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Comment by tomarr | Hacker News Reader

The GPS tracker technique does not seem foolproof, basic QA on returned goods would likely be trashing the GPS trackers.

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yeah. what people don’t understand is that the return has to be processed when it comes back. in an ideal world anything like a GPS tracker would surely be discovered.

there are also several issue with how the return may go. amazon may tell you to just keep the item (if the cost of shipping + processing the return is higher that the actual product price / margin on the item). they may decide that the item is in not good condition when it comes back. the packaging may be missing parts or damaged. i would guess that a lot of items don’t make it through the process.

also i would guess that because Amazon keeps existing and making a profit they have this baked into their business model. Also I would be shocked if the return rate is 30-40%. Again guessing, I would say it’s probably 1-2%. A lot of people buy shit they don’t need and keep it.

As far as “hacking the system” I think that they should have a system in place to track how many things you return (and if they were in good condition/could be resold) and how much money they made on your purchases. If overall you’re a net negative I would not be surprised if your account got suspended/banned. Why would they do business with you if you’re a bad actor?

You could surely hide it easily enough in the cardboard? Just wrap it over in parcel tape. The people at the other end will just assume you went a bit overboard in packing.

I think it's safe to assume that the returned item gets taken out of the box that you ship it back to them in, which is then discarded (along with the taped-on tracking device).

GPS emits an EMF, should be easy catch if you are trying.

Also, I wonder if you can catch it with batteries. Does amazon make the seller list the type of battery in their product?

I very much doubt any returns are scanned for GPS wavelength EMF.

this sounds like someone who isn’t thinking about all the edge cases for nuts returning stuff. i would not be surprised if there was a protocol in place for screening against all kinds of things (with emf being the small potatoes)

yes. that’s why i said that it should be caught but probably is not.

it’s also probably borderline illegal to do this kind of things

My read of that was that so little human attention is devoted to returned items that no one noticed a super-suspicious greenboard kicking around in the box.

Everyone probably noticed, but didn't care. I imagine they see a lot of returns where the customer forgot to empty the pockets, or something got mixed in with the returns, etc.

Which would explain why the clothing "went" to an electronic recycler (tracker removed and tossed into e-waste).

I also wonder how much is handled by weight. Weight of returned product != expected weight of product -> something is off and it's probably not worth figuring out.

This. The false positive rate is unknown and therefore the data could be highly misleading.

Exactly, a GPS tracker in the landfill != product in the landfill.

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