I'm more sympathetic to Amazon here than most. Scams are hard to detect. They set up a shipping confirmation process that's worked fine for them for almost two decades now. It has a hole (it only checks the town and has no closed loop to verify that the shipper shipped to the right address in that town), but none of the existing employees actually know that it has a hole. They get a report about a missing shipment, check their process, and it says it was received. Case closed.
This is like trying to report a web site vulnerability to a help desk employee. It doesn't work. You have to escalate until you find someone who understands the root issue, and escalation is messy (and involves blog posts like these).
I dont get why you are being sympathetic towards Amazon. They delivered the package to a WRONG address and then closed the case just because it was delivered to the SAME town ? Don't you see an issue with Amazon's system here ? This is just incompetence and nothing else. I love amazon but this particular case is just incompetence on Amazon's part after the fraud happened.
The author appealed, stating that the delivery address was incorrect. Amazon's rejected the appeal on the basis that the tracking information "shows that someone at your address signed for the package." That's not a mysterious hole that low-level employees are unaware of, that's just inattention on the part of whoever was handling the appeal.
The point was more that "mysterious hole" and "innatention" are mostly the same thing. My words were "scams are hard to detect" and I stand by them. The people you want to be more attentive make hourly wages and probably see thousands of these appeals every week, statistically none of which are creative scams worthy of arguing about on HN.
You're asking too much. Those employees don't exist. You have to get over their heads to people who design the processes, and that sometimes requires writing blog posts and making noise in public.
I don't get how this shows that "scams are hard to detect." This scam was trivial to detect. When the seller's supposed proof of delivery shows a different address, then it's not actually proof of delivery. All it would have taken to detect this was looking at the tracking info and looking at the order's shipping address and observing that they weren't the same.
Yes, obviously something is terribly wrong at Amazon which meant that this simple comparison never happened, but I don't see why we should expect this, or why we should be sympathetic to Amazon about it.
No, it's trivial to understand. It's simply an objective truth that it's hard to detect, given that you and I are hearing about it for the first time in August of the year 2017, when it exploits a USPS tracking data that probably hasn't changed much in 15 years or more. If it's so trivial why didn't you figure it out before? Why haven't Amazon and the post office closed the hole? Why haven't more people been scammed?
Yes, it will be trivial to detect - once double-checking the address becomes part of the procedure for verifying package delivery. If checking the address isn't part of the procedure, then the procedure needs to be modified. Low-paid support people are expected to follow the procedure exactly, so that the company can obtain consistent results.
Unless there's something I'm unaware of, they have no way to check the actual shipping address based on the tracking number without direct cooperation from the shipper. The reason they use the shipping city is that most shippers provide that information about every tracking number. To get more information you have to be the one who shipped the package. In this case amazon was not the one who shipped the package. It was a 3rd party seller who shipped on their own.
In this particular case, the customer was able to get a proof of delivery from USPS which included the recipient's address. Amazon had both the customer's address and the address the package was delivered to, for some reason they just would not or could not notice that they didn't match.
I'd hope that checking the address would be part of the procedure for asserting that the package was delivered to the correct address. If not the first time through, it surely should at least be part of the appeal process.
> My words were "scams are hard to detect" and I stand by them.
Amazon had nothing to detect here. The author did all the job and provided all the evidence. What was required by Amazon was to acknowledge the facts.
If the people that are supposed to provide assistance are not paid enough or have too much work to do to pay attention to what is written in an email, Amazon should, well, pay them more and/or don't overwork them.
It's not the customer's fault that Amazon pays its employees poor wages and asks too much of them. It's Amazon's job to put its employees in positions to do their jobs well.
It has a hole (it only checks the town and has no closed loop to verify that the shipper shipped to the right address in that town), but none of the existing employees actually know that it has a hole.
This is an entirely predictable outcome, especially for the brains at Amazon. This was implemented according to specifications and designs that involved several people, meaning that it was a conscious and deliberate decision to only check the city, which is obviously imprecise. This imprecision does not even require computers to recognize it.
Said someone about every security bug ever. This is the shipping fraud equivalent of "this never would have happened if you used rust". It's not helpful.
Absolutely not. Where even is the bug? It was a policy decision, and while an argument could be constructed that nobody could have known that they'd need to use greater geographic resolution in validating shipping destinations, they already had this data in the form of shipping addresses. This isn't a "640K should be enough for everybody" situation, it's a "nobody will ever want more than 640K" situation.
Yes, but that's why we entrust it to a half-trillion-dollar company. If it were realistic for everyone and their dog to set up a trustworthy marketplace on their Wordpress site, that's what we'd have.
Amazon should be solving hard, messy problems, it's their job.
Wonder if they could prevent this by requiring third party sellers to print amazon shipping labels. That should give amazon the correcting tracking information and ups/usps/fedex/whoever would have the accurate address.
Slightly different case but I have
a camelcamelcamel alert set up for a fountain pen. I got an alert that the price was very low. I could see it was a NEW third party seller. The price was less than half the price Amazon sells it for. I bought it just to see. Indeed it was a terrible fake.
Amazon refunded me but actually I see quite a few of these types of scams on their site.
They could do more to stop these things happening. They really should as it's a waste of time more than anything else.
This is like trying to report a web site vulnerability to a help desk employee. It doesn't work. You have to escalate until you find someone who understands the root issue, and escalation is messy (and involves blog posts like these).