Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $1.5m A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them. Andrew Birge, US Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, said Geoffrey Mark Hays Talsma has been indicted on charges of mail and wire fraud, …
That's a very good question.
I'd've thought that, after losing 500, somebody would be taking a closer look at what was going on.
It would appear that this activity was likely drowned under the hundreds of thousands of daily deliveries and also, that Amazon has been automated to the point that the whole thing administers itself.
Amazon needs to revisit the concept of activity alarms.
Some time back a friend of mine (who is a trusted reviewer for products sold on Amazon) received a "free of charge" Blu-Ray disc of some film to review.
But they contacted Amazon to say that they couldn't do the review as they did not have a compatible player on which to view it.
So Amazon sent them (free of charge) a Blu-Ray player (quite a good one in fact) so they could do the review. And they could keep the player afterwards.
Ultimately, this is the problem with Amazon - so have gotten SO BIG, that seemingly quite low value items (maybe tens of $$, even upto maybe a couple of hundred $$) can easily go "missing" or be given away, and it makes little or no difference to their bottom line.
Of course, the odd occasion this happens is just one of those things...but a perpetrator who keeps "going back to the well", is eventually going to be found out.
So, he/they will have the book thrown at him/them ;-)
"seemingly quite low value items (maybe tens of $$, even upto maybe a couple of hundred $$) can easily go "missing" or be given away, and it makes little or no difference to their bottom line."
Yes, they're a bit casual about stuff like that. I ordered a, er, very well-priced - the price of one bottle - 3-pack of spirits a while ago. Only one bottle turned up. I contacted customer services, they apologised, refunded my payment, let me keep the bottle delivered so far as compensation/goodwill, and told me to order again to get 3 bottles like I 'should'. So I did, and they delivered just one again. Contacted customer services again, same answer. Eventually I ended up with 3 bottles worth 50 quid each, a refund, and £10 credit 'for the inconvenience'.
I think it's a cost of having good customer service. Either you have some fairly empowered, intelligent, highly-paid people making decisions, or you have low-paid people allowed to give refunds without really understanding the problems, or you have shit customer service.
"or you have low-paid people allowed to give refunds without really understanding the problems"
This. On one order, I got myself a kit of electronic parts (about €30) and my mother some bamboo crochet hooks (about €3).
After a while I contacted them to point out that the crochet hooks never arrived. They refunded...the €30. Okay, thanks, but did anybody actually read the message and the item it was linked to, or did some drone just open the order and hit refund on the most expensive item?
(makes me wonder, does this count as a black mark against the company selling the components? their stuff came in a couple of days, it had nothing to do with them!)
What I think needs further investigation is whether Amazon took the hit on the refunds and you keeping the bottles of whether the cost was just debited back to the supplier.
Unfortunately the way companies like Amazon and the big supermarkets work is to ensure that the costs are dumped onto the supplier chain. This works because the supplier is between a rock and a hard place, either they sell through Amazon or the supermarkets or go out of business.
"Of course, the odd occasion this happens is just one of those things...but a perpetrator who keeps "going back to the well", is eventually going to be found out."
There are probably cleverer scam artists doing it, but they know to change products and tactics frequently and thus minimise the chances of being caught. ie going to a different well instead of the same one every day.
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I ordered a 1U rack shelf from Amazon a while ago during lockdown because they could deliver where the place I normally use was closed. Took a few days to arrive but when it did the shelf was damaged. It looked as if the thing had been dropped from height onto a hard surface as the front was crumpled. I cannot imagine how that was missed before it was packed as all the packaging was perfect.
Instigated a return with pictures and they said it was obviously a manufacturing fault or defect. Please send the item back to this address and we'll refund you and cover £15 of postage. I looked at the address and it was in Eastern Europe postage dwarfed the cost of the shelf and their £15. Called their customer service and the girl looked at the order for me, I said if I'm going to be out of pocket no point in returning it. She said she agreed and that she'd check with her supervisor. He said we'll refund you don't send it back either bin it or donate it to charity. I did the latter. I also said if you're going to have items dispatched and sold by Amazon from so far away maybe you should make it clearer.
