Amazon says it destroyed two million knockoffs in 2020, a fraction of the amount it ships

Amazon's latest brand protection report states it destroyed more than two million pieces of counterfeit goods last year and denied most would-be sellers from setting up shop in its online souk. "In 2020, Amazon invested over $700m and employed more than 10,000 people to protect our store from fraud and abuse," said Dharmesh …

[Snowy]

Still a lot of knockoffs

[QUOTE]"Fewer than 0.01 per cent of all products sold on Amazon received a counterfeit complaint from customers," said Mehta in a blog post. "Those complaints were investigated for accuracy and acted upon as appropriate."[/QUOTE]

That still amount to hundred of thousands of knockoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still a lot of knockoffs

And that's just what customers complained about - not what Amazon identified. How many customers don't complain because they are not aware they bought a counterfeit product, or are OK as long as it is cheap enough?

And the main problem on Amazon is not only true counterfeits - those trying to look exactly like a branded products and maybe sold at the same price to reap large profits - but the large amount of cloned products which are identical to branded ones and sold under many different brands - and also actively promoted by Amazon when you look for the branded one.

[big_D]

Re: Still a lot of knockoffs

c't magazine in German regularly reports on scammers on eBay and Amazon selling counterfeit memory cards and USB sticks, or currently, fake Apple Airpods, which are so well disguised, that only the poor sound quality and the lack of "learning" and the updates failing give them away at first glance (and a couple of spelling mistakes in the small print on the box.

[tmTM]

Re: Still a lot of knockoffs

Still miles better than eBay.

They happily allow large scale scams to operate, forget knockoff goods these criminals are out to empty your bank account and eBay does absolutely nothing to prevent it.

[fidodogbreath]

Re: Still a lot of knockoffs

Fewer than 0.01 per cent of all products sold on Amazon received a counterfeit complaint from customers

Probably because the list of reasons on the return page doesn't include "Counterfeit product."

[Dazed and Confused]

Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

OK, I wasn't paying attention. I went to Amazon (coz I'm lazy) and typed in "Sandisk micro sd card" (coz I'm lazy) and I was distracted, I wasn't paying attention, I was chatting to someone while shopping, dumb dumb dumb, the first hit had the normal Sandisk red & gold artwork & fonts, F**kme that's cheap, dumb dumb dumb, the alarm bells didn't go off. I hit buy it now.

It wasn't a Sandisk, and it didn't work very well at all and it lost data left, right & centre and ...

Amazon refunded no problems.

But most of the hits on the first page where knock offs, the same was true for Samsung ones... cloned artwork style knock offs.

Today? well the first clone is halfway down page two for Sandisk and I didn't spot a cloned Samsung one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

in no defence of fake sd cards and amazon, I find it rather baffling (or am I just being f... naive) that the sd card manufacturers don't give a flying monkey about the fact that it's actually much more likely to buy, in error a fake sd / micro sd card than a real one. They don't care, don't offer any tools to even _check_ if the 400tb sd card holds more than 4Gb of data. All they seem capable of is issuing, every now and then, a fart along the lines of "we take the issue of counterfeit products extremely seriously and work with numerous agencies to blahblahblah)". Perhaps there's nothing they can do, given the low-cost of manufacturing...

[Fazal Majid]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

The SD card manufacturers are powerless when faced with Amazon's stonewalling on the issue of counterfeits (Amazon actually had the audacity to turn their failure to police their marketplace into a revenue opportunity by creating a paid program for brands to blacklist fakes).

SanDisk estimates over 30% of all SanDisk products sold online are counterfeit. Apple did the same with chargers on Amazon and a whopping 99% were fakes, often with dangerous corner-cutting on product safety that could put lives at risk.

I stopped buying electronics on Amazon a long time ago, and get them from B&H Photo in the US, or in the UK John Lewis and Park Cameras.

[ThatOne]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

> I stopped buying electronics on Amazon a long time ago, and get them from [...]

Who get them from Amazon... :-p

Seriously, you can never know what you'll be served, as all it takes is one greedy/careless person in the supply chain... I have been sold counterfeit USB sticks with fake capacities in a reputable shop once. And the manufacturers don't really care, it's probably too difficult and expensive for them, given the product is cheap and the counterfeiters are elusive phantoms, here today, gone tomorrow.

[Zolko]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

I stopped buying electronics anything on Amazon a long time ago

there, fixed it for you.

Oh, and I just tried my new Bronze badge and its blockquotes, nice isn't it ?

[big_D]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

The problem is, there are so many resellers cropping up, you can't swat them down quick enough, especially for smaller manufacturers. You need to keep somebody permanently looking for fakes on each platform and with some of the platforms being slow or just ignoring reports, unless you pay for their premium counterfeit reporting programme, it is difficult to play catch-up.

Recently, c't in Germany tried buying AirPods off eBay, they bought half a dozen pairs from different re-sellers, all fake. In most cases, they reported it to the police and were holding onto the fakes until the police could collect them, but eBay was stonewalling, wanted the fakes back, thus leaving the buyers with no proof that they were fakes for the police. Even with a police case number, without returning the fakes, they didn't want to refund the money or deal with the reseller, until really put under pressure.

