[HN Gopher] The curious case of the handlebar bag scam
___________________________________________________________________
The curious case of the handlebar bag scam
Author : Zhenya
Score : 123 points
Date : 2021-02-27 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cyclingtips.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cyclingtips.com)
| PEJOE wrote:
| I encountered a similar situation to one mentioned in the article
| on Etsy - a scammer made a fake store for a real shop in Brooklyn
| selling high-end aprons. To me it looked like the legitimate web-
| presense of the store.
|
| After placing the order I received no response, and after
| disputing the charge a month later they sent a tracking number.
| (The package never came, and a helpful UPS rep broke the rules to
| tell me the tracking number wasn't even addressed to me - a
| saving grace and made me wonder if tracking numbers from
| legitimate purchases are resold to run this scam.)
|
| Etsy refused to take any part in helping with the refund, and
| despite deleting the store they refused to tell paypal to refund
| people's (including my) purchases.
|
| Paypal had the tracking number, and could ask UPS for the address
| and recipient, but refused to help and made me feel like I was
| the scammer for wanting my money back. They insisted to the end
| that they could do nothing, despite knowing the Etsy storefront
| was banned and that the seller never sent me a package.
|
| I would have been out $100 if not for Chase, who did the
| chargeback and got paypal in line. I will never use paypal or
| Etsy again, as it is clear they don't care about criminals using
| their platform to steal money from trusting consumers.
|
| The lack of response from Paypal in this article is no surprise -
| a lot of their business comes from people using their platform to
| steal from their users.
|
| Can anyone who works at Etsy or Paypal explain why this system is
| so broken and anti-consumer?
| smbullet wrote:
| I've also been scammed with Ebay + PayPal. Now that I know how
| useless PayPal is I will never use them again. Never had any
| issues (or heard of people having issues) with requesting a
| chargeback with Citi or Chase.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| This is why I stopped using PayPal back in the early 00s. They
| would staunchly side with a charge/seller over their actual
| customer for any reason and just frustrate the process. Even
| when their company had all the info, like eBay purchases.
|
| People say companies like American Express are a scam. But I
| can, and have in these instances just filed a charge back and
| walked. To the point that if a place won't take American
| Express (like Costco) I'll just move along.
|
| The number of times I've avoided scams and headaches because I
| can get a rep on in under 5 minutes is incredible. Everything
| from someone be swiping my numbers and running up charges
| online (that the store won't discuss even when I give them the
| charge auth #), to car rental companies playing games with
| tolls when traveling in places like Denver. It's frankly odd to
| me it's not the standard.
| maccard wrote:
| I've bought and sold plenty on ebay using paypal exclusively
| and can't say my experience is the same. As a buyer, I know
| that opening a paypal dispute they'll side with me, and as a
| seller I know in screwed if the buyer does so. Two anecdotes
| - I bought a phone that was "new" and when it arrived it was
| locked to a carrier I wasn't on. I tried to get it unlocked
| officially, but apple or the carrier wouldn't help. Seller
| said no refunds. Paypal sided with me because they didn't
| explicitly put it in the correct ebay category.
|
| As a seller, I sold a processor, listed it with 2nd class
| signed for postage and the buyer asked if I could ship it
| first class (next day vs 3-5 days). I said sure, paid the
| difference out of pocket and uploaded the tracking number. 24
| hours later I got a paypal dispute saying item not received,
| that it wasn't sent by the right means. He had signed for it,
| I had the tracking. No dice, I was out a PS200 part.
|
| Paypal so heavily sides with the buyer in every scenario,
| it's why it's popular!
