Now if Amazon included a guide with returned products, instructing customers what to evidence of fraud or tampering to look for? That would be a different story.
Not saying that I'd want this to happen to me, but assuming Amazon made it right I'd say that I was just inconvenienced and they were the victim.
Plenty of people have been scammed on microSD cards, a common target for this fraud, because they didn't know how to properly test them and never pushed the capacity until after the return period.
It's a mild inconvenience, the customer is hardly the victim. I'm for regulation of bad corporate actors, but punishing for mediocre customer service is going too far.
When I bought a new NZXT AOI cooler Amazon sent me the original box with a fake seal sticker on it. The original contents were taken out and the box was filled with an old used Corsair cooler and some random electronics. Even the manual was replaced with one for a pull up bar.
Amazon could have known the sticker was fake because it was just a blank sticker without a logo and the box should be completely sealed in plastic when new.
If this is a "mild inconvenience" to the individual who has to deal with identifying that their product is not what they ordered and returning it, are you suggesting that Amazon--a company with a $1.4 TRILLION market cap--is somehow the real victim?
- In Amazon's case, it is only Amazon that is that victim of its mistakes: if they decide it's more efficient to give money to scammers than to avoid getting scammed, I couldn't care less.
- In the case of Google and Facebook, they're not the victims for disrespecting their user's privacy, their users are. So, regulators should keep making the fines larger until it really really hurts them.