a lot harder for the scammers.

[@kanedaku]

There should be a minimum of a page title history. I have /we all might have seen in product reviews one that is for a different product than is listed. If its not a scam then the sellers wouldn;t have anything to worry about either, because their genuine title change for small differences and not entire product lines would be -referenced- _reflected._

[@raymondgelmers5132]

Indeed, it does not have to be that hard. It would really help to have a transparent changelog for all products Amazon sells. And also, when you change something to the product, it is often warranted that the reviews are invalidated as well. Different color can mean different paint quality for example. Might not be as durable anymore.

[@markhall2960]

I swear Amazon used to show what exactly a review related to on the product page, or is that only if the seller has more than one product on the same page? The ultimate answer would be to ban 3rd party sellers, or ones which don't have an existing e-commerce site, but I guess Amazon makes too much money from them for that?

[@asoka7752]

@@Adlata then amazon has to ban almost all their sellers as products are generally manufactured in China.

[@SecuR0M]

@@Adlata It's OK the Chinese would just approach middlemen in Vietnam, Thailand, and Canada, which are the three major colonies of the PRC lol.

[@RD-io6sm]

The amount of crappy products and scams on Amazon is unreal. This is one of the many reasons why I haven't bought anything on Amazon the past couple years.

[@andrewshular7145]

Amazon isn't bad at all, just takes a bit of common sense like buying anything online

[@IdealGrain]

I don’t order anything there anymore unless I know exactly what I’m getting. Crappy alibaba sourced FBA brands have gotten out of hand. I end up returning half of what I buy it seems. It’s a step away from buying on wish, just with good shipping. But drivers have to pee in bottles for you to get that good shipping, so even fast shipping is a bit of a negative. FU bezos.

[@koilamaoh4238]

I mean its everywhere but its better to buy "direct" not 3rd party, as the scammers basically ruined 3rd parties. I prefer amazons refund system, its the best I dealt with honestly and with prime, its easy. You can buy 3rd party if they are actually trusty. and Common sense really. Think of the limits of cheapness, as 1tb ssd = 43$ on the market for offbrand, which some of which actually work good.. now tack on 16tb?? 40$x16 640$ !(if theye xist be like 500-650)... thats for ofbrand.. now imagine name brand, double that price.

[@Djuntas]

The problem is 3rd party seller. We have a lot of great e-retailers thats based in Denmark, no 3rd party bullshit. Id trust any product they sell. Reminds me of another e-retailer that went 3rd party, and now a days its trustpilot score sucks ass.

[@TheFourthWinchester]

That's a lie. Everyone ordered on Amazon during the pandemic.

[@BadassMcGraw]

Adam: "it was a clever maneuver..." i felt his despair deep in my soul.

[@bean420man]

I actually work at an Amazon warehouse and have picked a couple of those exact scam products. I knew they were fake when I saw them but I can see how someone who isn't into tech like I am, could get fooled. I hope those people got their refunds quickly and without issue.

[@ListenToPeopleWhoKno]

Did you report the scam product to a manager or supervisor and if so was anything done about it?

[@jamesneal1511]

@@ListenToPeopleWhoKno Why would he? It's not his job or a managers job to care.

[@KRAVER_]

This is by far the best LTT video I have seen in at least a year !! very informative and easy for the average person to understand. I hate Scammers, and love making their days bad.

[@pirojfmifhghek566]

Here's a hoopy frood who always knows where his trowel is.

[@amunak_]

The solution is actually quite simple. Don't allow changing *too much* about a product. There are decades old algorithms for this, not to mention you could outright restrict category changes (and/or also restrict more stuff when the product has already sold a bunch). At least they could trigger a warning, or not count the old reviews. It's not all or nothing; you could allocate point values to changes where, say, changing the title or category costs lots of points and description or images less (especially when not outright removing). Then you use an LCS algorithm, add those costs and decide what kind of action you take for that cost. You can start with a banner that warns people that the description changed a lot (and perhaps showing the history), removing old reviews / number of sales, or outright banning the change. Problem is that's more work for Amazon and they probably make way more money off of the scammers selling their crap than by banning them.

[@felixisaac]

Precisely what I was thinking too! I'm sure other engineers in Amazon have also brought this solution in their meetings which further proves your point about Amazon trying to make money off of the scammers.

[@TjPhysicist]

im still trying to think of a legitamate situation where you would actually need to outright change the category of a product being sold. Title changes sure, even spec edits yea - stuff gets updated all the time...but category changes is sus A.F

[@trapfethen]

revision history would make crap like this much easier to spot at a glance, and to investigate for Amazon itself. You're correct though, they don't actually want to fix it as they make a lot of money off of the scammers.

