Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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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.
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.
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Yeah this stuff is why i never buy tech from Amazon, you never know if you're gonna get a counterfeit item
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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.
@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.
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.”
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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16 GB DDR2 + 16 GB DDR3 makes 32GB DDR5, right?
32 GBGB DDDDRR5 actually. Much better!
This isn’t exclusive to Amazon. I had it happen with friends build back in the Newegg days.
Newegg is still a thing, you just need to check the “Sold by Newegg” filter.
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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.
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Its amazon, just return it. That's really the only good thing about amazon anymore, easy returns.
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.
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amazon has been getting less generous with the returns for years now.
Especially if you have more than a few returns per year.
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So they don't have the resources to check returned goods or what? Or they simply don't care enough?
Yup this isn't a fraud problem. Just an Amazon problem
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?
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.
That’s the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
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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.
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?
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Don't buy expensive shit off Amazon. They don't do anything to prevent fraud.
We caught a driver on camera take a picture of a $2000 PC on a doorstep, then move it back into his truck. Took a month to resolve with Amazon. If you have to deal with these clowns, use the local pickup option from a locker.
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.
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.
This is a problem with all auto parts, even from NAPA supplying to garages. Mechanics are going broke replacing defective "new" parts.
Makes sense. I work at a different type of repair shop, we just had a brand new $400 battery go up in smoke on first power up. Ridiculous.
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Don't order from Amazon. Easy fix.
Hold sellers accountable. Actual fix.
I personally believe the platform provider needs to be accountable because they take a cut for the convenience and safety of the transaction.
I think, if the seller used Amazon shipping, it's not actually the seller's fault. Doesn't Amazon pool all items from the same SKU together from all sellers and ship whatever they can get to the buyer the fastest/cheapest?
Yes. If you sell on amazon, and have amazon fulfill the shipping.. you ship your stuff to amazon, and its just put in teh big pool with all the other items of the same kind.
Even returns get put back into the pool.
its the absolute most pants on head stupid fucking way possible to manage inventory to the point that shit like this seems almost intentionally designed for rather than a consequence of.
Which is why anytime you order anything from amazon, you should record the entire box to show its untampered with, then film the entireity of the opening and confirming everything inside is actually inside.
THere was a famous case of a guy who bought a 10 thousand dollar camera and got a box of rocks, and amazon sent him a replacement and got a box of bricks, before finally getting the camera on the 3rd try.. I think recording his second opening saved him from having amazon call him a scammer.
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No sympathy for anyone who still supports and buys from Amazon.
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.
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I bought ram from Amazon some time ago and somebody had done a sticker swap and returned. The ram sticks in the package matched the box according to all the stickers but the kit registered in software was a lower end set with different part/serial numbers than the stickers/box. The funny part was when I bought it the price difference was only like $5 but about a year or so earlier it was closer to an $80 difference.
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