[VocaloidDude]

So, I have looked at several headphones on amazon, the beyerdynamic tesla t1, and I just looked at the hifiman he6, and there's so many scammers on these selling pages. The scammers always have "contact me before you buy" in either their name and/or item description. I literally decided to order from one of these sellers, but I clicked on one-click order so the payment went through amazon, and it was cancelled by the person I ordered it from less than an hour later. There's soooooooo many of these scammers, on multiple different headphones that I have seen of the higher quality range. I reported this to amazon about the t1s over the phone, and they seem to have disappeared when I woke up this morning, the fake sellers on that particular headphone. But it's just aggravating to see that so many of these blatant scammers remain on all of these different headphones, and I've seen it on more than just these two pairs of headphones. 

 

[Mython]

Yes, there's been lots of discussion about scammers on Amazon, scattered throughout head-fi threads, this past few months.
 
 
Another scammer trick, on Amazon, is catching unwary noobs with vastly-inflated prices, implying that the product has a super-duper 5 yr mega magic warranty, blah-blah-blah. I've seen it on all sorts of things, including powertools.
 
IMO, Amazon is actually quite disgraceful in how much of this activity they fail to police, on their website, and I've been thoroughly cheesed-off, in the past, at how awkward they make it for people to report the activity. It's amazing how a company can spend years building a reputation for customer service, and then allow all sorts of a$$h0l3s to run rampant, scamming their customer-base.
 
 
As ever.... Buyer-beware! 

 

[chaos215bar2]

Indeed, this has definitely gotten worse over the past few years.
 
Always look at who you're buying from on Amazon. If something isn't shipped from and sold by Amazon, I'll also usually look at the list of sellers, with a particular eye to shipping timeframes.
 
I've had several instances where Amazon defaulted to listing with an expected delivery date a couple weeks out, when I could pay a few cents to a couple dollars more to buy the same thing with Prime shipping (sometimes even same/next day and frequently sold by Amazon itself). I've also seen cases where an item was backordered by a few days from Amazon, so they showed a different, more expensive listing by default.

 

[chaos215bar2]

Obviously Amazon does care about scammers. Obviously whatever they're doing isn't good enough, and yes, ultimately that falls on the CEO.

 

[Music Alchemist]

Fortunately, even if you are scammed, Amazon can take care of things for you. I once bought some CDs from various Amazon sellers that ended up being bootleg copies. One of the sellers wasn't even aware they were bootleg copies. Another seller didn't reply. In both cases, I got a refund, and they even let me keep the CDs.
 
I guess it's a good idea to go with sellers with fulfillment by Amazon. At least that lowers the risk of being scammed.

 

[chaos215bar2]

As long as you pay through the normal checkout process you're fairly safe. Yes, the scammer gets your mailing address, but they probably don't care about it anyway.
 
The kind of scam the OP described is a little different. Here, the seller asks you to contact them in the item description. Generally the goal is to get you to pay outside of Amazon in a manner that isn't easily reversible. (I hear gift cards are one method.) Obviously this is a terrible idea and very much against Amazon's TOS. If you actually buy the item normally, the seller will just cancel the order.
 
I'm not sure why anyone sees an item listed with condition "~MUST-CONTACT BEFORE ORDER!! ^^REDACTED*(-AT*) REDACTED**.COM*!!" and actually sends an email to the address, but I guess some people have a really hard time resisting a deal, obvious scam or not. (Yes, I just copied that straight from a real Amazon listing.)

 

[VocaloidDude]

I actually messaged one of those email addresses and said "why do I have to message you first" and got no reply lol! Hopefully they won't try to steal my information or hack my email or something, ******* scum of the earth. Too bad no one's ever come up with an absolute system for morality that gives all people incentive to act good towards each other, but I believe it's a virtue, god damn it. 

 

[Music Alchemist]

  Hopefully they won't try to steal my information or hack my email or something

 
In my experience, it's likely that any free email address is easily hacked. For example, most of the free email addresses I've had ended up having spam emails sent to them and others from that very email address!

 

[jellofund]

Amazon UK is rampant with these listings at the moment too. Literally every electronic product you look at has at least one dodgy listing and I was really dismayed this evening to see that one of Oxfam UK's regional branches has had it's seller account compromised.
 
I actually managed to contact the owner of one account via their ebay store a few days ago. Poor woman was frantic as her phone had been ringing off the hook with unhappy customers. She told me she'd reported the situation to Amazon but was finding them rather slow to respond. You'd think the first thing they'd do when they get such a report would be to suspend all listings with immediate effect but nearly a day later her account was still showing pages worth of high value items for sale. No doubt her trading rep is now trashed.
 
I'm amazed that Amazon don't have systems in place that effectively spot unusual trading behaviour and flag it up as it stands out like a sore thumb. I mean if a seller normally sells low value party items (e.g. invites and table cloths) in low volumes you would think it would be fairly easy to spot that something is up when overnight they flood their store with 4k TV's, DAPs, laptops etc. and they sell like hotcakes.