[@HydratedBeans]

Could also use image recognition and train an AI to tell the difference between “they changed the photo to something different,” and “they changed the image to a different picture of the same product.” Not an easy task, but Amazon has the resources

[@HydratedBeans]

@@TjPhysicist the only one I can think of is “Amazon added a new category”. But in that case they could allow switching to the new category for some time.

[@nniicckk1223]

They could make the criteria for becoming a seller higher. If your name is similar to a banned seller then it should be put to a review. They can also automate comparing a products page to before and after. If it uses completely different description and picture, it's probably not the same product anymore.

[@burlingk]

One technique that won't find all the "deals," but will minimize the scams is if you only pick the items available for Prime delivery. Items delivered directly from Amazon have a fairly simple return process as well.

[@katelyngerk5773]

That’s not really true there are some bad products on prime delivery. Trust me.

[@burlingk]

@@katelyngerk5773 It reduces the chance though, as well as increasing the likelyhood that I won't get scammed on shipping.

[@brianwilliams2949]

This video format is one of my favorites. Makes me feel like I'm hanging out with Linus face-to-face, and it is quite hilarious to crack these products open and see the absolute *crap* they have for internals.

[@948320z]

> feel like I'm hanging out with Linus face-to-face Especially when Adam told the cameraman to keep zooming in on his face lol

[@aidancommenting]

Funny thing is, these "products" sell like crazy. Older people who may not be technologically inclined, such as a few members of my household... who get frustrated when it doesn't work, refuse to believe they didn't buy a "good deal" and then proceed to buy more of these bootlegs and off-brands.

[@Yatukih_001]

Of course they do. The sellers are forcing people to buy them by using pressure, just like Pfizer. This has been going on since Ancient Rome and before that.

[@noahm5217]

I love how Amazon sells scam products in America but not in AUS. So glad to be here

[@hiker64]

"Fakespot" is a great Chrome addon that uses algorithms to evaluate Amazon reviews based upon dates, syntax, and other markers, and it looks at seller statistics and other things to give the seller/product a review like a term paper grade. It also explains why it ranked the seller/product. It's a great addon and works for other platforms other than Amazon as well.

[@henryyoung5189]

My mother-in-law fell prey to one of these drives for Christmas. I was incensed that these products are allowed to be sold on the site, and are pushed so high as to be appealing to people who, frankly, don't know any better. Glad you are covering this.

[@itsuhme-meeee4775]

At least you smelled nice

[@Crazy___Ginger]

Amazon really should be sued for allowing these products on their site.

[@lefteriseleftheriades7381]

What does incensed mean in this context?

[@Iltwytadaan]

@@lefteriseleftheriades7381 Enraged

[@executable3]

The fact that there's so many of these scams is why I don't use Amazon. It feels like a chore sifting through all the junk.

[@s0litaire2k]

For a fun experiment... Take a look through your older Amazon purchases, I bet you'll find more than one product you bought no longer being listed and something random in it's place... I bought a cheap SSD caddy years ago, and when I checked my purchase history now, that listing in my purchase history is now for a "3 in 1 beauty brush kit".

[@I.____.....__...__]

I've done that with eBay and taken screenshots of the recycled listings. I'm still not sure why they do that since it works differently from Amazon, making this scam feckless there, other than many if eBay charges a fee to post a listing. 🤔 (Or maybe they do it out of habit of doing the merge-scam from Amazon. 🤷)

[@TheAweDude1]

Also, a big problem with this sort of thing is that you only ever see the cases that fall through the cracks. If we assume that Amazon is actually trying to stop these scams, the problem is that you... don't see the scams they have stopped. That $400 million might have stemmed the tide quite considerably, and we only see the few that slipped through. Or, it might have stemmed the tide only very slightly. I think everyone should be more transparent. But, then you run into the issue of scammers using those caught cases to modify their scams to get through.

[@snoopidk73]

Nowaaay.. I just bought one 🤦🏾 and eat 20 days ago. How sad but funny that I now seeing this video. Thanks for sharing it with us 🙏🏾

[@imnotsickler]

Oh thank god, when you started the video my thought was "the important scam is the one where people change what the entire product listing is about, making it harder for even somewhat savvy buyers" and you got right into it. It's one of the lesser known scams and people really need to be aware, especially when you're budget shopping. Thanks, LTT.

