Amazon Takes Counterfeit Sellers To Court For First Time (cnbc.com) 62
For the first time, Amazon is taking counterfeit sellers to court. The move comes after several sellers expressed strong concerns about their businesses getting ripped off by Amazon, which is not doing anything to curb distribution of fake, poor quality products on its ecommerce platform. Notably, even Apple had said recently that a lot of its accessories listed on Amazon are fake products. From a CNBC report: On Monday, Amazon filed suit against a group of sellers for infringing on athletic training equipment developed by TRX. In a second case, Amazon sued sellers who are offering fake versions of a patented moving product called Forearm Forklift. [...] There's no way Amazon can litigate away the problem. The company generates over $75 billion a year in commerce, and about half the volume now comes from third-party sellers. However, with Amazon showing its willingness to take abusers to court, the company can at least hope to deter counterfeit sellers with the threat of potential legal action.
fake carbon fiber (Score:2)
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Fake as in not made from carbon fiber or just cheap?
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Better yet (Score:2, Interesting)
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Then Amazon would be liable when they make a sale. Knew and facilitated anyways.
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As the payments to marketplace sellers are made via Amazon, could Amazon not "follow the money"? Thus forcing a banned seller to use a new (bank) account to receive payments from Amazon as well as registering with a new name and email.
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That's easier said than done. With scammers like these, when you stomp one account into the ground, a new one pops up the next day to take its place, and nothing ever improves.
Re:Better yet - Give manufacturers control (Score:2)
Better yet allow manufacturers to police their own products.
1) Allow Apple to take down any product listed with the words "official" and "Apple", "iPhone", "iPod", etc. Allow Apple to ban sellers of counterfeit Apple products (with the right of the seller to appeal). Have consequences (fees) if Apple incorrectly reports sellers so that it isn't like the DMCA with no consequences for false reporting.
2) Allow manufactures to specify a list of approved re-sellers on amazon.com. For products with a lot of co
Their mixed stock is going to hurt there case as i (Score:1)
Their mixed stock is going to hurt there case as it contaminates the evidence
Connect product reviews to sellers? (Score:5, Insightful)
As the summary notes, there's no way Amazon can police the system adequately with the way it currently functions. At best, it can hope to dissuade some counterfeiters through threat of litigation.
However, to my mind, the real problem is Amazon's lack of transparency when it comes to evaluating and purchasing products from 3rd-party sellers. Amazon will just default to a lower priced listing from some random company, and unless you're paying attention, you could end up purchasing from someone else. There should be a much stronger "flag" that goes up before you can do this -- otherwise, Amazon risks getting sued for liability when people think they're purchasing stuff "from Amazon" but they get defective crap from somewhere else.
But one further issue -- what about linking product reviews (particularly for "verified purchases") to SELLER? If I'm going to be purchasing a product X from company Y rather than Amazon, I should be able to -- in some easy fashion -- just get reviews of X from Y.
I'm sure we've all seen reviews on Amazon that say, "I purchased batteries from [this company], and they're fake!" It should be transparent to find such reviews. So even if the product X has 1000 reviews with an average of 4.5 stars, if the 20 reviews from company Y say, "Beware -- this thing is a piece of junk, not as advertised!" a customer has a chance of making a more informed decision.
(Obviously, lots of reviews on Amazon are fake anyway, and there's all sorts of problems there too. But this would at least be something a customer could try before just blindly purchasing a product from some random 3rd-party company.)
Web of Trust (Score:2)
Before Creative Labs brought out the MuVo MP3 players, that name was attached to a music-selling site which they paid to have developed and then did not bother to go live with. I configured and documented the hardware that they didn't use. I forget, sadly, what I'd heard they did with it afterwards. It was nothing too special, just some Compaq servers with a dual-attach FC RAID. The music info came from allmusic. What was interesting (and relevant to this discussion) was the software, which implemented a we
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Worse than that amazon operates commingled inventory. With commingled inventory the seller you select is simply the one who gets your money, not nessacerally the one who supplied the product.
In general for products with high counterfieting risk I would advise avoiding amazon completely.
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For me, the "flag" is usually when there's no free shipping option on something. Only stuff sold by Amazon counts for that.