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > People say companies like American Express are a scam. But
| I can, and have in these instances just filed a charge back
| and walked. To the point that if a place won't take American
| Express (like Costco) I'll just move along.
|
| I have never heard anyone say companies like AmEx are a scam
| in my 20 years as an adult.
|
| And Visa/MasterCard/Discover all offer the same chargeback
| mechanisms AmEx does, so there is nothing special about AmEx.
|
| And the craziest thing to me is thinking Costco's extremely
| liberal return policies are inferior to a credit card
| network's chargeback policies. You can get a refund for fruit
| at Costco if you don't like the way it tastes. You can't do
| that with AmEx.
|
| I accidentally bought the wrong type of cheese, and they gave
| me a refund even though they had to throw it away due to the
| law not allowing them to resell returned perishable food
| items. (I didn't find out they were throwing it away until
| the cashier already refunded to the card...otherwise I would
| have just kept the cheese).
| mbreese wrote:
| _> To the point that if a place won't take American Express
| (like Costco) I'll just move along._
|
| I understand the sentiment and I will use my Amex
| preferentially over any other card for the same reason. But
| it's kinda funny to use Costco as the example. They have a
| famously customer friendly return policy.
| gumby wrote:
| > People say companies like American Express are a scam
|
| Have not heard this!
|
| I agree with you: Amex is great at looking after their
| customers (card holders) and are so jealous about their info
| (for charge cards, don't know about credit) that they share
| much less.
|
| I do use visa for local small businesses (family restaurants
| etc) because the fee Amex charges merchants is higher than
| the others'. But especially online, their guarantees are
| worth it.
| delecti wrote:
| I've heard a lot of complaints that Paypal staunchly sides
| with the customer over retailers. I think it's just that
| sometimes scammers beat the system, and Paypal is
| occasionally wrong in either directions.
| nneonneo wrote:
| I got screwed in the opposite direction. I sold an online
| service with PayPal, delivered the goods (files to set up a
| web forum), only to have the client file a fraudulent
| chargeback claiming they never received the site files (they
| used the files to set up a successful site which they are
| still using; I pointed this out to the PayPal rep and they
| ignored it). I never got a cent and actually had a negative
| balance thanks to the fees.
|
| It's probably very hard to be PayPal, but the incident left a
| bad taste in my mouth. I no longer accept or send any
| transactions via their platform.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Had almost the exact same thing happen to me selling via
| EBay and PayPal.
|
| The buyer said it wasn't them that bought it, but they
| corresponded via EBay and sent payment via PayPal. The
| unauthorized user had both passwords?
|
| PayPals response was basically that we just side with the
| buyer on all digital goods transactions.
|
| I'm moving everything off of PayPal now.
| katbyte wrote:
| Why not just visa if amex is not accepted? They offer (at
| least mine done) the exact same purchase protection and I've
| called up my bank and had charges reversed too.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Counter-Point: I've had three disputes resolved via PayPal and
| all in my favour (fairly, I want to add). In fact, I've heard
| quite a few small online traders refuse PayPal, as they've been
| scammed in the past (as sellers) and PayPal did not side with
| them.
|
| I'm not a fan of PayPal for other reasons and this is anecdotal
| as well, but in my experience PayPal is very biased towards the
| buyer.
| Theodores wrote:
| Handlebar bags are not a big seller by any stretch of the
| imagination. I have spent years in the bicycle trade and have
| probably bought more handlebar bags for myself than I have sold
| to customers. This is not much of an exaggeration. Then the ones
| I do own are just for the grand tour rather than daily usage.
| That bracket on my handlebars is invariably not holding anything
| and there is invariably a bag on my back.
|
| As much as I adore the handlebar barbag as a product and will
| gladly try and sell it to customers, truth be told is that it is
| niche. Baskets for shopper bikes outsell bar bags 100 to 1.
|
| To get PS45 out of a UK customer for a high quality handlebar bag
| is hard work. I can't imagine trying to get 179 dollars out of
| them for a handlebar bag. I wouldn't even pay that myself even
| though I like this product.
|
| The unique selling points are interesting. So it goes with gravel
| bikes. You can mount your phone and lights to it.
|
| The top isn't designed to hold a map which was 1970s USP.
|
| Let's look at what other manufacturers offer. Nowadays that top
| map pocket is for putting your phone in. Brackets for lights are
| not so common but I have LED lights on both of mine, albeit with
| brackets that are less than ideal.
|
| This 179 dollar bag lacks reflective strips which is weird. I
| also prefer standard Klickfix brackets as I can mount my
| handlebar bag behind the seat on my commuting bike, thereby
| getting better aero and handling.
|
| I don't think that fake pages trying to sell knock off versions
| of products are uncommon. Using such tales to hype your product
| is something else.