[@matthewmenteer5673]

Look into your previous purchases on Amazon. I had one turn into a very expensive winch for cars lol. I can't remember exactly what it was initially, I think a cheap knife sharpener that I left a bad review for. I gave it 3 stars then they tried to bribe me for a 5 star review. Another 1 star review mentioned that the gift card didn't work or never arrived. Sellers also do scams where they operate like normal gathering tons of small sales either to the public or between scammers. then get their numbers up and ratings as a seller up. I was scammed by one of those sellers who had a volume of about 500 sales a month and no negative interactions, from a real company with a filing in NY. TV was priced 5usd cheaper, so it popped up when you searched for it, I bought it only to realize it was from the Marketplace. took several weeks for Amazon to step up and honor their AtoZ guarentee. Very unpleasant experience dealing with Amazons customer service, at one point they sided with the seller and closed the case... as the negative reviews came pouring in. the seller had like 10 TV models and several power tool bundles they were scamming with all on the same week, a very quick and dirty go of it judging from the reviews. Some buyers had left reviews after me, but got their money back over a month before me. It was really hard to navigate the issue because Amazon nuked the seller from the system before resolving my claim.

[@earlygrayce3200]

Amazon should just make it so you can only change 20% of the wording in the listings to reduce this happening as much.

[@CH1CK3Nwings]

@@earlygrayce3200 Wouldn't you just be able to edit your page frequently and then you arrive at the same goal?

[@Etacovda63]

They could limit the edits, or indicate the edit amounts

[@Fine_i_set_the_handle]

@@earlygrayce3200 yall forget that humans exist lol. they could run a massive anti fraud department that manually audits accounts that make large changes to listings

[@zmc9403]

Every product page should have a history button so we can see what the fields contained in the past. Every edit/publication revision to the page should require a explanation in order to be published. Going beyond trying to fix scams, there could even be templates for certain edit types that affect other fields as well. Minor revision could display a flashy Up Graded! icon for better marketing. Error updates could have a red E icon with a on-hover explanation. Major updates to products should have a review filter to only show the latest version. Edit: Better explanations and clearer language.

[@jordanwardle11]

That doesn't fix the problem, only helps for later. Honestly, limiting keeping reviews when the category changes to a human review would be a way to fix the problem

[@sokolov22]

It doesn't help when certain people (with the help of insiders) are able to change any listing they want to something completely different, while kicking off legitimate sellers from the listing. Much stronger gates to revising listings is needed.

[@dragnar12]

1 make it so only sellers that are x years trusted on the platform can edit the page. new sellers can have the option as well but the tradeoff is 1 month or someting of pay delay ) 2. Editing a page can only be done in the same category ( ssd to ssd ) hdd to hdd ) socks to socks and so on. Trusted partners ( say x years + can change however they want ) 3. give a warning for say x months whit THIS PAGE HAS BEEN CHANGED REVIEUWS MIGHT NOT BE TRUSTED ) and then a link to ( SEE OLD VERSION,S )

[@Prash1c]

Always appreciate your content! I'm pretty tech savvy, but I'm tempted by sketchy knock-off tech. What I notice that the numbers of capacity tend to be fudged as Linus indicated. But, when you figure out the pricing patterns, then you can still get an ok dea; (MAYBE). The reason why: My theory: Chinese dumping of old gen tech into the West (yay, supply surplus!), but also for things that fail Q/A. For me, this applies to SDDs, SD cards, and USB keys. They sell storage chips with bad sectors for cheap, but then you have to do the math to see if this is effective risk.

[@jwickerszh]

Having only ever bought things online in China for the past 20 years, I've never got an actual scam product, yet. Although there used to be "fake" USB drives too online. The last thing that had potential to be one was a $100 apparently generic Router / mini-PC, "made" in some small Shenzhen company, that just died during a reboot after 2 days... and yes apparently the model shipped was also a bit different than what was ordered (or pictured online). Surprisingly though, I got an instant response from their customer service online, even got a video call with them were we opened the box and troubleshoot ... that's when they told me "weird that's not the model you ordered, looks like the old one". Anyway, apart from breaking the battery connector clip, and getting it to at least beep on power-on we couldn't get it to boot. Finally she said to just return it and order up a new one, while she'd make sure the correct one was shipped. Even asked what OS I wanted on it pre-installed. So that only took a couple of hours, got a new unit in 2 days, and a refund a couple days later. The router has been working fine since then.

[@GlorifiedGremlin]

I'm glad you're addressing this, because even as a fairly knowledgeable person about this kinda stuff, Amazon sketches me out for storage. It's exhausting having to weed them out honestly, and I could see myself slipping up lol

[@supertim7722]

I gave up if i wamt legit storage i just go to my local computer stores. I know a couple have deals direct with samsung and kingston so dont mind paying a little extra now

[@Thurgosh_OG]

I try not to use Amazon if possible, their search function is crud.