Fake apologies (Score:1)
They won't be sincere because in Asian culture it is considered an honor to be copied. To create something so unique and desirable that 1000 people try to re-create your perfection is the pinnacle.
Re:Fake apologies (Score:5, Insightful)
They won't be sincere because in Asian culture it is considered an honor to be copied. To create something so unique and desirable that 1000 people try to re-create your perfection is the pinnacle.
And when people try to re-create a product and ultimately fail in doing so, resulting in harm or death to others, is that also considered an "honor"?
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They didn't fail. They did exactly what they were paid for. Companies elsewhere generally (there are exceptions) won't take on contracts to produce goods that of such shit quality they harm the user. Chinese companies are.
China is the extreme example of "you get what you pay more". More money into the product = more safety and quality. Less money = lower quality and less safety. All the way down to building a non-working 5 cent USB power adapter that the prongs fall out of (which weren't connected to
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Considering all the copyright lawsuits Asian companies like Samsung and Huawei file where on earth are you getting this idea?
Amazon (Score:2, Insightful)
IANAL, but what basis does Amazon have to be suing these counterfeiters?
They aren't the trademark holders. From Amazon's point of view, all they did was violate the TOS.
Shouldn't Amazon just spot them, shut them down and pass along any relevant information to law enforcement and the trademark holders and let THEM handle it? I don't think Amazon wants to be in the position where they have to play trademark police. We saw how well that worked out with the DMCA...
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IANAL, but what basis does Amazon have to be suing these counterfeiters?
My guess is that it's a huge violation of the ToS.
The fraudulent acts hurt Amazon's business (Score:2)
The sellers a) engaged in unlawful acts which b) harmed Amazon's business. Amazon can therefore sue for damages. proving the amount of damages will be tricky, that may be negotiated.
> Shouldn't Amazon just spot them, shut them down
Yes, Amazon should close the scammers' accounts, and they do, then the scammer sets up a new account the next morning.
> pass along any relevant information to law enforcement and the trademark holders and let THEM handle it?
In one of the two cases mentioned in TFA, the trade
Amazon is becoming Alibaba (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I pretty clearly see that Amazon is headed down the dark road where Alibaba's always been. Amazon *used to* be a platform you could trust, at least most of the time. But now? With all these direct-from-China sellers on it? These people are sharks and they know every trick in the book.
A lot of them really don't know how to make money other than shenanigans. The idea that they should offer an honest product and run a good business, get a reputation, etc.? Foreign ideas. The counterfeiter idea is that the only way to win is to rip people off, and when they get burned and don't buy from you again, well don't worry there are billions more people out here and you don't need repeat business. A lot of these scammers operate on razor thin or zero margins, and they go bankrupt all the time. I really don't think it was a good idea for Amazon to open up to them.
What Amazon should do is go to Alibaba and hire away some of their anti-fraud department. Start playing whack-a-mole. It's just not going to get better any time soon. The winners are going to be the counterfeiters, and the losers are going to be Amazon honest sellers. It's a real tragedy.
Re:Amazon is becoming Alibaba (Score:4, Informative)
I was adding a battery to my boat meant to be easily removable and bought a set of Anderson PowerPole DC connectors off Amazon. They were terrible knockoffs that wouldn't create a reliable circuit when properly assembled. It's not hard to see counterfeits from this category causing a fire.
There's maybe a large class of products where counterfeiting may not matter, but outright counterfeiting of legitimate brand named products ought not to be tolerated.
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Except that it's often NOT the same quality. Compare a genuine Music Man Stingray or Rickenbacker 4003 electric bass to the bullshit counterfeits that flood Alibaba, and then come back and tell me they're equivalent.
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Yeah, I pretty clearly see that Amazon is headed down the dark road where Alibaba's always been. Amazon *used to* be a platform you could trust, at least most of the time. But now? With all these direct-from-China sellers on it? These people are sharks and they know every trick in the book.
And yet Common F. Sense can often spot a fake product from a valid one based on price alone, making me wonder who really is to blame.
Buying a $2 "Apple" charger that normally sells at a fixed price ten times higher and you really thought it was a legitimate product? Fucking please.