[katrinab]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

I would not buy an SD card from Amazon. Sure, some of the prices are too good to be true, but even the ones that are about the same price as Currys can still be fakes.

[big_D]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

Often, you have to look really hard, instead of SanDisk, it is SunDisk or they use the SanDisk name with a Samsung model number or vice versa. If you aren't paying attention and don't know exactly what you are looking for, it is all too easy to get caught.

[heyrick]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

Try looking for replacement heads for a Philips shaver (I think mine is an SH50). I would NEVER buy on Amazon. Once you've waded through the obvious clones, you might find one that's a proper branded product. And then you look at the customer photos and see that what actually arrives is very definitely not. And this is stuff sent via Prime, so in a way Amazon is complicit.

The only way they're going to clear up this endemic problem is by booting off and banning those who sell fake crap.

[heyrick]

Re: Well it seems a bit better than it was about a month ago

I should add, a couple of years ago I got a JYE oscilloscope kit from Amazon. What arrived was a fake. I reported this to Amazon and got back a message telling me that they do not sell counterfeit goods (I nearly wet myself laughing) and that out of their goodness, they will replace it. So at their expense it was returned and replaced with.....exactly the same (obviously non-JYE) fake. I kept this one as I wanted something to do over my winter holiday, but now if I'm feeling geeky I can get these things from banggood and they're the real deal.

[Potemkine!]

In 2020, Amazon invested over $700m and employed more than 10,000 people to protect our store from fraud and abuse

So I guess the ones I contacted were the lazy ones.

I ordered a screen guard for a smartphone. When I received it, its dimensions were inaccurate, several millimetres short in length and width. I posted then a negative comment. A couple of weeks later, I received a mail from the vendor asking me to remove my comment, giving money in exchange. the vendor contacted me three times, despite my constant rebukes. I don't like bribery, so I contacted Amazon, asking them if it was a standard policy to allow vendors to try to corrupt people to get positive feedbacks. I contacted the support twice, and contacting the support is not an easy task. The only answers I got were automated ones who were totally irrelevant. Nowadays, the crappy screen guard is still on sale on Amazon.

[Peter Galbavy]

Of course only 0.01% of things were reported as counterfeit. Amazon (UK in this case) make it close to impossible to report listings or sellers as "dodgy". Unless you buy something - fulfilled by Amazon or Prime - there is no active way to report anything. I have tried. I found obscure email addresses in notional policy and help pages that can only be found via external search engines and then the email bounces with a "the address you sent email to is not monitored".

I have one seller who I posted a 1 star review for contacting me via direct email offering me money to remove my review. I tried really hartd to report this. No dice.

Amazon is a world bestriding ostrich.

[Fazal Majid]

They make money either way whether you buy a dangerous fake or a genuine product. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

[heyrick]

"Unless you buy something - fulfilled by Amazon or Prime - there is no active way to report anything."

Even then, about the best you'll get is bullshit platitudes and maybe they'll send you a label for returning the product.

Which, days/weeks/months/years later will still be for sale.

They just don't care as they coin it either way.

[Anonymous Coward]

two million knockoffs in 2020

meanwhile, millions of pieces of junk with paid-for 5-star-reviews flood amazon. But that's ok, cause it's good for amazon business.

[mark l 2]

Whatever rules Amazon uses to verify its sellers, they do make mistakes and its almost impossible to appeal against them banning you from the platform.

My Dad has wanted to sell on Amazon and so he registered as a seller but they locked his account before he had even listed a single item. He had never be registered on Amazon before other than as a buyer and not had any issues with his buying account. No matter how many messages he sent to Amazon seller support they wouldn't tell him why his was banned, and after weeks of appealing against it and sending copies of his IDs, utility bills etc he just gave up and opened a ebay business account instead as he was getting nowhere.

[Aaiieeee]

I only buy recognised brands when on Amazon, there is too much junk to sift through otherwise.

Search 'projector' for example; it's possible some are good, but how do you find out? On the first page I counted 11 brands I had never heard of. It's possible they are all well respected in other markets and are now making inroads into my perception, but somehow I doubt it. I bought an epsom on the basis that there was some chance of it matching its spec.

At one point wasn't everyone supposed to be setting up their own 'brand', as if most of us have any value to impart.

[Andy Non]

It's not just Amazon's market place sellers

I've had a few items from Amazon's third party sellers over the years that turned out to be terrible quality / knock-offs despite rave reviews on Amazon and Amazon have always refunded me. But more worrying are items sent directly from Amazon themselves; a case in point being a Sony Playstation 4 dual-shock controller. It "looked" legitimate but was faulty straight out of the box. I sent it back and got a refund and flagged the item as possibly counterfeit, but never got any feedback.

[Fazal Majid]

Re: It's not just Amazon's market place sellers

This is because Amazon commingles inventory under its "stickerless commingled inventory" program, which means buying from Amazon itself as opposed to a third-party on their marketplace is no guarantee.

[Stuart Halliday]

EBay is just as bad.

Look up 2TB USB Sticks or fake HDMI leads or multiple coloured flowers. Thousands of items.

Ebay don't even have an option to report fake goods. Fake goods aren't even listed as an option to report.

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be the point of reporting their whole inventory anyway?...