[@GlorifiedGremlin]

@@supertim7722 I just stick to legit brands, but I've even seen audacious knock-offs of big brands like Samsung on Amazon. Its getting out of control, I can't IMAGINE how much older people get screwed over on Amazon

[@supertim7722]

@@GlorifiedGremlin yeh samsung fakes are quite popular by legit brands i guess i mean genuine retailers with proven supply lines. I use a few and they have direct deals with samsung and kingston and a few others because in the past they got a bad batch from there suppliers. 90% of the time though its just some god awful chinese seller. We make the joke about chinese products that numbers dont teanslate very well. 32GB becomes 3000GB. Power banks with 10000mAH become 1000000mAH. China isnt a super power to us there replacing america as the biggest joke. There 1,000,000 person army would probably be 10 guys 😂 china no1 my ass

[@HailAzathoth]

Pretty easy bro, just don't muy anything that isn't micron, Samsung, SanDisk, etc

[@johngogo17]

LTT Labs should have an Amazon account that can leave reviews and a link to the analysis! Either good or bad results would surely lead to a lot of people upvoting it and bringing it to the top review. Seems like a solid way to help protect guide people in the Amazon market, even when they aren't LTT viewers!

[@whywhatwherein]

Great video. Better than a lot of a journalist work being done nowadays. This kind of stuff is interesting to learn

[@jamming8519]

Linus does a outstanding job compressing his videos. My laptop screen views everything in 1080p. But with Linus videos I can watch them at 1440p level!

[@SwordandKeyboard29]

One thing they can do is deny merging from one product category to another, or force a manual review if a certain percentage of the product page is changed. It may be impossible to stop product pages from being edited but they can make it take longer and legit sellers can understand that product page changes need to be small to be quick

[@NotTheStinkyCheese]

A percentage would not work, because scammers would change one word at a time, while legit users would get hit after changing a single line (or vice versa). Real users tend to not be so forgiving of any limitations, especially if they previously did not exist. Also : The real problem for Amazon is one of scale. With millions of products and sellers they couldn't even if they actually wanted to. (and we all know that the one reason Amazon has that much money is because they cut corners whenever possible ... so good luck convincing Jeffy B to give a damn) Human intervention (even if it would only be 0,001% of their order capacity) would still need thousands of employees who do nothing except verify reviews and product descriptions all day long (and no one will want to do that kind of job ...) and it would be too little to be effective.

[@SwordandKeyboard29]

@@NotTheStinkyCheese I think the category limitation at the very least would make review merging harder. Changing one word at a time is still making it harder on them, and then the system could flag pages that do that. The longer Amazon lets scammers go on the more they risk losing market share to other retailers. People don't put up with scams forever, especially if they are hard to avoid

[@electrosyzygy]

@@NotTheStinkyCheese what they could do is incentivize their customers to do that; as ppl shop if they spot a scam they could flag it and get some cash back or credit if it's confirmed up. Streamline this process and maybe scammers may find it too labour intensive and financially onerous to keep playing whack-a-mole. They could also train an in-house AI, but they clearly don't care.

[@sullychow4123]

Considering how large Amazon is, how prevalent these kinds of things are, I'm surprised this hasn't been discussed already by bigger KZbinrs.

[@thee-sportspantheon330]

Bigger than linus? Who?

[@Mereo110]

Bigger than Linus? That's not MrBeast's field.

[@clansome]

@@thee-sportspantheon330 According to Socialblade there are 2,387 Channels larger, 593 Channels with mor subscribers, 774 Channels with higher View Counts, 6 channels in Canada in a higher position and finally 10 Tech channels in a higher position.

[@nynach]

@@thee-sportspantheon330 i think they just meant bigger youtubers in general, not bigger than Linus.

[@thee-sportspantheon330]

@@nynach Yeah I think I get it but Linus is like THE guy, In my opinion of course.

[@AxisZtv]

I actually bought that 16TB. I really only needed a 2TB and it was too tempted to not figure out what the scam was. When you open it in disk management there's a partition for most of the storage that is completely fake. Honestly I wouldn't have minded it but it broke when I tried to format it. Also didn't know about the connector... the speed makes sense now.

[@SvenskaIdioterna]

It gets even more fun once you realize that there are a lot of products that have similar names but are really just offbrand identical products from the same factory that makes them for some other company on request where they offload legit products at low prices. I tend to avoid all brands that don’t have a huge brand recognition or are very obviously ok through real reviews and all sellers that aren’t official stores or have true certified (with personal ID verification where you have to verify it in a way where they know exactly who you are, where you live etc) reviews that popped up at a reasonable time span. Then of course testing the product thoroughly and verifying everything is fine is a basic thing to do even for products sent from a trusted vendor, because if you got a bad unit, you want to tell them asap. But I know for sure that most people wouldn’t do any of this for various reasons.

[@lzxty6024]

My dad works at the US Attorney's Office as an IT guy. Recently I helped him move some stuff from one office to another. We were in the server room and I saw 6 4TB SSDs. I asked him how much they were. Since this is the government, they had to buy directly from the seller at the low price of $9,000 USD each.

