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Amazon is one of the world’s most powerful online retailers. It earns tens of billions of dollars every year by serving hundreds of millions of customers. And, for some, that may justify trying to scam this e-commerce giant.
Today, the most common scams involve hacking into parcel lockers, claiming that a parcel received was empty when in fact it was not, or even emptying parcels before slipping them into buyers’ letterboxes. Many of those responsible for these acts are caught and punished by the law: in France, fraud is punishable by 5 years’ imprisonment and a fine of 375,000 euros.
He scams Amazon with… dirt
In 2019, a Spaniard managed to swindle Amazon out of €330,000 before his greed brought him down. His scam was well-oiled and based on an important point that existed in Amazon’s procedure at the time: when a product was returned by a customer during the 30-day withdrawal period, the package containing it was simply weighed to determine whether the weight corresponded to the returned product. If this criterion was met, no one opened the parcel. And, in most cases, it was destroyed without even being opened, because storing the returns was too expensive for both Amazon and its suppliers.
A young man of 22 decided to take advantage of this information. He started ordering products from Amazon, for various amounts. He then systematically asked for his money back, which led to a return request from the site. But the parcel he sent back did not contain the products he had received: instead, it contained a quantity of soil whose weight corresponded, to the nearest gram, to that of the product to be returned. As a result, once received by the Amazon warehouse, the parcel was weighed and found to be the correct weight, and the fraudster received his refund.
A well-organised scam, but a crook who was too greedy
The scammer could have been content to take advantage of this trick from time to time, perhaps without ever attracting Amazon’s attention. But he chose a different path: he continued to exploit this loophole on a very regular basis and, at the same time, began reselling the products he stole from Amazon on his own site. In all, he managed to recover 330,000 euros thanks to this fraudulent system.
However, the online retailer eventually realised that there was a problem with one of its customers, who was placing massive orders and systematically sending everything back. Amazon’s logistics platform in Barcelona launched an investigation, and began opening the parcels returned by the young Spaniard. That’s when the company’s employees were confronted with kilograms of soil instead of the products that were supposed to have been returned.
A fraudster convicted and practices that have evolved
The scammer served a prison sentence after his actions were exposed. But it also highlighted Amazon’s practices, which have been widely criticised in Europe and elsewhere. In fact, since this incident, Amazon has completely changed its practices, and no longer destroys customer returns. They are either resold in reconditioned versions, or donated to charities when it is impossible to sell them. So it’s no longer possible to fill parcels with dirt, unless you want to get into trouble quickly.