Yes, I'm all for going after counterfeiters, but far too often we are practically rewarding stupidity and ignorance by not pointing it out. Being a cheap-ass comes at a price sometimes, especially with products that are held to
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Bullshit. I've brought a fair number of full priced products from Amazon's associates only to find they were fake. They were listed against the genuine items' pages but out of stock in Amazon, so I chose the also-sold-buy option. It it trivial for them to sell fake batteries and packaging, as well as dangerous PSUs in identical cases and plastic contains. So fuck off yourself. The problem is not limited to gray products, the criminals have identically looking products down to the injection moulded cases and
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Bullshit. I've brought a fair number of full priced products from Amazon's associates only to find they were fake.
A fair number implies you went back again and again after not learning your lesson the first time regarding grey market products on Amazon.
And you're too cheap to buy directly from the manufacturer or a more legitimized retailer to mitigate risk when it is important to do so (like car parts, batteries, and power supplies)
'Nuff said.
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This isn't really a counterfeiting "problem" - the counterfei
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No, the $2 Apple chargers aren't real. Folks have disassembled them and found serious design horrors in the counterfeit supplies. The outside cases are probably made in the same factories, but not the guts.
It took Apple a lot of effort to design power supplies that fit into such a small space and are still safe. The counterfeiters don't use their designs because they're too complex and cost too much money to make. Instead, they use hack designs that are cheaper to manufacturer and significantly more da
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What I wish Amazon would do is give me preferences settings in the account configuration where I can turn off non-certified sellers from any of a number of foreign countries, China being one of them. This would let the users vote with their wallets and Amazon would soon figure out that it is better off cultivating a number of key relationships with quality vendors in China, rather than flooding their marketplace with junk. On the other end, in China becoming a quality producer of goods for Amazon would be
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Because nobody wants to buy from the "legitimate" sellers because it's twice as expensive as just buying it locally. People want to buy from the counterfeiters because their products are exactly the same quality as the legitimate ones, but at far lower prices.
Amazon doesn't want to pass up this revenue stream because they know people won't buy on Amazon if their prices are always higher than retail, but they have to do "something" because the owners of the trademarks, patents, and copyrights are screaming m
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That simply isn't true, and anybody claiming otherwise is kidding themselves. At my previous employer, they were cheap and bought generic fake Lightning cables that looked like the Apple cables. The average life expectancy was about a week. By contrast, the typical life of real Lightning cables is measured in years, because unlike the fakes, the real authenticatio
Stop combining sellers for "identical" products (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish they would stop the practice of combining a bunch of sellers for a given product. It makes the reviews even less worthwhile because you don't know if a couple of bad sellers pushing fakes are tied to the bad reviews, nor do you know who the legitimate sellers associated with the good reviews.
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And Amazon also combines the products in their warehouses if the third party seller uses Amazon for shipping. So you might purchase from Amazon LLC, but get the fake product from the third party seller.
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I don't think that's true, frequently the specific vendor has some ID on the actual product package that came fulfilled from amazon and they usually match. If you just click 'buy' without picking a seller you'll get mystery meat.
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The amazon term is "stickerless comingled inventory". Sellers can choose to have their products commingled with that of other sellers and that of amazon itself. From the sellers side this saves having to label up the products with seller information. From amazon's side this presumablly makes logistics more efficient.
Which works great until you have unscrupulous sellers introducing substandard (fake, damaged, not new, not the correct model etc) into the supply chain. Customers can order from a reputable sell
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The amazon term is "stickerless comingled inventory".
This is really interesting, and I didn't know this.
Now the problem is that I'm shopping right now for USB-C cables. Cables that adhere to the standard are notoriously hard to find. For instance, _all_ USB-C to USB-C cables have to carry at least 60W (20V @ 3A) but there's lots of shit out there that'll lie about that, and heat up. Now imagine what happens if you forgot and hooked up a 100W MacBook Pro with that cable.
So suppose a buyer wants to avoid buying products that come from "stickerless comingled inv
they better fix it (Score:3)
"Go Ahead, Sue Me" (Score:2)
You typically need to sue in a US court if you want to get any reasonable settlement that covers your effort and costs. If Amazon wins the lawsuit, and the loser doesn't pay the judgement, then Amazon can seize all their US assets.
And if the offshore vendor doesn't have any US assets?
Ummmm
Lawsuit: Fail