Amazon Launches Program To Identify and Track Counterfeiters (reuters.com) 27
Amazon has launched its Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX), an initiative to help retail stores label and track marketplace counterfeits as part of the e-commerce giant's efforts to crack down on organized crime on its platform, the company announced on Thursday. From a report: Online marketplaces in the United States including Amazon face hurdles in keeping counterfeiters off their platforms and fake merchandise from entering their warehouses. The new program mimics data exchange programs by the credit card industry to find scammers and identify their tactics. Stores and Amazon marketplace sellers can anonymously contribute information and records flagging counterfeiters to a third-party database or use the database to avoid doing business with the bad actors.
"We think it is critical to share information about confirmed counterfeiters to help the entire industry stop these criminals earlier," Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon's vice president of selling partner services, said in a statement. The Seattle-based retail giant piloted the anti-counterfeiting initiative in 2021 with an undisclosed number of apparel, home goods and cosmetics stores, where counterfeiting is most common.
"We think it is critical to share information about confirmed counterfeiters to help the entire industry stop these criminals earlier," Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon's vice president of selling partner services, said in a statement. The Seattle-based retail giant piloted the anti-counterfeiting initiative in 2021 with an undisclosed number of apparel, home goods and cosmetics stores, where counterfeiting is most common.
Good job (Score:2)
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I must have missed whatever the AC farted, but now I'm beginning to wonder if any of the AI chatbots are using AC status and working for the corporate cancers... The better to keep the humans' discussions innocuous and "mostly harmless".
Tinfoil hat time? Anyone else encountered mysterious hard crashes after logging into Amazon? Or ChatGPT? At least for ChatGPT we are supposed to know what the AI is doing, but I doubt Amazon will ever tell anyone much about what is going on under the hood... (Much nicer if I were sure the computer was dying, eh? Today's hard crash only took a few minutes to reboot from.)
Off topic much? No topic is safe from the BSOD? (Yeah, I know Microsoft mostly seems to have abandoned that approach.)
It's about time! Thumbdrive fraud galore. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those $16 2TB thumbdrives come to mind. Some of them have controllers programmed to appear as higher capacity than they are. What bothers me is I get spam from Amazon highlighting these 3rd-party fraud drives. Amazon is enabling this sort of activity.
I'm part of a team that manages a sizable amount of science data. I fear someday having to tell a researcher that only the last 128GB of what they wrote to their 2TB discount thumbdrive they submitted actually got stored. Scientists have budgets, and look for savings. Amazon emails tend to generate more product trust than it should, especially to those in other fields. (thumbdrives are problematic to begin with and certainly not something we endorse for storage...but still)
Re:It's about time! Thumbdrive fraud galore. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they'll mostly be going after things like fake Gucci bags, not exaggerated/false specs on generic products.
You pretty much just have to assume if you're buying cheap Chinese crap that the specs are going to be either an exaggeration or an outright lie. I bought the cheapest set of LED fog lights on Amazon for my work van a few years ago (was like $16 IIRC). They're not bad for what they are, but they clearly don't put out anywhere near the amount of lumens claimed on the listing. I assumed that would be the case when I bought them, so I can't really say that I'm disappointed.
Flash drives are pretty easy to just test and send it back if it fails.
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Re: It's about time! Thumbdrive fraud galore. (Score:2)
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I propose filling the drive to "capacity" with 1GB random-ish datafiles, then attempt to validate by sha256 hashing each file on the drive against its known hash. To generate datafiles, I write a bunch of zeros to file with dd, then encrypt with gnupg using the disable-compression flag set.
#!/bin/sh
/bin/dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1000 | gpg --compress-algo none --symmetric --passphrase test --batch --yes > 1GB.data
I donâ(TM)t mind counterfeit as long as it (Score:2)
Problem: it's sold as genuine at same price (Score:5, Interesting)
For things like batteries, I donâ(TM)t want counterfeit, but thereâ(TM)s a lot of stuff that just isnâ(TM)t worth the higher price margin relative to the quality.
You're mistaking 3rd party with counterfeit. I don't buy common counterfeit targets on Amazon because I've personally had a few bad experiences. I needed a spare Lenovo battery, back when you could replace them yourselves. I bought one advertised as Genuine Lenovo. I noticed several were as suspiciously low prices and I avoided those to get one from Amazon.com that says Lenovo. When it arrived, it was clearly counterfeit..wrong label, all in Chinese...box looked like it was printed on a laser printer in someone's garage. I paid full price.
What happens behind the scenes is they mix and match items with the same SKU. So ChangsCounterfeitBatteries.biz ships 50 batteries to Amazon's Denver warehouse. Amazon.com gets my order and thinks they can get a battery to me from Denver for cheaper, but they're all out...so they just grab one from ChangsCounterfeitBatteries.biz's inventory.
Family and friends have had many similar experiences buying Apple cables...from Amazon.com saying official Apple, but getting something in generic cardboard or with poor copies and misspellings...and when you open up the device, it's a completely different design.
As a result, NEVER buy anything from major, popular computer brands there. Don't buy cables from Apple, batteries from Lenovo or Dell, etc. Don't buy anything XBox or Playstation that is easy to counterfeit, like batteries or chargers. I won't even buy Raspberry Pi accessories from there. There's no way of knowing if you're actually getting the real thing.
