You hit the head of the nail though, it's a calculated loss / cost. With retail they dealt with physical theft way more than this and anticipated up to 10% of inventory loss for a plethora of reasons. It's not surprising the thieves have transitioned here. I would expect that between this and mixed inventory, these issues are far more common that people would think.
While amazon is at fault for passing it back on, I imagine they make it right. They have always fixed issues for me with no hesitation. It sucks, but I wouldn't get out a pitchfork unless they denied it. And like I mentioned above, Amazon isn't unique, any company has this happen.
The question is where does the discount from my doing their inspection for them go? It doesn't go to the prices, they're the same everywhere. It doesn't go to the shipping, that's my Prime account.
I would argue that just like they bake in issues, you as a consumer have to account for that in your purchase decision.
There's no perfect answer, but i'm not sure you would be entitled to anything beyond them fixing the issue in a responsible manner. If you want something beyond, it's within your right to request that from them and theirs if they accept it. I will say, often if you have issues on individual packages with delays, they extend your prime by X days.
I don't buy on amazon very much, and I'm in Canada. But I don't see prices lower than Amazon frequently. Usually on other huge companies like best-buy or walmart. But they usually offer the same return policy and I'm pretty sure they face the same kind of scams.
But hey, that's my experience. You might have experienced something very different.
Imagine that mister Bezos start spending millions of dollars and employing an army to do deep-check into every item returned. Who's paying that bill? Amazon's stockholders won't. You will. I will.
But, as I said in a previous post, I'm not defending Amazon's behavior. I'm just pointing out that it's all about cost and the vast majority of users benefit from this as well (with lower prices and no-question-asked-return-policy), while a tiny-tiny minority of them might face an inconvenience of returning an used item from time to time.
I know it hurts when amazon relies on real customers to do their deep inspection, but it's all about costs. I don't expect this to change.
I would love to stop using amazon for a million reasons, but this is not one of them.