Amazon Delivery Drivers Part Of Theft Ring Selling 'Millions' in Stolen Goods on Amazon (go.com) 84
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
The two contract delivery drivers working for Amazon had a clear-cut assignment: They were supposed to bring packages from a warehouse south of Seattle to a post office for shipping, or sometimes drive to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to pick up items that were being returned to the company. Instead, the FBI said in a search warrant affidavit unsealed last month, they routinely stole the items and sold them at pawn shops.
A police detective last summer noticed that one of the drivers had dozens of pawn shop transactions, and thus began an investigation that uncovered a theft ring that sold millions of dollars' worth of stolen goods on Amazon.com in the past six years, the FBI said... Amazon told investigators that Zghair stole about $100,000 worth of property, including gaming systems, sporting goods and computer products -- items he sold to one of the pawn shops for less than $20,000, the agent wrote...
Detectives staked out the pawn shops, Innovation Best in Kent and Thrift-Electro in Renton, and observed that they appeared to be paying shoplifters and drug users cash for new items from Home Depot, Lowes and Fred Meyer department stores. Unlike typical pawn shops, they didn't make sales; instead, the products were moved to a warehouse and to Amazon "fulfillment centers," from where they were shipped when they were sold on Amazon's website by sellers using the handles "Bestforyouall" or "Freeshipforyou," the affidavit said.
Police say the pawn shops had received 48,000 items over the past six years -- for which they'd paid $4.1 million -- including razors, electric toothbrushes, and allergy medicine.
A police detective last summer noticed that one of the drivers had dozens of pawn shop transactions, and thus began an investigation that uncovered a theft ring that sold millions of dollars' worth of stolen goods on Amazon.com in the past six years, the FBI said... Amazon told investigators that Zghair stole about $100,000 worth of property, including gaming systems, sporting goods and computer products -- items he sold to one of the pawn shops for less than $20,000, the agent wrote...
Detectives staked out the pawn shops, Innovation Best in Kent and Thrift-Electro in Renton, and observed that they appeared to be paying shoplifters and drug users cash for new items from Home Depot, Lowes and Fred Meyer department stores. Unlike typical pawn shops, they didn't make sales; instead, the products were moved to a warehouse and to Amazon "fulfillment centers," from where they were shipped when they were sold on Amazon's website by sellers using the handles "Bestforyouall" or "Freeshipforyou," the affidavit said.
Police say the pawn shops had received 48,000 items over the past six years -- for which they'd paid $4.1 million -- including razors, electric toothbrushes, and allergy medicine.
How did that even work? (Score:5, Interesting)
The article doesn’t explain this either - how on earth can you pick up hundreds of packages for Amazon, not deliver them to the warehouse (or post office), and not have Amazon notice? It wasn’t even Amazon who got suspicious... the detective was looking at pawn shop transactions, for Pete’s sake.
I can’t believe Amazon’s logistics are that sloppy.
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I suspect the delivery drivers drove past the delivery sites and pretended to deliver the items, checking off all of the electronic signatures, etc. I bet it looked to Amazon like the items were actually delivered. A lot of people complain about their Amazon orders being stolen off their front porch, and Amazon may not have made the connection that all of the missing packages were these particular drivers. Since objects are fungible, there's no connection between one person's missing electronic toothbrus
Re: How did that even work? (Score:1)
Holy shit!
Coordinated as hell.
I thought my nightmare was bad. I have a piano and I bought a custom auto tuner that fits right under the lid (in westerns people kept guns in pianos so there's room). It's about the size of a couple of bricks or a really thick book. It's raspberry pi based so it's a pretty neat tech item. Anyway, my house was broken into and they actually went so far as to take the tuner and pawn it. I found it on eBay among thousands of similar items.
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Why would you call this coordinated? This kind of theft has been part of parcel delivery services for every delivery company throughout my lifetime.
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lot of people complain about their Amazon orders being stolen off their front porch, and Amazon may not have made the connection that all of the missing packages were these particular drivers.
Read TFS again. These weren't drivers delivering orders to Amazon customers; these were drivers who were supposed to be delivering merchandise from Amazon warehouses to post offices or airports. No front porches involved.
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Isn't the idea that you skim a few from each truckload, perhaps even being selective about which destination load you skimmed from, it might take Amazon forever to figure out what the commonality was when some were returns and others were non-deliveries to different zip codes.
They might have identified a black hole in internal tracking that made it "safe" to skim. It sounds like the way this was defeated wasn't via Amazon, but some kind of cop sleuthing of pawn shops.
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This is the only way that I can think of where it would actually work. End delivery drivers can't directly steal or have an accomplice steal too much from their own routes, Amazon's own data analytics should catch if Johnny's routes suffer disproportionate theft and either he'd be reassigned or let go as a result.
The returns angle makes the most sense. There are several discount retailers around here that sell Amazon returns. I assume that if they get those returns legitimately they're buying pallets of
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I know in most places pawn shops are pretty heavily regulated and are often required to maintain detailed information about people that sell property there to discourage theft and fencing stolen goods. They might even be forced to cross-check sellers against a law enforcement provided list of convicted thieves before accepting a transaction.
I'm guessing that convicting a pawn shop of accepting stolen goods is almost impossible -- who has the proof of purchase of anything, except for a few high-value items?
Re:How did that even work? (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazon was busy monitoring eBay for the stolen items, never believing the thieves would be brazen enough to sell on Amazon itself, and almost nobody thought the thieves would be genius enough to actually pawn the items in the same area they were stolen.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Wouldn't that be considered a line segment then?
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*chuckle*
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Amazon is set to clear $258.22 billion in US retail sales in 2018, according to eMarketer's figures, which will work out to 49.1 percent of all online retail spend in the country, and 5 percent of all retail sales.