Then there's the issue of Amazon's declining service quality. My family orders a lot from them for various items. As of 2023, they've gotten 10% of our orders wrong...like objectively wrong...order a USB-C cable, get a lightning one instead....order a set of silicone spatulas, get a dildo with the label/barcode "spatula set" on it (yes, that happened to us...it wasn't fun dropping that off to the return desk at Whole Foods)
B&H, Target, BestBuy, WalMart(in-store pickup only...their online stuff is getting sketch) and many others sell genuine goods because they don't have elaborate 3rd party networks that mix stock. (They've dipped their toes in marketplaces, but are clear who you're ordering from and what you're getting). Amazon doesn't even have the best prices in most cases. By buying from vendors, I tend to save a tiny bit of money.
Basically Amazon today is AliExpress with better service. You get unique and cool non-mainstream things from China. However, if you want mainstream electronics or computer gear, you have to buy elsewhere because they enable blatant fraud and lie about what they sell you. In fairness, they take returns, no questions asked, but I'd rather just get a genuine item now and not deal with returning anything. What really sucks is my kids...they're too young to be paranoid and they see a toy for a suspiciously low price, they assume it's real and I have to have a long argument with my 7yo that no one will sell you a $100 toy for $9.
Could be a good thing (Score:2)
And before you say that doesn't matter, ke
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And before you say that doesn't matter, keep in mind some of the most counterfeited fragrances are going for $800+/bottle, which is a significant investment for some buyers.
If the buyer is actually an investor, they would fully understand any risk in the purchase before spending even $200. Which means you probably shouldn't be shopping on 3rd party sites, especially if the original manufacturer does not recognize them as an official distributor.
If you simply cannot afford to spend $800+ on a bottle, then you are in the category of customers who are hardly considered "investors," as you already know damn well that bottle priced 80% less than what the manufacturer demands, IS f
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What kind of brain damage does it take to say "If you can't afford $800 then don't buy an 80% discounted bottle"? If it's 80% discounted it wouldn't be $800. Anyone who buys stuff on eBay knows not to buy the extremely cheap or 'open box' version of expensive consumable items because they're 99.5% likely to be fake.
I'm talking about listings with trusted sellers and 5-star feedback an
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....Anyone who buys stuff on eBay knows not to buy the extremely cheap or 'open box' version of expensive consumable items because they're 99.5% likely to be fake. I'm talking about listings with trusted sellers and 5-star feedback and ratings who are selling "New In Box, Sealed" items that cost full retail price or within 5% of it, but which come to you as cheap-refilled or entirely fake bottles. Amazon and eBay protect these fraudster sellers because they get to keep the commission on these sales of fake items. They leave it up to the purchaser to "prove" they're fake instead of requiring the seller to prove provenance or authenticity, and if you leave bad feedback or comments they happily remove them to keep the fraudulent sales going unimpeded.
Really? Because your first "anyone" comment is talking about a marketplace where a 99.5% fake percentage can be sustained because of pure ignorant demand.
eBay is provably known by only one other name; The Black Market. Anyone still believing they're buying valid authentic expensive product every time from The Black Market simply because the built-in star rating system markets you to...well, let's just say P.T. Barnum would be a multi-trillionaire today. "New in box, Sealed" should hold about as much valu
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your first "anyone" comment is talking about a marketplace where a 99.5% fake percentage can be sustained because of pure ignorant demand.
Only if your reading, comprehension, and logical reasoning are severely deficient. The problem is not ignorant demand. The demand exists, and the authenticity of most of these items is unknowable by the purchaser until they have already received it. Expecting products to be what they're advertised to be is not ignorant. That's why delivering fake products from a purchase of an authentic product is fucking illegal.
The problem is tacit allowance of fraud by the platforms. This is also not exclusive to eBa
Amazon Basics (Score:3)
This should apply to product copies too, like Amazon Basics products.
Hopefully this includes LEGO... (Score:3)
Amazon is (or at least used to be, I haven't checked lately) full of people selling fake knock-off LEGO products. Hopefully this new initiative can go further to stop the sale of such fakes.
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I am not talking about legitimate competitors like Mega Bloks.
I am talking about the bootlegs that ones that copy the exact unique shape of the Minifig (which has been ruled as a protected trademark in the same way as things like the unique shape of the Coca-Cola bottle is a protected trademark).
Or ones that infringe copyright (either LEGO's copyright or that of 3rd party IPs like Star Wars or Marvel or Ferrari).
Or for that matter knock-offs that violate patents on newer elements that LEGO absolutely still
Re: Hopefully this includes LEGO... (Score:2)
Given it's amazon... (Score:2)
It will identify counterfeit product's and negotiate their 50% margin and stick them as a "Featured" product...
It's what it has been doing with the $49 8TB SSD's. As it suppresses reviews, ignores tweets, I assume that amazon is a pro-counterfeit company. Absolutely nothing is trustable with the company on there. I don't even trust them to sell me genuine samsung, kingston or sandisk sd cards anymore, I test every single one of them I receive.
I'd trust ebay over them, and I don't trust ebay at all.
Too little, too late (Score:2)