[@PsyKosh]

One option might be something like being able to view all earlier versions of a product page, and a way to report if you spot that it's a completely different product.

[@andymoran8007]

My thoughts as well. Give the user the ability to monitor the page considering amazon's QA department doesn't stand a chance in the face of hundreds of thousands of burner accounts. Basically like turning one QA department and multiplying it by millions of users every day who can report as they go.

[@mrmidnight32]

There is a video of a woman who started a company that got ripped off by fakes which Amazon promotes more than her original product. And still allows them to harvest fake reviews and purchases to trend. Good video, if you can find it on KZbin. It’s been like 2 years so I can’t remember but worth watching

[@Blackjax137]

Should be noted that Amazon profits directly from sales of scam products on their platform. As such, they should be held legally accountable for the sale and promotion of scam products. That'd get their butts into gear real quick.

[@kenc2257]

I always/frequently check Amazon reviews, even for products I'll buy elsewhere (like at Costco, or another online retailer). I've seen OBVIOUS cases of this "review merger" thing--always wondered if it was a technical mix-up, or something deliberately more nefarious...

[@bonkiru9818]

You didn't get ripped off, because the information & awareness you provided to the audience is priceless.

[@anotheratreyu742]

Wholesome 🥰

[@leonro]

He still got ripped off unless he managed to get a full refund from amazon, in which case either the scammer lost money (by virtue of giving out a free product) or amazon lost the money to the scammer, both options being adequate IMO.

[@bonkiru9818]

@@leonro Well considering he can, and are willing get ripped of to make this video about it to spread more awareness about shady business practices that are going to be quite useful for those who stumble upon this video, possibly recouping the losses by the sponsor message or adsense. I'd say, go Linus. Good for him.

[@swiftrealm]

@@leonro The money he will make from this video far outweighs any potential loss from buying the fake drives.

[@leonro]

@@bonkiru9818 I know that he himself won't be any poorer after this endeavour. The sponsors definitely must have paid more than the cost of the drives alone. But it is still technically a rip off if you are on the losing end of a financial transaction, which is also why I hope they managed to get a refund for the products.

[@Zer0Blizzard]

17:29 Something that Amazon could easily do to combat this would be to compare weights+volumes of the two different products when the seller changes the product that gets shipped. If it goes through an Amazon warehouse, they already know both vol+weight for the product. Combine this with checking for price changes, and a simple program of having Amazon product testers, where random people opt in to having products products to review (think under $200 and certain people get certain products by their interest), and you've got a self sustaining anti spam system.

[@davidgoodnow269]

Ooh, I like! I worked shipping and receiving in my dad's business for years, then spent time as a supply sargeant in the Army. Amazon flags my reviews for such, I've noticed.

[@yourwallet4219]

Probably very impractical, but it would also be very nice if Amazon did a thing where they open one of every item and showcase it, so you know what the actual product looks like. Sick and tired of seeing the coolest looking shit in the image reel / thumbnail for a product, and then I scroll down to reviews and look at the media to see some disappointing stuff, such a tease.

[@shauriasimmons6428]

They also pay an army of fake reviewers by giving them free products in return for good reviews, all those Voice of the Vine testers are being paid to shill the scammy products.

[@jagmarc]

Amazon / Ebay etc would never get involved in product Quality Assurance

[@Astraeus..]

Volume and weight are irrelevant metrics for most tech. Volume is irrelevant because for many products (such as HDD or SSD's) the actual volume across many of them is roughly identical. As for weight, the only way to use that in the way you suggest is if the products are weighed with less than a 5 gram margin for error, which is never going to happen.

[@danilmartyniuk]

You shared very useful knowledge. Thank you so much!

[@vunpac5]

One solution Amazon could do, is they already email you to rate / review / answer questions on something you purchased. So if they seller changes / updates their product ask those same people to just give it a quick verify that it's the same product. If a product is getting a lot of reports it's not the same product. There is probably an issue.

[@OctagonalSquare]

The review merging one is wild. I was having issues with spiders in my house not too long ago and in searching for a solution, I came across “sonic repellant” to deal with it. I did some research and found it’s a scam and was curious why so many reviews seemed to be positive on Amazon. Well, turns out they did that by merging reviews from plug-in air fresheners. Which is smart as a lot of the descriptions of function overlapped due to both being small white things you plug directly into an outlet. So yeah, if something seems to good to be true, really read the reviews carefully!

[@adriangodoy4610]

I had one of that ultrasonic moskito repelents. I dunno if moskitoes where repelled, but young people was for sure what an infernal noise.

[@yourwallet4219]

I didn't know those ultrasonic repellant things were scams LOL... I bought them from a retail store a decade ago due to seeing mice in an apartment building, have since moved. Don't really know if it worked or not, but after a quick google it seems like laboratory tests found no efficacy in such devices. I feel wronged.

