The 'Brushing' Scam That's Behind Mystery Parcels (bbc.com) 142
If you've ever received a parcel from a shopping platform that you didn't order, and nobody you know seems to have bought it for you, you might have been caught up in a "brushing" scam. From a report: It has hit the headlines after thousands of Americans received unsolicited packets of seeds in the mail, but it is not new. It's an illicit way for sellers to get reviews for their products. And it doesn't mean your account has been hacked. Here's an example of how it works: let's say I set myself up as a seller on Amazon, for my product, Kleinman Candles, which cost $3 each. I then set up a load of fake accounts, and I find random names and addresses either from publicly available information or from a leaked database that's doing the rounds from a previous data breach. I order Kleinman Candles from my fake accounts and have them delivered to the addresses I have found, with no information about where they have been sent from. I then leave positive reviews for Kleinman Candles from each fake account -- which has genuinely made a purchase.
This way my candle shop page gets filled with glowing reviews (sorry), my sales figures give me an algorithmic popularity boost as a credible merchant -- and nobody knows that the only person buying and reviewing my candles is myself. It tends to happen with low-cost products, including cheap electronics. It's more a case of fake marketing than cyber-crime, but "brushing" and fake reviews are against Amazon's policies. Campaign group Which? advises that you inform the platform they are sent by of any unsolicited goods.
This way my candle shop page gets filled with glowing reviews (sorry), my sales figures give me an algorithmic popularity boost as a credible merchant -- and nobody knows that the only person buying and reviewing my candles is myself. It tends to happen with low-cost products, including cheap electronics. It's more a case of fake marketing than cyber-crime, but "brushing" and fake reviews are against Amazon's policies. Campaign group Which? advises that you inform the platform they are sent by of any unsolicited goods.
Help Amazon? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just accept the "gift" and move on.
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Yeah, nahh. Throw it away, why take a chance, they are already scamming people, how safe could the product be, the bin is the only place for it and Amazon is a shite review platform and every should know that by now, they want to protect high review scores because it promotes more sales, they have the morals of, well none at all, they will break any law they can, as long as the profits are higher than the penalties, they are a very economically destructive corporation and parasite upon the economy returning
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If you are in the UK, you should report it to the Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
https://planthealthportal.defr... [defra.gov.uk]
They will give you instructions on how to dispose of them. You should not put them out in regular rubbish.
Re:Help Amazon? (Score:4, Informative)
The USDA is asking people to throw away the seeds:
Here in the UK they ask you to destroy the seeds. You have no idea what the seeds are. You have no idea if you were sent knotweed seeds, and you cause major, and I mean major damage if you just throw them away.
Re:Help Amazon? (Score:5, Informative)
The USDA is asking people to throw away the seeds:
Here in the UK they ask you to destroy the seeds. You have no idea what the seeds are. You have no idea if you were sent knotweed seeds, and you cause major, and I mean major damage if you just throw them away.
The USDA is actually asking us to send them the seeds. It's even right in the article that he posted. On their site they direct you to instructions.
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Why in the world would anyone want to do this "brushing" scam for seeds that no one wants (i.e. "dangerous") ? Or are the seeds in these packets not the same as the ones in the listing relevant to the scam? In that case, why even bother sending seeds at all?
Pretty sure it's a waste of time to even worry about these seeds. It's not likely they're sending seeds for the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Besides, where I live most of the garbage goes to an incinerator. They aren't surviving that.
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The seller benefits from good reviews, even for products other than the one reviewed. Seeds are chosen as they are the cheapest item, and the person doing the scam has to pay for them (it is true they may get some of that back, but some goes to Amazon and some to the manufacturer, so picking a cheap item is desirable).
That's the whole point (Score:2)
Why in the world would anyone want to do this "brushing" scam for seeds that no one wants (i.e. "dangerous") ? {...} In that case, why even bother sending seeds at all? {...} It's not likely they're sending seeds for the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Besides
That's the whole point of brushing!