|
| Admittedly it is a curious story. Common sense would tell you
| that the cycling world needs this product. But try selling any
| handlebar bag to any customer on a busy Saturday in a wealthy
| area where customers happily spend 350 on cycling shoes. The
| handlebar bag is a hard sell.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yeah, this bag looks pretty neat. Most bar bags swing a bit and
| don't work well with my wife's cantilever brakes.
|
| But, the price tag is a bit much. I can get a handmade bag from
| any of a number of boutique bike bag producers for the same or
| less. Or, I can buy a small camera bag, rivet on a KlickFix and
| call it good enough for <$80.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal
| everyday life in much of Asia for decades. Any successful brand
| will see counterfeits and, indeed, sometimes before the quality
| brand even launches. A prestige brand's logo will be thrown on
| some cheap, low-quality anonymous thing, and ordering online you
| are just as likely to get a counterfeit as the real thing.
|
| Now it goes beyond physical products to media too; another
| example is blogs these days. Someone finds a successful blog,
| pays some developing-world person on a freelancer platform to
| rewrite every post just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown, and then
| puts the counterfeit site up with a heavy load of SEO and
| advertising. This started with recipe blogs - that cajun cooking
| site that claims to be by a born and bred Louisianan has
| grammatical mistakes suggesting an Eastern European or Southeast
| Asian author - but is now spreading through all kinds of other
| hobbies and interests. With recipe blogs, this phenomenon is now
| so mature that counterfeiters are copying from previous
| counterfeits.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Do you see any other way for it? Google and FB created an
| eyeball economy by supplying both the marketplace and the
| serving platforms, which created unsolicited Mechanical Turk
| army for content creation that runs on exceptionally thin
| margins, burning through humanity attention span.
|
| It's no longer possible to find organic high quality ad
| supported content(except maybe on YouTube, it still has some
| great stuff). Places like HN have other motivations to keep
| running high quality forum but the vast majority of the content
| out there is made with lowest possible quality. This even goes
| for the news.
|
| Lately I live in Turkey and trying to follow the Turkish media
| but it is so lazy or so politically motivated that I cannot
| take it.
|
| Turkish mainstream media outlets no longer create articles for
| human consumption but for bot consumption, so the articles are
| unreadable due to keyword spamming. The news part is one
| sentence but they manage to multiply it to a wall of text
| through repeating the same thing using synonyms etc, it doesn't
| even make sense grammatically.
|
| They also do SEO spam by generating articles from the exact
| same template for each popular topic. For example, if you
| search for opening times of a supermarket, you will have the
| first few pages of results filled with mainstream newspaper
| pages that start with "Recently people start showing interest
| to market opening times but is it safe to search for shop
| opening times? Besides, what does 'opening times' really mean?
| To find out about opening times continue reading". Yo Have the
| same format for all kind of stuff.
|
| The incentives of the current content economy are perverse. You
| ether want to make it cheap as possible, just enough to lure
| someone to it and send them somewhere else through ad click or
| you want to influence someone to do something after consuming
| your content.
| gumby wrote:
| I am the other way about Youtube: often the content is simply
| someone talking at the computer in a single take, or with
| minimal editing. It takes longer to view than to read
| something that someone actually thought about and wrote down.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This is my issue with Youtube tutorials and unedited
| podcasts.
|
| It'd be much faster to consume the content if it was
| written down - but when Spotify and Youtube give you
| monetisation with pretty much zero extra effort, people
| tend to take that route.
|
| Monetising a blog is a LOT harder.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It 's no longer possible to find organic high quality ad
| supported content(except maybe on YouTube, it still has some
| great stuff)._
|
| Was it ever possible? I've been on the Internet for quite a
| while, and since the earliest days, my heuristic was, if it's
| ad-supported, it's garbage. There's very few exceptions to
| that rule. Good content, written by people who care, is
| either paid, done for non-monetary reasons, or a loss leader
| billed under some company's marketing budget (though there's
| of course also some garbage in that last category too).
| itronitron wrote:
| >> the content out there is made with lowest possible
| quality. This even goes for the news.
