Scams on Amazon?

Alf Stewart.

I am an avid fan of Amazon.

I find the range of products on the site, the reviews and the customer service offered to be second to none. I like using the site so much that I renew my prime membership yearly.

Anyway, I'm currently in the market for a new drone. I was all ready to buy one yesterday afternoon with the intention of collecting it from my parents place on Monday (they're in the north)

Anyway, was checking out a DJI phantom3 professional model (£790) when I spotted, within the same ad, DJI Phantom 3 Professional that it was available from an alternative seller, brand new, at the very reasonable price of £520.

I even added it to my basket, ready to go to checkout and pay when a few things caught my eye.

The seller wanted people to contact them by email before buying, to "check if he posted to your area" because my address wasn't one based in Britain, I thought maybe Irish addresses might not be included in the delivery options, so I duly fired off an email.

A few hours later I received a response from the seller asking for my full name and address so they could "notify Amazon, and ask them to prepare my invoice"

Obviously, I thought it odd, but replied with a spurious name and address.

Twenty minutes later, they contacted me again to ask if I had received invoice (I hadn't) and to check my spam folder if I hadnt received it.

There, sitting in my spam folder was a very authentic looking order form from Amazon, complete with order numbers etc.

I copped it as some kind of scam immediately, and got on to Amazon this morning to notify them.

I usually viewed Amazon as a fool proof site to shop, so this suspicious advertisement has really opened my eyes to how easily some people can be duped.

I assume, the scam is, that I paid the invoice outside the safety net of the Amazon web site, prob through western union or some sort, and no goods would ever reach me.

Very surprised to see the seller still up on the site. I thought Amazon would have acted on it quick sharp.

Your Face

Similar thing happened to me before Christmas.
There was a Graphics card for sale for a good price.
I added it to the basket but couldn't proceed with buying it.
The seller said I had to email them my details.
It sounded dodge so I asked Amazon about it.
They said not to worry, some sellers do that and I was protected by Amazon. I told them this seller wasn't really using Amazon for selling only listing - they said they would look into it.

TerrorFirmer

To be fair, those scams are insanely obvious. They ask you to email them, outside Amazon, before you make any sale, and they offer all kinds of electronic equipment from PC's, to laptops, to camera and phones, for ridiculously and suspiciously low prices.

Amazon do catch these very quickly. If you had just bought through the normal methods, the sale would have been cancelled and the seller banned. I mean this is the text of the very seller you're talking about - how could anyone fall for this?

It even has non standard characters to avoid Amazon's detection system!

I CȦN'T SHlP T0 ȦLL ADDREṢSES. BEF0RE "ȦDD T0 BȦSKET"; C0NTȦCT US: ℹinfo[ẚṫ]mail592.comℹ

Alf Stewart.

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

To be fair, those scams are insanely obvious. They ask you to email them, outside Amazon, before you make any sale, and they offer all kinds of electronic equipment from PC's, to laptops, to camera and phones, for ridiculously and suspiciously low prices.

Amazon do catch these very quickly. If you had just bought through the normal methods, the sale would have been cancelled and the seller banned. I mean this is the text of the very seller you're talking about - how could anyone fall for this?

It even has non standard characters to avoid Amazon's detection system!

Yeah it was pretty obvious to me once the email exchanges got underway, however (and the point of the thread) I have always viewed Amazon as a pretty safe, almost scam proof, and am shocked that even though Amazon called me earlier ref me reporting it, your man's ads are still up there.

£520 is a sizable chunk of money to be scammed on.

scamalert

Its not news been mentioned couple times already that chinesse or just scammers in general are trying to pull fast one,the trick here is that once they ask you to contact personally etc,to convince to make payment trough WU or the likes,think paypal has some sort of flaw in there as well.

Thus by bypassing amazon,what happens next usually seller never bothers to send you anything in such case money order or WU cant be retrieved,think paypal has some delay policy a month or so until claim can be logged-not certain thou.

Anyway all this leads you send hefty amount,in return for nothing and since you didnt buy it trough amazon theres no chance in retrieving cash.This is well known issue and imagine amazon has some grip on it but seems some fake sellers manage to get trough it anyway.

Easiest way to avoid it is to never buy of someone who has no reviews-which on a lot of items you can always find ones that seem to be well layout but there's no feedback of any sort,specially given if cost is lower then someone who has plenty,since what new sellers usually do is send out samples in exchange for reviews ,thus why in many cases you see received at discount etc to leave feedback and gain customers -someone even left a site at bargain alerts where one can register and receive items at small cost or nothing just to build up reviews but usually all low cost.

There was a case a while back where some found certain gpu's looked identical to high end ones,say 200e-vs 500 etc,so someone figured to order bunch replace expensive with cheap and do straight return,only was noticed when it was resold to other people that it happened.So while amazon is safe in general and offers good protection if smth aint right is safer to get in touch with live chat then suffer some scam.

Not the most sophisticated scam OP but I hear you; coming from Amazon you'd expect more.

thanks for the post