Say a seller has a horrendously bad quality batch in stock. So bad that the seeds are contaminated with absolute craptastic weeds.
e.g.: you want to order tomato seeds, but you only get a single lame sprout of tomate, and a giant sprawl of invasive weeds.
But the seller has already bought them from the farmer;: he already has lost the money and now the seeds are staying in containers in seller's storage.
Strategy 1:
Try to sell the horrible batch anyway (maybe by lowering the
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They could easily solve the fake review problem with a "reviewer reputation" (probably an internal metric, rather than one to show users). For example, a new account with no purchases has a reputation of zero. Someone with years of purchases gets a higher reputation. Reviews marked "useful" get higher reputation, answering questions maybe gets you some too (especially if your answer is marked "useful", and not "sorry, not tried using it yet"). Spammy activity that gets reported penalises you harder than goo
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This is the algorithm we need for all social media: a trust metric that each user can fine tune. Building their own "web of trust" based on their own criteria.
Of course, given the death of P2P systems like Usenet in favor of the walled gardens, we aren't likely to see any such thing emerge. The first thing most of us would filter from places like Twitter would be ads. And Amazon? Why would they care? They've largely figured out how to put all the real pain on their employees/contractors/drivers, the small
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That's exactly what they were doing. The fact that the person actually bought the item was considered a good point toward "reviewer reputation". I suspect *any* scheme you can dream up can be hacked, just like this was.
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The fact that the person actually bought the item was considered a good point toward "reviewer reputation".
I guess the question then would be is.. How were scammers able to come up with a unique payment method for each faked account?
Clearly they are not applying for fake credit cards in the fake accounts' name, otherwise this would not be a mere "review" scam, and I think Amazon would probably notice 100+ people suddenly using gift certificates disproportionately on a certain item; furthermore,
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I normally filter out all the 5 and 1 star reviews. And only read the 2-4 star reviews.
5 Star are either from the company (with the same old marketing garble)
1 Star are just from haters.
Even with the honest reviews, I have found their ranking is based on what their expectation would be. The cheap trinket is made for plastic, where you were expecting metal (which may cost twice as much) or that service where you expected a luxury treatment, where you had a bunch or crude guys cursing up a storm while comp
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Amazon is full of fake everything. Fake reviews. Counterfeit brand products. Fraudulent quackery - I keep getting suggestions on there for 'EMF shield' tokens, pendants and sprays to protect against the cancer rays from my phone.
Re:Help Amazon? (Score:5, Insightful)
As with all things, if no one tells them there is a problem, how do you expect them to fix it? Without someone reporting this, I have no idea how Amazon would even know it was going on.
Re:Help Amazon? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Help Amazon? (Score:5, Insightful)
... and how is that my problem, if I'm the recipient of a package? I'd consider doing it if they paid me to, but I'm not generally in the habit of helping out giant multi-billion dollar international corporations for free.
You are not helping a giant corporation. You are helping people who might be misled by huge amounts of fake positive reviews for shitty products.
Re:Help Amazon? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Help Amazon? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the sarcasm? That actually sounds like an excellent idea.
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Privacy? Amazon already knows the address they're shipping to. They just need confirmation that the address of the guy ordering it is the same address. As far as hassle--it's Amazon problem, and it's up to them to deal with hassle of solving it.
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Privacy? Amazon already knows the address they're shipping to. They just need confirmation that the address of the guy ordering it is the same address.
yes, how would that be done exactly? Also, how would it work for gifts when the shipping address isn't the purchaser by design?
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But most of all, by helping amazon to fix things, we would take away one of his reasons to complain about the things that don't work at amazon.
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Hear me out. You do nothing. Amazon reviews become useless, people start to shop elsewhere. Amazon then fixes the system so they don't bleed to death. Or the new place we all shop has already fixed it and we watch the fall of a giant.
