Amazon Says Thieves Swiped Millions by Faking Product Refunds

Amazon sued what it called an international ring of thieves who swiped millions of dollars in merchandise from the company through a series of refund scams that included buying products on Amazon and seeking refunds without returning the goods. From a report: An organization called REKK advertised its refund services on social media sites, including Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Court in the state of Washington.

The lawsuit names REKK and nearly 30 people from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants in the scheme, which involved hacking into Amazon's internal systems and bribing Amazon employees to approve reimbursements. REKK charged customers, who wanted to get pricey items like MacBook Pro laptops and car tires without paying for them, a commission based on the value of the purchase. "The defendants' scheme tricks Amazon into processing refunds for products that are never returned; instead of returning the products as promised, defendants keep the product and the refund," Amazon said in its lawsuit.

Editors, please stop linking to Bloomberg.

[whoever57]

Linking to paywalled articles is not useful.

Non-paywall story

[davidwr]

Amazon sues REKK fraud gang that stole millions in illicit refunds [bleepingcomputer.com].

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

You can't bypass a paywall? It took longer to write this post than to find the complete article. https://archive.is/YuzdT [archive.is]

Re:

[CaptainDork]

Scrape the headline and paste it into the address:

Alternte site. [seattletimes.com]

Returns Scams

[TwistedGreen]

I always thought someone could easily do this and never get caught. Especially with random PC parts that I order, you could just return any old PCIE card, maybe something obsolete or broken you have lying around, and the overworked "returns inspectors" I imagine work at Amazon would probably never notice. I'm too honest to actually do it, though.

Returns are so easy that I often buy something just to see if it's any good, because I can easily return it if it's not. The whole system is built on the assumption that only a small percentage of customers would be dishonest. If that percentage creeps too high, it would ruin it for the rest of us.

This scheme sounds much more complex. They're actually bribing employees? Easy way to fix that is to actually pay your employees enough. Hard to have sympathy for that.

Re:Returns Scams

[Firethorn]

Paying your employees "enough" isn't actually a fix for that.

Because for some people, there is never such a thing as "enough".

Consider that a supreme court justice is currently being blamed for taking bribes. Their pay is $268k/year. CEOs are caught all the time, as are congressmembers, etc...

I mean, a living wage is worth it in many other ways, but it isn't going to stop select employees from taking bribes.

Re:

[not flu]

Consider that a supreme court justice is currently being blamed for taking bribes. Their pay is $268k/year. CEOs are caught all the time, as are congressmembers, etc...

I imagine the bribes they take are quite high to make it worth the risk. If you're paid a nothing-to-lose wage it makes bribing you so affordable that schemes like this are more worth doing.

Re:

[Firethorn]

In the justice's case, it's currently more "what can they do to me even if I'm caught?"

Plus, well, yeah, rich person bribe taking tends to be larger scale, but that might be that low level stuff just isn't worth the time.

I've heard of some downright stupid bribery cases though. Federal senators taking bribes in the low thousands, for example.

In this case, I wanted to point out that paying a good wage to them is probably not going to solve the problem all that much, as the problem with criminals is that typ

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

Not sure why this got so highly upvoted given that you're just arguing with a perfect solution fallacy. Nothing is going to eliminate corruption 100%, people being people. This doesn't mean you can't reduce the motivation by paying employees a living wage. As I said, the goal is to keep the number of false returns below a certain percentage, not eliminate them completely. If it gets too high then Amazon will forced to modify their return policies to the detriment of all honest shoppers.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

In the pre-online world, you would go to a physical store and inspect or try out a product before buying. Sometimes, after you brought the item home it would turn out to be defective and you might send it back but that would be fairly rare.

Returns fulfull the same try before you buy function in the online world. If you follow that argument to its conclusion, then online returns should not be rare, rather the rate of returns should eventually settle somewhere around 50% or so. That's why they make it easy

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

You seem really depressed. Do you want to talk about it?

Bad return policy

[bobbutts]

Even though their trucks drive by my house every day Amazon makes me drop off returns at the UPS store or Staples unless I pay a $8 fee for UPS pickup. I've stopped buying most of the cheap items I used to and cancelled prime since I don't want to deal with going out to make returns. Company I used to love that I now hate.

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[x0ra]

My usual UPS guy as no issue picking up returns whenever he drops off. a package.

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[taustin]

I do all my UPS stuff, incoming and outgoing, at work, where they come by pretty much every day. So does everyone else in the office.

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[Tarlus]

Really, that is your tipping point with Amazon?

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[Celarnor]

Up until about 2-3 years ago, I'd never had to return anything. These days there's something wrong with basically every other order -- order a two-pack of something and get one, order one color and get another, etc.

Amazon Swiped Millions Selling Fake Products

[crunchy_one]

I'd shed a tear if Amazon wasn't home to thousands of scammers selling millions of dollars worth of fake products to unsuspecting customers.

Re:

[RitchCraft]

Scammers scamming scammers.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'd shed a tear if Amazon wasn't home to thousands of scammers selling millions of dollars worth of fake products to unsuspecting customers.

Imagine being a manufacturer who wants to take a hard stance against Amazon and their fake product problem by refusing to sell on their site or warranty any product sold on Amazon, only to find consumers are THAT lazy/addicted and don't shop online anywhere else now. Which ultimately means your hard stance affects your own sales to the point where you have no choice.

Not really sure who to blame for that one; cheap consumers asking for it, or cheap consumers asking for it. Hard to blame Amazon when they d

How is this not criminal?

[davidwr]

hacking into Amazon's internal systems and bribing Amazon employees

If true, people should be in jail.

Oh...

[AppXprt]

Oh it's okay when it happens to people like me, but Amazon gets to sue over it...

Re:

[phantomfive]

You can join the lawsuit [geekwire.com].

So, it's a...

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Amazon Says Thieves Swiped Millions by Faking Product Refunds "

Barely equal to a rounding error in a day's receipts.

The consequences of short-term thinking

[Tony Isaac]

Amazon figured out that it costs more for them to process a return, than to just refund the money and tell the buyer to keep the product. Well duh, what did they think was going to happen when people realized this was their policy?

The short-term cost-savings cost them long term, in the form of increasing scams by fake returns.

Not the whole story.

[ceg97]

Whenever I hear stories like this I want to know how the loss due these thieves compares to other losses like simple mis-delivered, damaged or lost packages. My own experience in retail was that losses due to inventory shrinkage by employees as well as outright embezzlement were far greater than those due to shoplifters (generally the poor) that get all the press and condemnation.