Can someone point me to a search term that turns up counterfeit goods? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because I hear this complaint all the time, yet have never seemingly encountered it in my 20+ years of using Amazon. I'd be curious to see what they look like.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I feel I must be buying different things?
I did once however report that a power strip I had bought, knowing ahead of time it was super cheap, was designed in such a way that you could touch the live power pins because it was rounded and that I had shocked myself. That report seems to have gone nowhere
If it were possible to get 9800 mah out of an 18650 we might all be flying around with electric jetpacks. About the best capacity possible today is 3600 mah. This has been going on for years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGF9DZcBric
batteries are one of those classes of products (as mentioned elsewhere) where it's 100% impossible to buy anything legitimate on Amazon. Even if what I ordered was an OEM laptop battery (for example) what you would receive is, at best, a knockoff with OEM stickers applied.
It's fraud and Amazon is profiting from it. No amount of rationalization fixes that. If batteries can't be sold without endemic fraud then stop selling batteries. Otherwise you're a fraudster and deserve whatever penalties are appropriate.
The truth is that it is possible to police the suppliers, resellers etc. to prevent this, and Amazon has both the power and resources to do it. Amazon just doesn't give a damn.
I'm a best-selling author. Every few days a 3rd party sells my book as 'New' or 'Like New' for below the sales price. Only issue is, I'm a self-published author, so there is no way they can be getting the book and selling it for less than what I sell it. I've bought the products multiple times, and each time it's a fake copy of my book (different paper quality, typos, missing pages, weirdness in cover design). This isn't happening just to me — across the board, some of the top coding + ML books are counterfeit.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578973839?ref_=pe_3052080_3975148...
An obviously counterfeit listing is the unsubtle way of doing fraud. The subtle way is piggybacking of a real listing, but then shipping a counterfeit for slightly cheaper. Or shipping it for the same price, and making use of the fact that FBA inventory is commingled.
Many people across this thread have commented receiving fake products, incl fake apple products. There are a few WSJ articles about people selling fake name-brand household goods like toothpaste - or even returns/expired products from other American retailers. But I think the most famous one may be "Birkenstock". Birkenstocks are very popular sandals, that are NOT for sale on amazon. The company has litigated with amazon over this, and does not authorize any sales on the platform - since 2017.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I feel I must be buying different things?
I did once however report that a power strip I had bought, knowing ahead of time it was super cheap, was designed in such a way that you could touch the live power pins because it was rounded and that I had shocked myself. That report seems to have gone nowhere