Win/Win
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The only way to fix reviews is to decouple them from the platform itself. And make it a single document rather than a stream of little teeny reviews. And something with a complete revision history. IOW: Consumer Reports as a wiki.
Half of the critical reviews I see on Amazon are garbage about shipping, not the product.
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As with all things, if no one tells them there is a problem, how do you expect them to fix it?
Why do I want them to fix it? What's the downside for me?
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"What's the downside for me?"
You buy a crappy product (for which you pay a premium) based on fake reviews.
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"What's the downside for me?"
You buy a crappy product (for which you pay a premium) based on fake reviews.
I don't buy from Amazon and I don't use reviews from anonymous people to guide my buying anywhere. If stuff shows up here it's a gift. Probably an unwanted gift, but still.
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I am not the one getting Scammed. I am just getting free crap. I remember back in the old days, we would get free samples in the mail. Soap, Foods, or some sort of trinket. Why would I think that little packet of seeds or a candle would be anything but a free sample.
I get a product, my accounts are not under any threats.
If it were an expensive item say over $20 I may return it, because I figured it was for someone else, and they got their order wrong, and I wouldn't want them to go threw the hassle of try
Re: Help Amazon? (Score:2)
If it's from an Amazon labeled box (fulfilled by Amazon) you don't need to return it. Amazon will reimburse both the buyer and seller in the case of incorrect delivery.
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Doesn't even make sense (Score:2)
But this doesn't even make sense. I set up thousands of fake accounts to order this item... then I am actually stupid enough to spend the money to physically ship them to these addresses and fake accounts? Shipping for them is cheap, but not free. They are coming from China, not from Amazon, so this is obviously not a "fulfulled by Amazon" scheme. So why ship anything? All it can do is tip off the scheme.
Brushing doesn't make sense. There is something else at work here.
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So, if I get some random package from somebody working for/with Amazon, I'm supposed to go out of my way to help Amazon police their own platform, because they're unwilling to spend the money to do it themselves?
Exactly. That's spot-on what you're supposed to do. For them.
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Re:Help Amazon? (Score:5, Interesting)
That would only work if it was fulfilled by Amazon in the first place. I worked at an Amazon warehouse, packages put on the belt are weighed and compared to the weight of the product, and it gets kicked out if it doesn't match. Seeds weigh almost literally nothing and would get kicked out instantly. The solution at this point would be to completely disallow reviews unless it is fulfilled by amazon which would likely start antitrust lawsuits and cause even bigger problems.
A better solution would be to show a warning on a review if its regional IP does not match the general region of the shipping address, so someone posting from Wuhan with a shipping address in Clarksville would get flagged.
While I'm on this subject, Amazon could solve the "Win a $10 gift card by leaving a 5-Star review" problem by adding "Bribary attempt by seller" as a refund reason.
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yeah they only do this for amazon fulfilled stuff.
if they want to fake review for self fulfilled orders, they just don't send the package.
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I worked at an Amazon warehouse, packages put on the belt are weighed and compared to the weight of the product, and it gets kicked out if it doesn't match
Really?? Last time I ordered a Synology NAS, I was sent a case of 4. That's literally 4x the weight, FBA, and it made it all the way here. I don't think that system is anywhere near 100%.
Happened to me (Score:5, Interesting)
For the life of me I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to be used or work or why it was sent to me.
I'm glad to have a little closure on that now, thanks.
Re: Happened to me (Score:2)
I've gotten a bunch of stuff. I report each one when i can track down which site it was from (usually a seller on Amazon). I got some silicon feet for furniture, a shower head, a relaxation noise machine, box of screws, etc.
Re: Happened to me (Score:4, Informative)
When they send it to me, I take it back to the post office and refuse it. They get charged for the return postage. Most foreign countries, that costs way more than delivery, because delivery is subsidized.
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UPS dropped two of those packages off, they just throw them in my drive way. They're office is such a pain in the ass to deal with that I threw them in the trash instead.