It goes to show you the difference between how the UK and US treat these types of crimes. As wow! up to 20 years for each mail and wire fraud charge. The maximum sentence from fraud in the UK is 10 years, but they usually only throw that at people who have committed the most serious frauds, such as against lots of individuals or abusing their position, rather than against a business that make $1.5m in a less than an hour. To be looking at 20 years in jail you would have to be committing armed robbery or other violent or sexual offences, not stealing to some books from a billion dollar corporation.
"US prisoners, particularly in privately run prisons have to work"
That's not quite true. Some states force prisoners to work, but in others it's a voluntary option and reasonably well compensated* to encourage takeup.
*Compensation includes days off the sentence and other privileges, not just money.
And in some states it's mandatory, but the compensation is time off the sentence rather than money, I think.
Since it's in the US, apparently the main objection is from competing businesses who object to the cheap labour their competitors benefit from :/
However.. "Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool."
-- https://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-ff-federal-judges-order-state-to-release-more-prisoners-20141114-story.html
Maybe things have changed since 2014.
That took me back. It's the French banks' term for the implied cost of carry, or internal funding charge, crossed out against each trade's raw P&L to get a benchmark nett. Had to expand a system of mine to allow including paired notional figures. So I just put hooks everywhere and added it as an instance.
Nothing at all to do with textbooks.
You have a point - quite a boring and fiddly job, and well paid, but not fabulously so.
Of course they didn't make 1.5 million - that was the retail value of the books, not what they sold them for. I doubt they could sell their ill gotten gains at more than half price, so they perhaps made 750,000 USD.
If we guesstimate that it took 15 mins per book to order it, re-sell it and ship it, they would have had to spend 3500 hours buying and selling books.
Therefore their hourly rate for their criminal enterprise is ~ USD 215 per hour, or about GBP 155 per hour. Very nice - about GBP 300K per year as a full time job. Maybe the primary perp was smart enough to hire a minimum wage patsy or two for the grunt work, to increase his reward/effort ratio. Even so it doesn't seem enough to risk your liberty over, given the near certainty of being caught eventually.
The scam that really beats all -- and the reason why text books are rented rather than purchased -- is that its a captive market that has no choice other than to buy the product. You have to have the textbook to take the course so asking $60--$100 or more for a book is the rule. Most textbooks are worth nothing like this but its a captive market -- you have to have such and such a book and it has to be the specified edition -- but as the market is captive its milked for all its worth. This leads to a lively trade in used books and book rental, often facilitated by the school library/bookshop, and obviously opportunities for fraud.
Yes. This was the second thing that got my attention ("HOW much for that book?!?"). I read somewhere that some professors write their own text books, giving them a nice extra revenue stream. One professor I had was keenly aware of the price of books and went out of her way to use books that were less expensive and available outside the Uni's bookstore (another racket), and also to have the print shop assemble booklets of photocopied chapters from other texts and then sell the booklets for the cost of the copies and coily-bindy thingies.
One imagines students calling the police after a break-in and saying "no, they didn't take the smartphones or large-screen teevee, they just took all our textbooks".
You have to have the textbook to take the course
Been there, nearly 40 years ago we were told we *had* to have a particular textbook for a course. I don't think I referred to it once in the whole year, we assumed the professor concerned was getting a cut of the profits.
Specialist fiction costs more than general fiction... look at the cost of a decent SF or Horror novel compared to the trash that normally fills supermarket book shelves. Some of that is down to the smaller audience meaning more per unit to recover the cost or production but most of it is the publishers know they have you by the proverbial short and curlies - you want to read the stuff, you will pay.
It's the same with textbooks, audience-wise - but you also need to factor in that if you want to write a decent textbook that will sell, you need to know the subject - which normally means an expensive education. It also explains why so many climate experts, and armchair tacticians are to be found on facebook...
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