They have cornered the stolen package market, also, and too.
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The article doesnâ(TM)t explain this either - how on earth can you pick up hundreds of packages for Amazon, not deliver them to the warehouse (or post office), and not have Amazon notice? It wasnâ(TM)t even Amazon who got suspicious
At this scale you'd think a human at Amazon would have eventually been involved, but at the small scale this apparently happens frequently according to 3rd party sellers.
Basically no matter what goes wrong, the automated system dings the seller as at fault, and the mess gets dumped in their lap. Even from what I've seen, Amazon doesn't listen much to the sellers.
So the seller ships the item, it goes missing "internally", the customer complains they never got the item, and the seller gets flagged as having
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They didn't, it's clickbait (Score:4, Informative)
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They're packages Amazon doesn't really care about - stuff like returns and such. Returns are annoying to deal with - co
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Similar scam for Amazon Package Store (Score:5, Insightful)
The Amazon package store clerks run a similar scam. It only works on "counter pickups", where a customer has many small items. They hand over 5 or 6 boxes, holding back the one or two that are valuable in the back. Of course, all the boxes have been scanned as delivered to the user.
They then ask the customer if "that's everything". Most of the time, the customer can't fully inventory all items, particular if some orders have 2 or 3 to a box. They literally have to open each item in the store, reconcile them with what's still pending/not yet delivered, and compare with what the online site says they just picked up. Most just haul their boxes to the car and discover the problem at home. Since the stolen item was scanned as delivered, you can't dispute it online (the web site disables those reporting options). And if you return to the Amazon pickup location, they tell you to try customer service.
Meanwhile, the scanned-and-withheld item is taken home at shift end. I've seen this happen to a few friends, and even had it tried on me once. My advice is to check all items at pickup, no matter how crowded the store, and how long the wait. Or order items in smaller quantity or combine all items into a single box for shipment, so it is easier to reconcile.
An better solution would be to pay the Amazon works a living wage, so theft is rare, a not a survival strategy.
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My advice is to check all items at pickup, no matter how crowded the store, and how long the wait. Or order items in smaller quantity or combine all items into a single box for shipment, so it is easier to reconcile.
If you have to drive to a store to pick up your Amazon order, why not just drive to a retailer (e.g. Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc.) and buy what you need there?
Doesn't ordering from Amazon only to have to drive to another physical location to pick up your order defeat the purpose of online ordering (i.e. convenience of not having to drive somewhere to get items)?
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If you have to drive to a store to pick up your Amazon order, why not just drive to a retailer (e.g. Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc.) and buy what you need there?
There is an Amazon Locker about 1 mile from my house. The closest Walmart is 6 miles.
Many items on Amazon are not available in stores. A large retail store may have 50,000 different products for sale. Amazon has millions.
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So laziness? Also Amazon locker is not an Amazon store.
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If you have to drive to a store to pick up your Amazon order, why not just drive to a retailer (e.g. Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc.) and buy what you need there?
Even if I had to drive directly to one of those retailers to pick up my Amazon purchases, Amazon would still have broader selection and lower prices.
Most retail is going away, and good riddance. I can't even get a good feel for a product in store conditions, so I'm dependent on reviews to determine what's worth buying anyway. Why would I then I want to go to the store? The only things I really need right now are food, clothes, and shelter. Clothing stores make sense, because electronic fitment is in its inf
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If you have to drive to a store to pick up your Amazon order, why not just drive to a retailer (e.g. Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc.) and buy what you need there?
Doesn't ordering from Amazon only to have to drive to another physical location to pick up your order defeat the purpose of online ordering (i.e. convenience of not having to drive somewhere to get items)?
Because Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc. do not have what I want and make it too difficult to order.
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My advice is to check all items at pickup, no matter how crowded the store, and how long the wait. Or order items in smaller quantity or combine all items into a single box for shipment, so it is easier to reconcile.
You can't choose to combine items into a single box. You can order a bunch of stuff at once and have it broken up into a psuedorandom number of shipments based on who is fulfilling it, and where it is warehoused.
Wonder if stolen items went thur Amazon twice (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sore all over (Score:2)
What are these maroons thinking? Any half-ass company will track failed shipments vs. segment and who had it, and they will stick out like a sore thumb.
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What are these maroons thinking? Any half-ass company will track failed shipments vs. segment and who had it, and they will stick out like a sore thumb.
You'd think so. But that is not how they were caught.
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Looks like Slashdot is feeling generous lately, last time I used "maroon" in exactly the same way I was accused of racism.
Amazon security is incompetent (Score:2)
This should have come through loud and clear in the shrink metrics. Amazon completely dropped the ball on this. There's really no excuse besides gross incompetence/negligence.
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not only that, but high ticket (and many not-so-high value but with rapid turnover potential) items have scannable serial numbers that manufacturers, wholesalers, warehouses and retailers all track. amazon themselves couldn't figure out that third-party merchants were submitting for fulfillment program inventory the same fucking serial numbers that were already in the system.
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Do remember that sometimes people buy something, then sell it later. If I buy something from Amazon, then sell it in a garage sale later, and the buyer then sells it on Amazon, there's nothing illegal/immoral/fattening going on, so Amazon would have no particular reason to give a rat's ass about it....
AI (Score:3)
Death of the pawn shop industry (Score:2)
So, hang on, the police get a record of all pawn shop transactions, and they regularly trawl through them?
That groaning sound was the sound of an industry - a small one, granted - dieing with a knife through the heart.
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A number of states passed laws requiring this kind of pawn shop record keeping and automatic transmission to law enforcement to try to crack down on pawn shops laundering stolen goods.
AFAIK all states require the record keeping on all transactions but not very many have automatic transfer of these logs to law enforcement.