|
| I'm amazed at the consistency with which news articles from
| major sites contain basic grammatical mistakes.
| sn_master wrote:
| Even YouTube isn't immune. Many times I search and the top
| result is text-to-speech trash with a stock image. Countless
| channels exist that just do text-to-speech and auto-upload of
| news articles found online, without even citing them.
| lrem wrote:
| I literally never got a result like this. Are you searching
| for something too niche to actually have quality content on
| YouTube? Or is your search buble such a sad place?
|
| Disclaimer: I work in Google, but nowhere near any of this.
| baybal2 wrote:
| A reverse scam scheme exists too: somebody buy an OEM product,
| and markets it as its own development.
|
| I see it being rather common on sites like Kickstarter.
|
| I myself encountered such in Vancouver once. A woman was
| claiming a CEO of a medical start-up doing "deep learning"
| bluetooth pulse oximeter of own design, and was pitching on
| HackerNest Vancouver at around 2013-2014. I cannot imagine that
| she somehow managed to get few millions in funding for that.
|
| I sent a photo with with an RFQ to Alibaba, and got quotes from
| trade companies in minutes, and then posted a screenshot on the
| HackerNest's meetup page.
|
| Then, I ran onto a trio claiming the idea, and design of a
| flexible silicone keyboard as their own on either Kickstarter,
| or Indigogo. After sending emails to the platform few times
| over few months, they quietly deleted the project page without
| much public comment.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep...
|
| On aliexpress, pretty much every thing is now "xiaomi"... from
| towels, toothbrushes to manicure sets..... Sometimes looking at
| review photos and trying to look for bad-quality marks helps...
| sometimes, sadly... not.
| stefan_ wrote:
| It's everywhere. DIY sites are full with trash tutorials
| written by people with no clue what they are doing, but $1 more
| in their pocket for writing the trash. Quora, that wretched
| hell hole, is full of nobodies giving the most ridiculous
| answers since being paid pennies for it. Medium since their
| monetization push has lots of people who decided their place in
| the world is pushing out badly copied useless tech tutorials.
| There are whole SaaS AI sites helping you expand a few keywords
| into more trash writing. Google hasn't so much made the worlds
| knowledge searchable, they have poisoned the well.
|
| (Oh, and there are a lot of these people on HN who think
| writing garbage blogspam for their latest project is a great
| "growth hack". A hearty fuck you to you, too.)
| ecshafer wrote:
| Tech blogs and sites are mostly useless. There are good
| places MDN, official docs sites (when they aren't written by
| Google that is). But there is so much just machine generated,
| or amateur 3rd world generated trash out there that its
| difficult. Front end development is much worse than other
| areas with this.
|
| This summer I had a lot of trouble finding information for
| something specific in Angular on how to do some specific
| thing, where the official docs didn't cover it in depth
| enough, and then searching for it online was impossible as it
| was thousands of "blogs" with the same copy pasted tutorial
| with a few key words changed around that show the same hello
| world example.
| sn_master wrote:
| YES YES YES for the tech tutorials.
|
| Many times I look up something, and all the YouTube videos
| and tutorials are telling the exact same thing and it's clear
| there was no effort at all or even if the author knows what
| they're talking about or even tested that code at all.
| jfengel wrote:
| Quora doesn't pay for stupid answers. It pays for the stupid
| questions that bring in those stupid answers. The stupid
| answers are generated for free, and get shown ads while
| they're doing it.
| gumby wrote:
| > Google hasn't so much made the worlds knowledge searchable,
| they have poisoned the well.
|
| This happened to Google already with translation. Their
| translation system started with documents with known
| translation (e.g. EU and UN official documents). Then they
| started to use documents on the web that offered their own
| translations...until Google translate got good enough that
| people started using it to translate their own websites.
|
| This "inbreeding" or bad feedback made the translations worse
| until this was figured out and I believe they long gave up
| automatically using translations found in the wild to improve
| training. Source: friend who worked on GT at the beginning.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Sounds like a great opportunity to devise an adversarial
| network that detects google translate output.
