They seem to have a lot of sellers (relatively speaking) that do "triangle fraud". So they sell the part, order it from another site using stolen card, ship to original customer. They could be doing a lot to combat this but basically say "call the police" if they don't just ignore well sourced reports. Moving to more "fulfilled by Amazon" helps but that's never going to cover of all the inventory so fraudsters will always have a home there.
Amazon cares substantially about stopping these things.
As is the case when you are fighting against other humans, who are crafty, financially-motivated, and are willing to break the law, and may be operating from different jurisdictions where attempting to get the DA to prosecute them or filing a lawsuit against them is ineffective, it's a very difficult battle to fight.
As an example I'd be surprised if Amazon could get China to prosecute a business operating from their country that's selling counterfeits on Amazon. Additionally, it's hard for Amazon to know if a product sold in its marketplace is counterfeit: there's no global API or method to look up if a product is authentic. The best you can do is rely on the trust of the seller. If you want to mitigate your risk, buy products that are only sold by Amazon itself, or name-brand 3rd party sellers who have high reputation (like Belkin for electronics; Apple even lists Belkin products that integrate with theirs on Apple's online store: https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/power-cables?fh=4... ).
People occasionally experience counterfeits, but once reported the seller is typically caught and banned. (But if they're a corporation in another country, and willing to break the law and ToS, they'll reincorporate under another name and try to do it again. Stopping this is difficult.)
Reviews are also a difficult problem to tackle. Amazon decided long ago to allow people to leave reviews without purchases, though reviews from people who purchased the item get an extra "verified purchase" badge. But that doesn't stop the abusers: they "buy" the item under various accounts they've created themselves, give the product a good review, and then return it to their own inventory. Small sellers might get a bunch of friends & family to do this, which would be hard to detect as ToS-violating conspiracy; larger sellers will use sophisticated schemes to create many accounts and identities to do the same thing (or simply pay a network of actual people to do it, such as by asking on Craigslist and similar places), to boost reviews of their own products, or if they're willing to burn cash, buy and negatively-review products of competitors. When done from many names/addresses/credit cards/IP addresses, it requires sophisticated intelligence analysis to detect and stop.
Please consider the attackers that Amazon is actually up against when trying to stop these abusive behaviors before concluding that they don't care. They have multiple hundreds of people working on the problems. They are simply hard problems to solve, because Amazon is fighting against other smart, sophisticated humans who gain financially from their abuse.
Amazon could shut down its marketplace, which accounts for 50% or more of all sales on the store, and only sell products it acquires directly from manufacturers, but that would destroy many businesses who have built themselves up using Amazon as a primary venue to sell their product. Furthermore, it would disallow people who have legitimately acquired the product another way from reselling it--for example, say I buy a pallet of some authentic product from a retail store that's going out of business; shouldn't I be able to resell those products? The law says that I can. If Amazon has a marketplace, shouldn't I be able to resell there? These could be Nike shoes or any name-brand products.
(Sophisticated manufacturers who want to protect their supply chains from 3P reselling will repurchase inventory from retailers who are going out of business; or alternatively provide it to retailers on consignment --meaning Nike owns all the shoes being sold in a retailer's store up until the point where they're sold to a consumer; so upon going out of business the retailer is expected to return the inventory.)
Now you run into tricky situations. I buy a pair of Nike shoes brand new from a retail store and never use them. I decide I don't like their look after all. Should I be able to sell my shoes on Amazon as new at a lower price than Nike does? Yes, you should and you can (though you're unlikely to be selected as the default offer as a new untrusted seller with a single product; unless Nike is one of the companies with brand protection for what may be offered as "new"; though I believe you could still sell as "like new"--I am not an expert on this space).
Some brands were counterfeited so frequently that Amazon has started to offer the ability to limit who can sell trademark-protected items that are only sold by their manufacturers with its Brand Registry: https://brandservices.amazon.com/
I believe the sellers who are accused of fraud or counterfeiting will be asked by Amazon to provide proof of authenticity, such as purchase orders from the manufacturer or other proof of authentic origin, but allowing people to open accounts and sell means they start with a presumption of trust -- creating the possibility that some people will have bad experiences with counterfeiters until they're caught and shut down.
