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A comment on Money Laundering via Author Impersonation on Amazon. Parent comment

Re:Money Laundering via Author Impersonation on Amazon by wlesieutre on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @09:38AM (#16429726)
It's worse than that, the authentic name-brand listing can still ship scammy clones instead because Amazon aggregates the listing from multiple sellers and pretends they're all the same thing

Previous discussion including some firsthand experience from sellers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13926015

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Re:Money Laundering via Author Impersonation on Amazon by dabernathy89 on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @11:06AM (#16430422)
Yep. Just a couple weeks ago we bought Chemex coffee filters - the "Amazon's Choice" ones! We got a counterfeit that didn't even try to replicate the actual product (it was just sheets of tissue paper in the completely wrong shape). Looking at the reviews, we weren't the only ones who got these either.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017OFOP68/ref=cm_sw_r_em_api_c_Yo...

They've apparently since taken off the "Amazon's Choice" label here.

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Re:Money Laundering via Author Impersonation on Amazon by camus2 on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @09:54AM (#16429835)
> It's worse than that, the authentic name-brand listing can still ship scammy clones instead because Amazon aggregates the listing from multiple sellers and pretends they're all the same thing

It's called fraud. Some people here call it "scaling" but it's just good old fraud at scale.

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