| thaeli wrote:
| I've never understood why recipe blogs have so much extra text,
| unless it's an SEO thing to start with. The text all feels
| useless fluff to me anyway; all I'm there for is the actual
| recipe card itself. And from a user's perspective, it's
| impossible to tell the difference between the original and a
| "counterfeit", both are full of borderline malware ads, too
| much scrolling, and infuriating modal popups wanting my email
| address.
|
| I don't want your newsletter. I don't want your life story. I
| don't want intrusive ads. I just want the (functional, non-
| copyrightable) recipe itself.
|
| /rant
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's an SEO thing.
| klyrs wrote:
| > I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe
| itself.
|
| There's the rub. You can copyright your story. It's easy to
| scrape recipes from webpages. It's harder to translate a
| story into a recipe. If you post a plain & simple recipe to
| the internet, it will be copied and folks (and the bots
| behind search engines) won't have a clear incentive to
| visit/link your recipe over the numerous copies. If you've
| got a clear copyright violation, there's a chance you can get
| the copies taken down, or at least hidden by search engines.
| If it's just the functional, non-copyrightable recipe itself,
| no such luck. And then, with all the expense of creating and
| hosting the content, plus fighting the deluge of spammers,
| how do you monetize? The easy way: the borderline malware
| ads, modal popups, dickbars, etc. Blech. I'm with you, it
| sucks. But it's not just "an SEO thing"; it's also a case
| study on how "information wants to be free" meets the gritty
| reality of the internet economy.
| watwut wrote:
| It is google algorithm. It pushes doen pure receipts in
| result, so they add fluff to go up in search.
|
| The text is useless fluff. They gotta have something that
| looks like ranking worthy text to google and takes as little
| effort as possible (since humans will skip it).
| maccard wrote:
| Most of the "decent" blog recipe sites have a "jump-to-
| recipe" button at the top.
| akiselev wrote:
| Google tracks your behavior during searches so the longer it
| takes you to press the back button to return to the results,
| the higher that page scores. All the recipe sites seem to
| have figured out that score weighs heavily in Google's
| rankings.
| irrational wrote:
| Review sites are the worst. Recently I was looking for reviews
| for a nail gun. It was impossible to find a legitimate review
| site.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm not a cycling person, but I'm curious. Does the cycling
| community know about the book "Mrs. Armitage on Wheels"?
|
| As an outsider peering in, this reminds me of that book, given
| its a way to mount your laptop and everything else to your bike.
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| I'm not all that deep into the bikepacking/touring world (just
| some weekend rides) but it's not something I see referenced,
| however they have some pretty amazing storage and packing
| options that remind me of it:
|
| https://www.davestravelpages.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/...
|
| https://robertaxleproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pan...
| bengale wrote:
| Now that's a blast from the past! I used to love that book.
| leviathant wrote:
| How many of these scam sites were running Shopify?
| lallysingh wrote:
| Real world products have anti-forgery mechanisms -- holograms,
| serial numbers you can check, etc. How about a 'spot the fake'
| section on the kickstarter site to identify the countermeasures?
| usrusr wrote:
| But here the product isn't forged at all. Only the website
| assets are misappropriated. For a shop that claims to sell you
| a Macbook but then only sends you a book about Macs.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| The problem for the original brand is that some people are
| going to receive the fake bags, believe that they are the real
| thing, and then leave negative online reviews saying that the
| product is low-quality. Even if you had a hologram or serial
| number on the real thing, you can't expect people receiving the
| fake to be aware of that or care.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Then you just reply to the review, notifying the customer
| that they have received a counterfeit, and then report the
| review as fraudulent, and move on.
|
| This is what a lot of businesses do. It's the only way to
| fight back without spending a lot of money to stop Chinese
| organized crime.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| If reviews are easily marked as fraudulent, all merchants
| will just follow this route to eliminate negative reviews.
| ecshafer wrote:
| "Chinese Organized Crime" is a bit much. Its most likely
| some small time guy in China that is just doing this stuff
| for a quick buck. They would probably not even see anything
| wrong with it morally or legally, as its the fault of the
| person for falling for such an obvious scam. And they still
| get a product.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Perfect privacy is perfect protection for scammers. There are
| always trade-offs.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Heck, this nothing new. I guess the cycling community isn't
| familiar with it, and new tech makes it easier to do these scams.