For USPS I unfortunately opened one of the packages because it was addressed to me and I was expecting a package at roughly the same time. I briefly through my order was wrong, but after digging up the tracking numbers for my order I realized I had no record of the tracking number on this shipment.
If I through the shipping label addresses w
Re: Happened to me (Score:4, Funny)
If I through the shipping label addresses were legitimate I would fill the box with all the bubblewrap I get and pay to ship it over. Let them figure it out what they got an empty box after pulling through a bunch of bubble wrap looking for the contents. Probably not a productive use of my time ...
A brick would cost them more.
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If you simply tape it shut and deny having opened it, you can still take it back to the post office and "refuse delivery." The sender pays any fee. There is no fee from the US side, but their national mail service will charge them the same rate that you you have to pay to send something there. And that is usually over 10x what they pay to send it to you in the first place.
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Sweet! This should work for me. Some of the junk I got came through ChinaPost and thus USPS.
On the UPS/FedEx/DHL side I've started the policy of not opening the package and I search my email history for the tracking number. Hopefully I don't miss any ancient crowd funding things, I had an indiegogo that shipped 2 years after it was funded. Great product and I still use it, but it was a loooong wait.
It goes further than this (Score:2)
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and Amex rejected the claim since it was delivered to the proper address.
I'm sorry to hear your mother was bit due to Amex still operating under terms and conditions from the dark ages.
If she has any means to change credit card providers, her or you should check over Visa/Mastercard terms from banks that are options.
All three banks I've had Visa cards through in the last decade state "any unknown or unrecognized charges" as valid reasons for a dispute.
Even the mighty Amazon is on board with this enough to continue accepting visa/mastercard.
You file the dispute with the bank, the
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I find it odd that AmEx would refuse. I've never had an AmEx card, but the Visas and MasteCards usually accept my disputes without hesitation. Granted, I do not abuse the privilege, but I just disputed something last week. They did ask why, but they accepted my reason and I probably could have told them anything.
I had tried to buy something from a minor retailer - one I had never heard of before, but seemed legit. And small businesses wonder why consumers go back to the big boys like Walmart, Target or
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When my credit union sees anything even remotely fishy I get an automated call within about 5-10 minutes. It's really quite astounding. The charges don't ever make it onto my card.
9am my time: Did you just order $35 worth of McDonalds outside of Moscow? Um, no, I did not.
9pm my time: 5 minutes ago, did you just buy gift cards from a business in another country that you've never done business with and send them to someone? Actually, yes, yes I did!
I've never had to dispute anything with my credit union. I'm
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My friend manages a hotel and doesn't even try to defend a dispute against amex (there's a lot of fraudulent hotel stays).
How does this happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like such a dumb, obvious weakness in rating algorithms. Why don't buyer accounts only count for increasing seller reputation once they have spent some amount of money from "probably good" sellers?
Suppose you have a seller credibility score. It can be initialized based on staffer review (with a per-staff contribution limit if you are worried that your staff will be bribed), or based on total sales, or some other algorithm. Buyers similarly have a credibility score, based on total purchases or diversity of purchases or whatever else. The credibility of a buyer or seller goes up based on transaction value times the counterpart's credibility, with some maximum determined globally and by the buyer's and seller's credibilities, and very much limited for each counterpart.
E-commerce sites with literally billions of transactions seem like good candidates to provide enough data to tune the credibility tuning algorithms. This is a lot like web searching algorithms, except that buyers and sellers are effectively bipartite cliques, and so the problem is easier than the general page-rank problem.
Re: How does this happen? (Score:2)
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Why would Amazon want to cut down on people using their platform to sell stuff, if they get a cut of every sale?
They have a very vested interest in there being as much commerce on their platform as possible. As long as the fraud isn't driving away more people than it's increasing sales, it makes financial sense to look the other way.
And I can't imagine that people are boycotting Amazon because someone in China sent them $0.50 worth of seeds or plastic crap for free.