[@yourwallet4219]

@@adriangodoy4610 Sounds like it worked on larger pests (ba dum tss)

[@poochyenarulez]

yep. I saw LOADS of them

[@FerralVideo]

I haaaaate review merging. Even "legit" products can end up doing this nonsense.

[@frankie123456ization]

This is why I always look for reviews with pictures or use a search reference to check they are actually about the product I want.

[@jcthe2nd]

All they have to do is restrict the editing so they cant change the name of a item without deleting the reviews easy to implement

[@xiki1506]

Lo que más debes mirar es el vendedor

[@bradhaines3142]

the way reviews are makes it really hard to tell, they like to mix them up with other items that arent the same. laptops especially

[@krisztiannkiss]

I used to review products to get them for free. I left a picture, don't be fooled.

[@elandco1047]

i am a technology noob, this channel has taught me all i know… wanted to say thank you ❤

[@dariuskolba]

I used to look after an ebay shop for a company in uk, we would sell fake sandisk sd cards, that were 128mb and would write data over. If any buyer would complain, we would apologize that the card was probably defective and just replace it with the proper one. There were so few complains that it paid off big time

[@SeohnAranys]

Several months ago called a complaint about all those 16TB drives with Amazon. Even pointed out that no legit company sells SSDs that large for anywhere near those prices. Told them how easy it was to spot the scam. Yeah pretty sure they don't care about being complicit with scams.

[@DomBobomb]

I think Amazon listing should allow you to see the page revisions over time to avoid the rename scam. And it shouldn’t allow the change of category or something drastic like that. Seems the most solvable option 😊

[@GamePlague]

Changing the category should trigger a manual review which results in removing all reviews if the product is different.

[@brodriguez11000]

@@GamePlague When I do a review I include identifying product numbers exactly because Amazon pools reviews so someone could be complaining about something that's not even on the page.

[@cliffwow2365]

​@@GamePlague Its really not that simple. Amazon's backend is a spaghetti code mess, products get "auto-assigned" and moved to incorrect categories often. If you lost all your reviews from a category change that'd be catastrophic for legitimate sellers.

[@pvishal2725]

In india some people got a soap wrapped up in cloth instead of a laptop From amazon so they introduced a policy that enables the delivery driver can unbox it and show you the product if it is a scam you can return it on spot.

[@supreme84x]

The editing issue is an easy fix with multiple options. You could restrict major changes after 30 days, where they can add photos and additional options. If it's edits beyond x amount, then it could be held for review, so a human could check the before and after and make sure it is the same type of product. You can restrict category changes (cloths to electronics) after 30 days. Amazon could also update their review system so you can categorized reviews on a page by item/option. Sometimes I want to see only the reviews for the Pixel 6 case and not see any pixel 6 pro reviews. That sorta thing. Maybe have reviews after major edits occur be deleted or held for review. If deleted you could have an option for sellers to have them reinstated after a review. This isn't that difficult.

[@paaph8747]

Anybody: You just need to pay humans to moderate product changes. Amazon: Literally impossible.

[@joshstephens413]

Ehhh, more like Amazon: Fuck you, LOL.

[@wuy4]

China has 3x the population of the US making a tenth of the money. It's extremely lucrative for them to just scam Americans for a windfall. Hiring manual inspectors is a losing proposition because they outnumber you and they are willing to work for way lower wages. Even if you did this as a company, you shouldn't have to because your not in the business of fighting crime. The Government is. Corps pay taxes so the government can fund crime fighting. However, you'll never see the Chinese government doing anything about this because they see this as acceptable social behavior (scam posting and scamming in general). There is a huge disconnect when a high-trust society (US) meets a low-trust society (China). American's can't imagine how low-trust society is in China. EVERYTHING is filled with scams and there is rot from all their top leaders to grass roots citizens.

[@KonamiKonami]

And they even own the Mechanical Turk platform where they can pay pennies for this kind of work.

[@stephenmawdsley2378]

your "its cheaper to compensate the customer" comment is spot on. i work in logistics and have dealings with amazon, as far as there deliveirs to customers go, the dont mind couriers leaving parcels on door steps etc as the figures show great delivery success rates. Then when it comes to peoples parcels going missing the say its cheaper to just replace the parcel than it is to investigate the delivery / courier and find out what actually happened to the original parcel

[@deltasixgaming]

I'm glad I found this Video again my Coworker just fell for this Scam like 10 Times because he was trying to get a Cheap PS4 External Hard Drive and kept buying them but his PS4 wouldn't detect them so he thought it was his PS4 until he talked to me and I ended up giving him my Real 4TB External Drive from Seagate

