So, Epson joins HP in the golden ink deal
I am so happy that I have a laser printer.
All these shenanigans go right under the bridge . . .
Amazon and printer manufacturer Seiko Epson have filed a joint action against firms in Turkey and the UK which they claim sold counterfeit printer bottles and cartridges on the global online retailer's platform. A lawsuit [PDF] launched in the US says the traders infringed registered trademarks of Seiko Epson Corporation and …
That's why I'm OK with cartridge systems, and why I'm OK with paying more for them. The EcoTank systems are great...IF you do the volume necessary to keep that ink tank continuously flowing, constantly exchanging old and new inks through the heads. But sadly people don't know this so the wrong demographic is buying the EcoTank products, people without the necessary or 'justified' print volume to warrant the purchase.
By now, the printer designers should know what's necessary to keep things from drying out if unused. If they're not doing so, that's not a "wrong demographic" problem. I wouldn't give printer designers a free pass for poor design.
This is why almost all modern inkjet printers come with a warning similar to: "do not unplug printer when not in use".
The "industrial" EPSON photo printers will send you a notification if they haven't been used enough, and I believe they will also do an ink purge automatically.
I did see someone say that they used their consumer unit for the first time in a couple of months, and the nozzle check pattern came out clean. I don't know if most modern printers using dye-based inks instead of pigment-based ones has any influence here ...
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Multiple Marketplace accounts sold fake bottles, cartridges for 2 years+, claim companies"
So Amazon will be refunding all of those fake purchases made over two years until it decided to take action for PR purposes?
No, thought not.
It doesn't take two years to discover this? Heck if they want to find fake, shoddy knock offs with ease, just use their own platform and look at some of the seller names like AJHXEWASAX or HUANKINDOGG
Read HUANKINDOGG as HUANKINGDONG and had an internal chuckle.
Amazon invested more than $1.2 billion and employed more than 15,000 people to protect its stores from counterfeits, fraud, and other forms of abuses.
Clearly not enough when I can do a search and find some in a minute or two, for a variety of products.
Quite. If Amazon genuinely spent that much resources, they should fire those 15,000 people and underlying processes as it is not working.
Or just, you know, actually screen those you let sell shit on your platform. Nah, easier to have lots of fees, sometime confusing structures and profit...
True, but both are issue that Amazon need to deal with. Cheap tat that is not as described is just as bad for the consumer as the fake branded tat. But then the consumer is not the reason for this action by Amazon. It's only because a "big name" like Epson have made the moves first, dragging Amazon along with them because if Amazon don't look like they are taking action, Epson will sue them too for knowingly facilitating the fraud (Epson have told them, probably via lawyers, so no wiggle room!)
The seller names are usually a dead giveaway...
A few years ago I bought some Kirby-branded vacuum cleaner bags on Amazon for slightly less than I would have been able to pick them up in the shop locally.
Probably 2 years later, I got an e-mail from Amazon letting me know that I had been a victim of counterfeiting! Oh noes! If I remember right, the e-mail mentioned that I should not use the product and dispose of them. I think they did refund me the $18-$20 that I had originally paid.
So I think they did go above and beyond with trying to chase down the counterfeiters in my case, but it was too little, too late. I still lay awake at night in a cold sweat worrying what might have happened with those off-brand vacuum cleaner bags...
"It doesn't take two years to discover this? Heck if they want to find fake, shoddy knock offs with ease, just use their own platform and look at some of the seller names like AJHXEWASAX or HUANKINDOGG"
My wife decided to look for an ultrasonic jewellery cleaner just the other day. She was concerned that when she selected cheapest to highest on the pricing, the first 20 or say pages were cheap USB or battery powered devices claiming to be ultrasonic cleaners for a couple of quid, all from China, all pretty much identical in looks and design and I'm damned sure had no ultrasonic transducers in them. Most likely just small motor with an offset cam/weight. They may even "work" in some circumstances with the right cleaning fluid and the agitation produced by the motor, but they ain't ultrasonic and will never have anywhere near the same effect. At the very least they are fraudulent descriptions if not out right scams.
