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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

> Why does the actual product need to be delivered to the fake reviewers?

Because Alibaba, and now Amazon require tracking numbers from sellers.

From time to time they take these tracking numbers, and check them with APIs of shipping companies, and postal services. If a seller has too many invalid tracking numbers, or shipments that don't match the address, they rm -rf him.

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But you can ship a packet of flower seeds (cost: 10 cents and a stamp) instead of your expensive product, and your tracking obligation is dealt with.

Yes, exactly.

Congrats, you understand the scam.

Why not check every tracking number when the cost to do so is so low?

I don't think tracking info APIs are particularly cheap at that scale. If the seller runs in high enough volume there is no need to check every single order to smell fraud.

I'm not so sure. I believe Amazon customers are getting a push notification on their mobile device for every delivery notification, which leads me to believe (at least in the case of Amazon) they have the data.

Robustness perhaps based upon "fluke" incidents leading to false positives having worse outcomes from being trigger happy on edge cases.

I'm pretty sure Amazon already does this. I have always received a delivery confirmation straight from Amazon, even for stuff shipped by a third party.

Yeah I am pretty sure Amazon works with most of their shippers because you can usually see all your shipping status information right in Amazon itself without having to leave Amazon to go view it. And like you mentioned there also are delivery notifications.

In fact the shipping company Amazon typically uses in my area takes pictures of their deliveries. So I get an email from the delivery company with a picture, but then Amazon also allows me to view the delivery picture on their site too and notifies me of the picture.

With how much server power Amazon has, I can't imagine them being afraid to make some API calls.

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