[@rchow4100]

i use to work for a small company who tried to sell their products on amazon as well and it was really hard to cease and desist those other accounts. they would buy maybe 1-5 units of our product, then resell it for $1 off or something and as they are a local seller, they most likely can offer better shipping options than we could. amazon doesnt care about this so it was just the same other random accounts everyday who would buy and resell our products. we even had random accounts who would just copy and paste our product pictures and information just to have a 'product' listing and have it at some $xxx overpriced just to mess with the search algorithm

[@Sydney_2011]

They could also be doing the “brushing” scam where they create fake Amazon accounts to buy from their store, and then review it themselves. But because it’s Amazon they need to actually send out a product for the review to be accepted by the system, so what they do is send really cheap stuff like seeds, plastic clips, or whatever they have on hand, to customers that haven’t actually ordered anything. That creates a verified package sent, that they can use to build their store with fake reviews before they start their scam store with these products.

[@duelgundam]

Yup. Not Amazon, but a number of people here in Singapore have become unwitting recipients of these fake scam shipments. It has even been covered by the local newspapers.

[@ohioplayer-bl9em]

I have not left a review in a long while but I think you have to have bought the product to have the option to review it.

[@inakiorozco881]

@@ohioplayer-bl9em thats what he is saying, they are buying it

[@josephoberlander]

One of the things that frustrates me as well is when 90% of their customers are outside of the country and Amazon simply won't let you see foreign reviews AT ALL.

[@Sydney_2011]

@@ohioplayer-bl9em They are essentially buying it themselves with bot accounts, and then reviewing it themselves. But the Amazon system needs to also have a verified sent package, so they just fake them by sending cheap trash to anyone and generating a sale code. It’s a cheap way of guaranteeing that you control the review process until you’re ready to send out scam products that have a large enough profit margin to make the small outlay back.

[@jonesdude25]

One thing that I've found helps is only looking at the reviews with pictures/videos attached, that way I can both see the actual product itself, and I can usually feel more confident that it isn't a scam.

[@Byronic19134]

Great point, and another thing is I usually won't buy anything that doesn't have somebody doing at least a shxtty unboxing or review on YT because most popular products on Amazon will have one.

[@yourwallet4219]

Yea, for me, unless it's a big name product, I gotta see reviews with attached media. Not because I necessarily think it's a full on scam, but because there does not exist a single company that puts honest images in their image reel. So many times, I have seen something that looks really cool, then I go to look at the attached media in the reviews, and it looks like some dollar store knockoff shit of whatever was in the product's image reel.

[@occamraiser]

I like to find reviews that are 3 or 4 star - they usually give a genuine insight from someone who's actually used it.

[@Plankalkultronic]

Good journalism here, nice to see.

[@liamzly]

3:06 By looking directly at the number of pins to determine the interface! just learned that you can do that. I always thought blue was 3.0

[@azerik92]

On Review Merging: the simple partial solution to that is making it so product listings can't have their overall category changed, or having a review process for listing changes.

[@alexwildner6369]

Or they can allow you to press a button that shows you what the previous listing used to be? Like how you can view previous usernames someone has had on Steam. Basically a log of previous changes.

[@Olivia-W]

​@@alexwildner6369 This is a good idea, actually.

[@gblargg]

"review process for listing changes" Could easily cost more than what these scammers get away with.

[@Olivia-W]

@@gblargg Yeah. But showing edit history sounds more feasible.

[@boxhead6177]

Even if they allowed edits, Amazon with all its tech... should be able to detect fraudulent edits. Like 100% of the title, description, pictures are replaced and the products category even changes. Like where is Amazon's Machine Learning AWS when you need it to actually do its job. A bot flags the edit, a human reviews it, moderators are key to curb stomping this fraud. Amazon should also be vetting any "sponsored" products, as promoting fraudulent products, not only makes them liable but culpable for knowingly taking money from fraudsters.

[@toxeia]

The thing most frustrating to me is that I've contacted Amazon multiple times about review merging, and every time I've done it they dismiss me. It happened when I got my Pixel 7 Pro and found a case being sold that was released 6 months prior to the phone's release date. Despite that, and the reviews talking about other items, they didn't care. The listing was still there last I looked.

[@danielrrbb]

Yeah Amazon doesn't care. I don't buy that they're in a catch-22 in this situation. They could easily automatically take down products that are all fake. There is not a single 16 tb ssd on earth that costs less than $1000, and they still don't block them. There's no chance that even their automated system can't differentiate these from real sellers. Amazon makes money from the promo buys, they're just as complicit in this scam as the scammers themselves...

[@ikjadoon]

Because Amazon collects seller fees. It's just like Apple & Google working really slowly in removing paid app scams. Amazon, Apple, and Google *all* get fees, no matter if an app is scam, as long as not everyone gets a refund.

