The Latest Amazon Fraud

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, conducting much of its business by mail order. This makes the company and its customers easy targets for all manner of scams. If not the latest then the latest in the news in a big way is for a customer ordering an expensive product to receive something far less expensive, junk, or perhaps an empty box.

This happened to Daniel ShenSmith recently, a legal professional who runs the Black Belt Barrister YouTube channel. In a video uploaded late last month he related how he had ordered a piece of electrical equipment for over  six hundred pounds and had received instead cardboard boxes plus a roll of Sellotape. He is in good company, dozens of other people have recently received similar bogus orders.

Some of the comments to this video include (verbatim):

“my partner ordered a graphics card for several hundred pounds and got bubblegum scented tea candles. this happened in the uk, and they took a while to refund it”

And

“I had a similar issue at the launch of the brand new PS5 at the time it was due to be delivered in November 21, and i received the box with all sorts of rubbish in it, fortunately there was quite a lot of this happening and they were able to get me another just before xmas time.”

Other commenters indicate it isn’t only Amazon that has this problem. How does this happen? There are two likely possibilities: one is that it is crooked sellers, the other that it is an internal problem. 

Most likely it is both. In March, a DHL driver in the north of England who stole over £50,000 of goods over a three month period was given a suspended sentence, if you can believe that. He was caught because he stole a tablet that belonged to Amazon; it contained an unreleased program, and this prompted a special investigation. 

There have been far bigger frauds in recent years, some of them organised and directed at the company itself.

Returning to the ShenSmith case, he has created an app which he says will solve the problem of proving fraud for the customer, although preventing this and all the other scams that accompany mail order fraud is another matter.

An obvious way to reduce it is to use Click & Collect, a popular method of ordering and collecting goods. In the UK, Sainsbury’s and many other big stores offer this service. The customer can then open the package in the store in front of staff, although this is clearly not suitable for larger packages.