 

[Thenewguy007]

I actually messaged one of those email addresses and said "why do I have to message you first" and got no reply lol! Hopefully they won't try to steal my information or hack my email or something, ******* scum of the earth. Too bad no one's ever come up with an absolute system for morality that gives all people incentive to act good towards each other, but I believe it's a virtue, god damn it. 

I think they aren't scammers, just people who want to get around the fee Amazon charges when a item is sold through their website. I think Amazon's cut is something like 10-15% of the final sale.
They advertise on Amazon & when it comes to buying it, they get in contact with you & arrange to buy it outside of Amazon.

As long as they send you a paypal notice, with a clear description of the product, you are good.
Paypal will 100% refund you if you get scammed or get a broken product.

 

[VocaloidDude]

I think they aren't scammers, just people who want to get around the fee Amazon charges when a item is sold through their website. I think Amazon's cut is something like 10-15% of the final sale.
They advertise on Amazon & when it comes to buying it, they get in contact with you & arrange to buy it outside of Amazon.

As long as they send you a paypal notice, with a clear description of the product, you are good.
Paypal will 100% refund you if you get scammed or get a broken product.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh sounds like bs. 

 

[kryten123]

I think they aren't scammers, just people who want to get around the fee Amazon charges when a item is sold through their website. I think Amazon's cut is something like 10-15% of the final sale.
They advertise on Amazon & when it comes to buying it, they get in contact with you & arrange to buy it outside of Amazon.

As long as they send you a paypal notice, with a clear description of the product, you are good.
Paypal will 100% refund you if you get scammed or get a broken product.

 
Sounds like a poor business model to me if they aren't factoring in the fees?
 
...and to clarify a comment above "Fufillment by Amazon" just means the stock is located in an Amazon warehouse. The guys working in the warehouse sending the item out won't know whether the item is legit or not when they box and post. Stick to placing your order through the Amazon payment and you'll have recourse.

 

[Music Alchemist]

  ...and to clarify a comment above "Fufillment by Amazon" just means the stock is located in an Amazon warehouse. The guys working in the warehouse sending the item out won't know whether the item is legit or not when they box and post. Stick to placing your order through the Amazon payment and you'll have recourse.

 
True, but it still lowers the risk. I believe they have measures in place to make things safer. I think they even examine things to see if they're genuine before accepting them into the warehouse, though this assumption could be wrong.

 

[chaos215bar2]

   
In my experience, it's likely that any free email address is easily hacked. For example, most of the free email addresses I've had ended up having spam emails sent to them and others from that very email address!

With a good, unique password in place, any of the major email services are quite safe. Just imagine the fallout if someone were actually able to get into most people's email accounts with such ease. The cases you read about almost invariably involve passwords that were shared with less secure services that became compromised, or passwords that were obtained via targeted phishing and/or social engineering attacks.
 
The problem is, email is fundamentally kind of like regular mail in that you can put whatever return address you want on a letter. (Many email programs and any reputable webmail service won't let you do this without at least verifying you own the the address you're using, but the underlying SMTP protocol does nothing to prevent it.) An email provider can declare valid servers that are allowed to send email under it's domain (e.g. gmail.com), but all it takes is one server that your provider trusts to be misconfigured to get around that.
 

   
True, but it still lowers the risk. I believe they have measures in place to make things safer. I think they even examine things to see if they're genuine before accepting them into the warehouse, though this assumption could be wrong.

I doubt Amazon does much. They're is all about minimizing costs, and it's expensive to have staff on hand trained to spot a wide variety of fake products. You're not going to get an empty box instead of the new headphones you ordered, but if a seller goes through the trouble of using plausible packaging, I wouldn't expect Amazon to spot it.
 
That said, it's really easy to return anything fulfilled by Amazon for a refund if you have any trouble, so I can't imagine a seller getting very far trying to sell fake headphones fulfilled by Amazon.

 

[Nick 214]

  With a good, unique password in place, any of the major email services are quite safe. Just imagine the fallout if someone were actually able to get into most people's email accounts with such ease. The cases you read about almost invariably involve passwords that were shared with less secure services that became compromised, or passwords that were obtained via targeted phishing and/or social engineering attacks.
 
The problem is, email is fundamentally kind of like regular mail in that you can put whatever return address you want on a letter. (Many email programs and any reputable webmail service won't let you do this without at least verifying you own the the address you're using, but the underlying SMTP protocol does nothing to prevent it.) An email provider can declare valid servers that are allowed to send email under it's domain (e.g. gmail.com), but all it takes is one server that your provider trusts to be misconfigured to get around that.
 

This is a great bit of info. Due to a Paypal issue turned ID theft I moved to an end-to-end encrypted email. I use and rather love Tutanota. 
 
NK