Beware Amazon

[Pamela]

[JNugent]

Was the example which arrived in the size you ordered?

Did it cost you as much as £40?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Brian Gaff (Sofa) brought next idea :

Which, I think, is what many suppliers of the cheaper items rely upon - you deciding it is not worth the aggravation of returning. Returning faulty items is free of cost to the buyer on Amazon and Ebay, just takes a tiny amount of effort on your part. If it's a cheap item, likely the seller will just no want to pay costs of return and just refund what you paid.

[charles]

Back in October, I ordered something from Amazon which I decided I didn't need. Printed free return lable, took to shop in village and my refund appeared within hours, Certainly long before it had got back to Amazon.

[alan_m]

Shoes/boots are a problem for me. Fashion for the past 5 years or so seems to dictate that shoes in shops are all narrow fittings. I have to always go to mail order and find suitable wide fittings.

Safety boots or shoes are the exception and they seem to fit irrespective of where found.

[charles]

A now defunct "Barretts" always used to stock wide fittings.

[williamwright]

Clarks have wide fitting shoes.

Bill

[Steve Walker]

I too need wide fittings, but, over the years, I have also found many shoes uncomfortably high on the instep - which I eventually (too late) discovered was a sign of flat feet, which in turn meant that weight was passed through one side of each knee joint, rather than both, resulting in wearing away the cartilage ... the result being being both knees being shot by my mid-30s.

[Dave Plowman (News]

I don't use Amazon much. But ordered up something I wanted quickly from them, as quite a bit cheaper than I could find eleswhere. Only later did I find out it was coming from the US and would take weeks to arrive. So got the one from Ebay 2 days after ordering. Tried to cancel the Amazon one - too late. And only way to get a refund was to post it back at my expense. This was so expensive I sold it on Ebay and lost less than sending it back would have cost.

[williamwright]

Don't refer to ordinary working people as monkeys, please.

Bill

[John Rumm]

Does depend on how the 2FA was being done... one time code to email fails when the attacker has access to a compromised email. Code to SMS can be circumvented by either social engineering the owner of the phone to give up the code, or the mobile operator to shift the number to a new SIM under the attackers control.

Circumventing 2FA using an authenticator app or hardware token is more difficult at the technical level, but there is still scope to social engineer the end user.

[Bob Eager]

Indeed. Saw this only this morning:

"Amazon refusing to investigate missing parcel

Recently ordered a high value item (£1099.97) from Amazon which was protected by a one time password. On the day of delivery the driver rang me asking for directions (not uncommon as people sometimes have difficulty locating our property) and while I was on the phone to him he informed me he had a parcel which required a password and he asked me for the password. I gave it to him and he said he will be with me shortly. He turned up around 10 minutes later and handed me a bunch of parcels (I'd placed multiple orders but most were low value items). Turns out every single order was delivered except for the high value item.

Amazon are claiming it was delivered using a one time password and therefore they will take no further action on the matter. They asked me to make a police report which I did, in all good faith, and after being batted back and forth between police advisors claiming it was amazon's responsibility not mine I did eventually get an officer to send me an email with a reference number which I passed onto Amazon and they still, again, sent back the same copied and pasted response telling me that the tracking shows it was delivered with a one time password and therefore they will take no further action on the matter.

I spoke to multiple advisors on the phone who seemed to understand that, in my unique situation, there was grounds for an investigation but they informed me that their system did not let them escalate to the internal team on the grounds that it was an OTP-Secure delivery and therefore there was nothing they could do.

So they're basically letting the driver run off with my parcel and leaving me £1099.97 short? With no investigation whatsoever? I believe it was my mistake to give the driver the OTP over the phone but he asked for it and it was him I was supposed to give it to so I trusted him to deliver. Biggest mistake of my life. You can't trust anyone these days."

[Robin]

<snip>

How is that /meant/ to work?

Is the driver required to hand over a parcel for someone to check before they get the password - and risk that someone running off with it?

Or is the recipient meant to give the driver the password on arrival - and still risk not getting the high value item if the driver is lying, thieving scum?

[John Rumm]

So do a chargeback with the cc company... (assuming he did not use a debit card)

[Jethro_uk]

So did I.

Every conversation started with "what is the email address of the account you are discussing ?"

Of course I didn't know that, since the scammer had changed it. And Amazons systems don't seem to allow a previous email address to be searched for.

So I had to give an old order number. That *did* find the account, and confirmed that it was "under investigation". (Don't forget I had explicitly pressed the "Deny" option when I got the original warning email, for what good it did).

The agent then said they couldn't tell me any more as the "fraud team" were looking into it, and no one ever talks to them. However they would sort it out within ...

well at first they said 24 hours

After 72 hours they said 96 hours

After 168 hours they said it would be one more day.

That's when we - as a company - gave up. I still have all the calls recorded - 160 minutes worth.

In this case I was at the direction of my employer, who finally set up a new account.