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Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is filled to the brim with predominantly Chinese scammers that they have shown no interest in stopping. Scams I've seen:

- 2 pack scammers that sell someone else's product as a bundle, but it costs more to buy the 2 pack than it does to buy the real item twice.

- Listing swaps, where someone will take a commodity listing with lots of reviews and change the listing to sell overpriced broken garbage

- Counterfeiting or extreme product cheapening after a listing receives recommended status

- A mountain of fake review schemes now including this.

These bad actors don't contribute to the Amazon market. There's little reason not to ban them for ToS violations.

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> These bad actors don't contribute to the Amazon market. There's little reason not to ban them for ToS violations.

These bad actors are optimizing for sales, and Amazon benefits from each sale on their marketplace. Their actions result in more money for the bad actors and for Amazon alike.

It's a similar situation to VC-funded social media platforms turning a blind eye to bots and automation early on because bot activity increases growth and engagement metrics, both of which in turn can increase the platform's valuation in future funding rounds or an IPO.

That's gotta be a very short term thing though hasn't it? Honestly Amazon is two, maybe three, knockoffs away from me never using them again (currently: 0). I can't be arsed with faff.. that's why I use Amazon.

It'd be daft for them to not be curbing this!

I believe that they assume they've bought enough goodwill from segments of consumers that things like this don't really matter.

My older relatives generally assume that Amazon will have the best prices online for everything despite that not being the case for 5+ years now.

They're counting on customers like my relatives and yourself not changing their assumptions or habits.

Funny you mention the 2-pack scammers. I was literally just looking for a center-post mounted bike seat for a child yesterday and noticed that exact scam. I thought to myself, "why would someone want a two pack of these bike seats?" Lo and behold the actual product cost less than half as much as the two pack. I didn't realize what was going on, just thought, "this doesn't seem legit" and bought a totally different item. Poor bike-seat manufacturer.

Sure, that sounds good, banning scammers. But then important metrics would not go up and to the right. Metrics executives see! You can't just run around prioritizing the customer experience willy-nilly. Who knows what that would lead to?!? /s

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