Imagine you're the Amazon engineer responsible for figuring out how to stop people willing to break the law and all of your policies to make profit; then put yourself in an attacker's shoes and imagine all the things you could do to circumvent the best ideas you can come up with for stopping fraudulent reviews and counterfeits. (Assume for the sake of argument that your company is committed to allowing third-parties to sell on the store.)
I don't buy it. This is why companies have (sometimes government-mandated) know-your-customer policies.
Allowing anyone to sign up and do business on your platform with minimal friction is great for growing your platform, but it's terrible for growing a trustworthy platform.
The things you bring up are the result of an allow-all policy with a denylist. Deny-all with an allowlist would fix the problem. But of course that costs a lot more to implement, and as long as people still buy stuff on Amazon despite the hassle of dealing with counterfeits, Amazon will continue to fail to fix the problem.
> Amazon cares substantially about stopping these things.
And yet Amazon doesn't even let their customers choose the correct reason for returns when they receive counterfeit items. Instead of being able to choose "This item is a counterfeit" or "I believe this item is a counterfeit", the customer must choose between reasons for their return that aren't entirely accurate, like "Inaccurate website description" or "Item defective or doesn't work".
You'd think that a company that claims it is throwing vast amounts of resources at stopping counterfeiting on their platform would at least try to collect data on the counterfeits their customers receive.
They care substantially, yet still don't have the ability for users to report counterfeit and fraudulent goods in their report form reasons after 25 years.
Yeah, I've personally run into that myself. It's not that the listings are being renamed, it's typically that the seller is listing their product as a "variation" of the other product has has good reviews.
What you're describing is another kind of abuse called Listing Abuse, specifically Variation Abuse. If you encounter Listing Abuse, use the link on the page "Report Incorrect Product Information" [1] and say that the product is experiencing Listing/Variation Abuse, and give a couple examples of reviews that are clearly for unrelated products. It will be investigated, taken down/unlinked from those reviews, and the seller will be punished as appropriate.
("Variations" are products that have different SKUs but are all linked together and share reviews, such as the same product that comes in different colors or patterns or sizes. For example, the Speedo Swim Cap has 20+ color and pattern variations: https://www.amazon.com/Speedo-Silicone-Solid-Swim-Black/dp/B... . Each is actually a distinct product SKU, but since they're all functionally the same, just with different colors or patterns, they have one page and share reviews.)
The fundamental problem that makes Listing Abuse hard to stop is that, if you allow people to sell on your store, that means you allow them to enter their own product information -- which you don't have any way to verify. There's no World Authority for Product Information that you can check against. And not all sellers use Fulfillment-by-Amazon where Amazon holds the inventory; plenty of sellers ship the product themselves, meaning that Amazon never has an opportunity to see or inspect the product. Even if Amazon had a policy requiring new sellers to ship a product to Amazon to inspect, that wouldn't stop malicious sellers from shipping something different to customers.
Sellers have a lot of power to describe the products they're selling that they legitimately need. Unfortunately this means they have the power to list their products as variations of other highly-rated products to falsely make them look like they have a lot of good reviews. This is another one of those problems that is difficult to solve, because you need to give sellers access to describe their products to support legitimate usage patterns, like adding a new variation. (Like Speedo deciding to offer yet another color or pattern beyond their existing 20+).
All that being said, I agree that this should really be one of the easier types of fraud to stop, and don't understand why it's taking so long for the company to shut it down effectively. I think they need to build some machine learning systems that compares product information to review content when new variations are created, to flag likely variation abuse for human review. I also don't understand why variations are not required to all be shown on a single page (which would stop the abuse); there are probably legitimate use-cases that require it.
imagine hiring a thousand people to do the work while engineering is figuring out how to make them redundant, eventually. not every problem needs a technical AI solution. if people need to be a part of the process, so be it. just don't pretend it's too difficult because somehow the scale of the problem on other platforms simply doesn't compare.