And as well know, Amazon, AliExpress, Temu etc are all swamped by this tat coming out of China. They even buy up reject chips, scrub the tops and print any old part number on it that might match the pin count. Unless you have a specific item description, part code and/or seller yiou recognise, it's almost impossible to just browse for something interesting these days. Something Amazon really need to look at in a much more serious way if they want to salvage even a tiny fraction of their reputation.
I spent a whole day browsing camera tripods on Amazon, with my objective being to find the specific OEM model I like, and then to sort through all of the identical rebrandings so I could find the cheapest one. And by identical, no really, I mean actually identical; same mold, same parts, same design, even similar brand stickers. It's likely the items were, actually, the exact same, and were all developed by the same Chinese OEM and sold wholesale to these “brands,” whom then rebrand them and throw in crappy add-ons, before reselling them for a 500% markup. With that being the most probable case, finding the cheaper option doesn't mean a drop in quality, only less money spent on my part.
So rather than fall for the scam and overpay for something very cheap, I instead found a bundle with ball head, additional longer center column, and phone holder accessory, for a mere $100 on sale. Meanwhile, there were listings for only the tripod that cost $400 or even $500. Exact same item, for a massive discount, and I imagine maybe $50 more than it actually took to produce the item, in terms of raw materials, labor, and potentially OEM markup.
You do see this a lot with specific products, and can find the same designs floating around different sellers. I did the same thing as with my tripod when I was looking for camera arms, and cold shoe video lights. Once again, I got the cheapest possible and got the exact same product that everyone else was selling. I also looked into ultrasonic cleaners at one point, and I was blown away at how many definitely not ultrasonic results there were.
I encourage you, dear reader, to also scroll through 10 pages or so when searching for a category of item, and see how many duplicates you can find.
Here are a dozen Amazon purchased thumb drives which were not as advertised. Not only were they falsely advertised, they all resulted in data loss for the consumer:
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
Oh, wait. I misunderstood. The 15,000 Amazon drones are there to protect Big-Tech companies like Epson from "fake" products and defend their brand identity. They are not there to protect consumers from fake products with false advertisements.
Only tangentially related, but… last year, my next-door neighbour bought the tech bargain of the century. A 5TB USB-C SSD for $30.
I told him it was a fake at that price. I sent him links to some of the thousands of stories on the web about fake SSDs. I carefully explained all the tricks that the scammers use - hacked firmware to lie about the drive capacity, deliberately slow transfer speeds to deter test-copying of large data, and so on.
He bought it anyway and continued to insist that it was genuine and a bargain (Narrator: It wasn’t genuine. It wasn’t a bargain.)
The icing on the cake is that this chap is a very senior silicon architect at a large semiconductor manufacturer, with patents and PhDs and a commensurate salary. What’s that old saying about “intelligent isn’t the same as smart”? :)
"...business and shipping addresses, public corporate records, removal addresses, financial accounts, and/or phone numbers."
Yes, a real undercover operation there, no wonder they were caught so easily!
It make me wonder if the companies concerned were so up-front about it, were they unconcerned about possible consequences or did they think that they had done nothing wrong?
No doubt these counterfeiters were selling large volumes meaning Amazon were raking in a good profit from their sales, so only actually did something about it when Epson got on to them.
There are 1000s of obvious fake products on Amazon I could find within minutes so not sure exactly how 15000 employees can't do the same.
Finding counterfeits would be an actual good use for AI. It could scan Amazon looking for suspect product listing which could then get passed over to a human moderator to investigate.
Only the printer makers get to gouge customers by charging rates that would make a mafia loan shark blush for replacement ink!
This reminds me of the scene from The Simpsons where an FBI agent is running down the hall and you see signs on doors like "Joint Terrorism Taskforce" and "Hostage Rescue" then there's this big set of double doors with "Movie Piracy" on it. A not so subtle hint that maybe there's a problem with the distribution of resources.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.giphy.com%2Fmedia%2FD8HpyMMLzuPjW%2F200.gif&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=10390615ced67aef742b697bca40d69892365acee4e397e28c4becabaf24ebb1&ipo=images