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Amazon has a strong interest in making ratings work well because a reliable rating system encourages people to buy more kinds of stuff from Amazon, not just the things they already know.
The risk to Amazon is not that random people are sending stuff to Amazon customers for free, although that could be (and has been, in a few cases that made the news) disturbing to the targets. The risk is that customers ignore the reviews, this makes it harder to find a good product, Amazon ends up handling more returns, an
Re: How does this happen? (Score:2)
IIRC, Amazon currently limits review posts to those who have spent at least $50. That may need to be increased.
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I generally assume anything like that is obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
This may explain why I only have one shared patent to my name, but I would rather have fewer, stronger, patients than lots of parents that only add marginal and arguably obvious improvements to the state of the art.
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Where do we sign up? (Score:3)
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I think one key fact should be clarified (Score:2)
The actual news story is unclear, but it seems like they're saying that someone can set up an account with my name and physical address, but a different email -- I think the email is the real Amazon identifier -- and their own credit card, so the packages have a place to go, but no other harm is done to the real customer with that name and address. Do I have that right? And if so, should Amazon be verifying that kind of thing, or is it legit to have more than one account for a name/address?
Re:I think one key fact should be clarified (Score:4, Interesting)
More than one account seems legit, but then of 1,000 people in the phone book, enough won't have an account, so Amazon can't really block that.
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Yes, I can take the phonebook, and set up accounts for every name / address in the phone book
Do those still exist? I haven't seen one in about 10 years.
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I get three or four different phone books left on my doorstep every year. They go straight into the recycling bin. For some reason, the phone book producers' first amendment rights to publish their wasteful garbage outweighs my right to not have wasteful garbage dumped at my house. We could start a protest movement. Gather up all the unwanted phone books dumped on people's doorsteps in the area, load them up into a dump truck, and return them to the front door of the publisher's offices. Unfortunately, when
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Seems like an easy scam to detect (Score:2)
This seems like an easy scam to detect. Just average the number of reviews that is associated with each reviewer of the product in question. If the reviewer accounts are all new, the average reviews count is going to be pretty low. If each new account only left one review, for the "brushed" product, the reviews per reviewer count is going to be "1", which is a huge red flag.
Even a number less than 10 would seem shady to me. No product should have reviews that are left by nearly all new accounts.
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An alternative would be to shadowban any account whose IP does not match their region until proof of address is provided.
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I doubt there's VPNs in every locale in the country.
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Somewhere To Sign Up (Score:2)
Is there someplace I can post my address so the scammers will use it and send me free stuff too? I mean sure it's probably going to be junk but it sounds like fun to receive mystery packages with various consumer goods in them.
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Someone I know received "snail extract skin care product" in such a package.
They're still getting hospital treatments after a single use two years ago.
Yep, it is a lot of fun.
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I'd love to get some snail extract. I wouldn't use it but it would be super funny.
I think knowing you are going to get crazy (and potentially dangerous) products kinda changes the equation. I wasn't suggesting it would be fun to get them if you weren't aware of what was happening.
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I know you, too, so yeah. Extremely stupid is correct.
Why mail it then ? (Score:2)
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Two words:
Tracking info.
Sellers may be required by Amazon have to provide tracking when they ship.
Re: Why mail it then ? (Score:2)
Do these parcels sent from China by regular mail for next to nothing ("free shipping, delivered in 4-6 weeks") actually have tracking information?
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Some certainly do, just checking my recent orders, there is one for $4.34, free postage from China, with tracking.
Finally, this makes sense! (Score:5, Interesting)
This past week, I got a mask in the mail, and no one I knew ordered it for me.
That one was a bit amusing, but the one that really made me scratch my head was about three months ago when I got a package of infant formula from Amazon. Being as I have no children, it was rather perplexing as to how it arrived.
Now I know that someone spent $55 to be able to make their own review.