[@gmualum08]

Exactly this. Amazon doesn't care so not sure what they spent the 400 million on, probably a money laundering scheme

[@amistrophy]

Amazon customer service has driven off a cliff They dont even offer refunds anymore for most items

[@davidrussell8795]

I bought a graphite crucible that looked like it was the size of a coffee cup,but when I got it,it was more like a 2 ounce crucible, not 8 ounce.

[@PeachJellyJam]

Thank you for this much-needed PSA!

[@gernhartreinholzen3992]

8:35 Nice, a new clip for the next "Linus dropping things" compilation! 👌

[@FrozenBusChannel]

Chinese speaking person here. The seller name at 16:26 translates to 佛山市順德區飛創商貿有限公司 (Simplified script:佛山市顺德区飞创商贸有限公司), which is the name of a commerce company in Shunde district, Foshan city, China. As a general rule on Amazon, avoid all products whose brand or seller names has Chinese, cause it's highly likely to be some Chinese entity drop-shipping stuff that is worth a tiny fraction of the price you paid.

[@JK-mo2ov]

1.) can’t change product category 2.) reviews tied to purchased item, can leave as out of stock on the selection if wanting to keep the reviews 3.) only limited modification without new listing (color, spec change, etc) 4.) mandatory categories filled out properly (for storage, type, size, connection, tested read speed, tested write speed, layers of NAND, etc) 5.) verified accounts with 2 factor and verified purchase reviews

[@lavaos]

3:00 this made me check my usb hub that i got from amazon a couple years ago, which every port was color coded blue, and i found that only one of the four ports is actually usb 3 and the rest are usb 2 but blue for some reason

[@johnelias6286]

I'm getting flashbacks to my time at the beginning of the pandemic working for Amazon onboarding new FBA sellers to Amazon so that they can import all this crap into the country. Still remember telling a vendor that they messed something up on their onboarding docs and instead of fixing it (because they legally couldn't for some reason) they ghosted us and a week later a "completely different" company signed up instead.

[@neb6705]

Sounds like that job sucks, did you have much input in being able to deny vendors you recognise would be clear scammers?

[@johnelias6286]

@@neb6705 yeah it was trash lol. We only could really call it out if it was actually illegal and blatant - once we had a seller who was just straight up trying to import bongs and unfortunately we are not allowed to import drug paraphernalia into the country like that 😅

[@neb6705]

@@johnelias6286 at least people would be getting what they paid for with the bongs lmao

[@rjk7104]

For the "review merging" scammers, it should be simple enough to prevent editing ALL the item properties in a short time span. Allow a few edits here and there, limited by a certain amount of time, but prohibit editing many fields in a short amount of time.

[@paulbedford-holt6755]

Or allow users to view what edits the page has been through

[@itsTyrion]

or, hear me out: don't let them completely change the category. I cannot think of a legitimate reason to change category from "clothing" to "computer & hardware"

[@I.____.....__...__]

Limiting how much can change is like limiting how many attempts you get at a password before being locked out for 15 minutes, then an hour, etc. Or… what about just having a large number of changes get flagged for human review, and too many false flags gets you banned.

[@Stonepotwaffles]

Hey man my socks got Wi-Fi

[@Paradox-es3bl]

@@itsTyrion Well, actually... if those categories are in a drop down menu, clothing and computers and hardware would probably be next to each other in the list. Can't really think of a legit reason to go from Computers to Pet Care or something, though. (or the reverse)

[@TechnocratiK]

I imagine that there's a lot that Amazon *could* do, such as incentivizing purchasers to review products (and in a timely manner), breaking rating data into 'recent' and 'all time' categories (see: Steam), publicize the return rate on the products they sell, flag products that fall well outside the normal price range for their class, allow users to see the version history of product pages, allow users to see the price history of product pages, ...

[@TDAdvocate]

You can absolutely restrict product revisions. Prevent category switching is the easiest fix ever. Most of these product merges are using easier categories (as said in the video) and if you prevent category swapping you prevent the vast majority of these scams. That alone would reduce the number of scams by leaps and bounds.

[@justinleesmith]

This reminds me of Louis Rossmans recent issues with Yelp, where moving his business across state borders meant yelp would require a new business page and all reviews were lost. Pretty good example of how antifraud behaviours can impact real and legitimate businesses.

[@flameshana9]

And yet changing your category from handbag to ssd is easy and comes with no penalties.

[@llamas_3D]

My dad literally bought me this exact SSD for Christmas it was 8TB and corrupted the first time I stored files on it. Thank god I had the sense not to trust it with my University work 🤣

[@OperationDx1]

This has been going on for years. I remember once I bought a complete TV series box set that was boot leged. The quality was so bad it would not even play in my dvd player.