Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt

Re:Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's re... by irrational on Saturday August 03, 2019 @01:03AM (#20598771)

Similar experience with a sawhorse. It was clearly a used item when I opened it. I got a replacement no problem, how is it more cost effective to pay shipping twice than to pay someone to check it once?

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Re:Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's re... by JakeTheAndroid on Saturday August 03, 2019 @01:08AM (#20598790)

The people that process the returns make next to nothing and run off a script of yes/no and anything weird gets escalated.

A Q/A person to validate a range of products for authenticity (or at least more so than now) likely costs more per hour.

They have their supply chain so efficient, it's likely very cheap for them to move physical items across the globe.

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Re:Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's re... by ldoughty on Saturday August 03, 2019 @07:58AM (#20599996)

It would cost them $20/hr per validator (burdened).

If only 5 items an hour are bad returns, that's $4 per item identified.

It's likely cheaper to have you, the customer, do the valuation because you might not even realize the issues... And if you do, you might be too lazy to return it. Which further let's the value of hitting a validator.. so the employee would now be to probably find twice as many bad returns per hour for the company to break even.

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Re:Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's re... by belltaco on Saturday August 03, 2019 @01:29AM (#20598831)

Depends on the rate of the fraud. If, for example, 2 out of 10,000 returns are fraudulent, probably it costs lesser to process 2 replacements than check 10,000 items.

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