Re:Finally, this makes sense! (Score:5, Informative)
Mystery Shaver (Score:2)
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I try to avoid using Amazon at all costs because labor issues
Lol, you sound like my sister. She thinks the same way about Walmart.
Whenever I get the chance I always recommend she get things from Walmart, or I'll say that I was just at Walmart today and it was awesome or something.
What I really find funny is that all the alternative stores she does shop at treat and pay the employees about the same or worse.
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Well, if you stick with locally owned places, at least the owner is probably spending most of their profits (or at least some) in the local economy, even if they are also screwing over their workers, rather than sending those profits outside of the local region to the out-of-state shareholders.
Sounds like everybody wins (Score:2)
Product reviews on Amazon are usually worthless anyway (and sellers reviews often ain't much better), random people get free shit, and the scammer has to spend money on his scam. What's not to love?
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That explains it! (Score:5, Informative)
I received a sheet of teflon (which made for some fun science experiments at home actually, I might order more LOL!) and some random plumbing parts. Both came from China, and I tried to report them to Amazon since there was a seller number on there but I couldn't find the form for "received something I didn't order, and I have no order number to give you." So Amazon doesn't seem to have a way to report this.
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Same here, they sent some solar-powered LED motion sensor light fixtures to my address (which are actually kind of useful) and some kind of off-brand skin-care product.
We tried to report it to Amazon, and there is indeed no way to do that. Amazon doesn't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut, it's all good as far as they're concerned.
Well duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, it should be easy for large vendors to stamp on the practice. Someone like Amazon probably already has half of these names & addresses registered on other acounts. It should be trivial to flag & suspend merchants with a effusive reviews from new accounts that duplicate details of other accounts. Other tell-tale signs would be IP addresses, missing information like phone numbers, site browsing history of new customers, credit card country mismatches, mangled Engrish, generic reviews, timestamp clues (e.g. reviews appearing in succession) etc. And making it easier for people receiving packets to report them would help too. And aside from all that reviews from new customers that were not fulfilled by Amazon should be more stringently vetted, perhaps with 2FA for new customers.
Whether other sellers do the same is up to them but I bet they could all do far more than they're doing.
I got some dope stuff actually (Score:5, Insightful)
All I got... (Score:2)
There was a brushing scam, and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt :-(
I at least got bluetooth earbuds out of it (Score:2)
Happened to me. I got a package from Amazon with a pair of bluetooth earbuds, some tea candles, about 10 iPhone charging cables (I don't have an iPhone), and some other crap. I actually started using the bluetooth earbuds occasionally (mostly for podcasts around the house, and I may only put in one of them so I can still hear other things), and they work surprisingly well. No nicer features like ANC and such, but they stay in, get long battery life (I haven't worn them out yet), and sound good enough. I tri
Dammit! (Score:2)
Rats! I was hoping because these were seeds, it was some green goo doomsday scenario from an Evil Genius.
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It could be an evil plan. I can see reasons for someone to anonymously ship out as many cannabis plant seeds as they can produce to random addresses. It would waste a lot of law enforcement time dealing with all the plants discovered in people's gardens who didn't know what they were planting, and provide some level of plausible deniability to any intentional home-growers. It'd give people a source of pot without depending on a dealer - though low grade, without the skill to cultivate it properly. And most
I got ... (Score:2)
Credit Card (Score:2)
Why do they send the product out? (Score:2)
I've seen similar scams on Ebay (Score:3)
Lens' Law (Score:2)
Lenz is already taken, so yeah....
Anyway, the Lens Law for clear viewing of truth in reviews is the 60/15/25 rule.
It's a simple 'if', should you want to automate a sifter program.
If 5-star < 60% and 1-star > 15% and 2-4star <=> 25%, it's possible it's truthful.
If 5-star > 60% and 1-star <=15% and 2-4star is weighted high toward 25%, it's a lie.
If 5-star is weighted low or < 60% and 1-star weighted low or > 15% and 2-4star is weighted low toward 25%, it's truthful.
If 5-star is weighte