Comment by ck2

7 years ago

there's a new trick/scam on amazon I am not sure if anyone else has noticed yet

seems designed to trick not only buyers but also sites like fakespot

a vendor lists an item for awhile, something cheap and reliable enough to gather plenty of legit 5-star reviews

then they leave the listing and ASIN but delete and change out the photos and the title/text with another item, not even similar item in some cases

so the ratings/reviews remain but the new product is given all their weight instead

cannot believe amazon does not detect and stop this

3 comments

ck2

Reply
earthshot  7 years ago

There's an e-mail thread going around Amazon about this, internally. The scam is that the fraudulent seller finds an item that is real but out of stock from all sellers. The seller than sends in their inventory, and updates the listing because they are now the only seller of that item.

It really sucks, and I hope we find a way to solve this, soon. It's a terrible customer experience.

  • garmingps  7 years ago

    Wouldn't one easy way to solve be that a human has to approve all changes to the name of an item? Or that name changes that change more than x% of the title have to be approved by a human? Or that all changes only happen after some waiting period? I would think anything that slows this down/makes it even a little harder will have big knock-on effects.