|
| At least, they aren't full-fat counterfeit bags (I'm sure those
| are on the way, now that the bag is shipping).
|
| New York has had Times Square Rolecks watches for decades. It's
| so bad, that even high-end watch sellers are getting fooled.
|
| Welcome to the big leagues, guys. I'm sure you'll do well. As
| pointed out, this isn't really a bad thing; just annoying.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Counterfeit cycling parts have been around for a while. Mostly
| they're taking advantage of the obscene profit margins that
| western companies have been racking up over the last couple of
| decades. Look at the ridiculous prices for name brand carbon
| fiber bottle cages than go look at the Aliexpress knockoffs.
| klyrs wrote:
| Sad about the scams, but I admire the original maker's
| sticktoitiveness. The scammers are successful because, and these
| are my own words, that's an awesome handlebar bag. They wouldn't
| be successful honestly selling whatever basic-ass bags they have
| to ship.
|
| So, I'm kinda glad for the scam, because it brought the product
| to me through this story. I'm gonna buy one for me, one for my
| mom, and one for my brother. And when I can buy an extra mount,
| I'll do that so I can swap my bag between bikes. Not because of
| charity, but because it's a damned good product and suddenly I've
| got birthday presents sorted for 2021.
| momeunier2 wrote:
| I fell for this scam... I've been even dealing with their
| customer support and they've been answering all my emails. They
| know exactly what kind of game they were playing. They were
| polite and were answering the right thing and were never really
| lying.
|
| I hate them...
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| The product is too niche for this to be some small-time scam,
| this is more likely the result of streamlined and specialized
| parts of organized businesses. This dynamic is likely not even
| the brain-child of any one individual; it's entirely plausible
| that it's the result of AliExpress drop shippers that offer
| commissions for sales referrals and don't look too closely at the
| process that generates them. The drop shippers take on the
| payment/chargeback risk for the spread above ordering directly
| from AliExpress, and pass along part of that spread to the SEO
| and advertising specialists figuring out the cheapest way to
| funnel the most traffic to the highest-commission targets.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I saw a similar scam on YouTube here:
| https://youtu.be/cCoQPuCGAMg
|
| The difference between the pictures and what he received was
| genuinely amusing.
| justinator wrote:
| This seems to be a very similar problem to knock off haute
| couture.
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| I just wanted to say, that bag looks like a great handlebar bag,
| I love how it's acting like a base for other accessories so you
| don't have to overload your handlebar and you can switch
| everything between bikes with one move. I hope they manage to
| squash the fakes.
| CivBase wrote:
| Never ever _ever_ crowdfund a project unless you are familiar
| with the producer and have confidence in their ability to
| deliver... or you 're just willing to loose all of the money you
| pledge. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are rife with scammers and the
| platforms do as little as they can get away with when it comes to
| preventing scams and helping victims. It's a lesson I heard the
| hard (and rather expensive) way.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Yes, Kickstarter does an atrociously bad job screening
| applicants, down to allowing "free energy" scammeroonis getting
| in after a "technical review."
|
| Some people suggest it's being done fully intentional on the
| Kickstarter's side.
| troymc wrote:
| Did you read the article? This is not the usual story of the
| Kickstarter that didn't deliver.
| CivBase wrote:
| Yes. The most successful crowdfunding scams deliver
| _something_ to avoid retribution from the planforms, payment
| processors, and legal authorities. My advice is the same
| regardless.
| alistairSH wrote:
| What the bloody hell are you on about? The company
| highlighted in this article has a legit product. They are
| being copied by scammers selling half-assed fakes on
| Facebook, Etsy, etc.
| wtallis wrote:
| This reply only serves to make it seem even _more_ likely
| that you didn 't read the article, or at least completely
| failed to understand it.
| CivBase wrote:
| Why? Just because the scammer tried to add extra
| legitimacy to their scam by committing fraud, pretending
| to be some other legit company?
| jeffgreco wrote:
| The scammers weren't using crowdfunding sites.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Bizarrely, the buyer doesn't leave empty-handed, because the
| scammer then actually sends them a much cheaper and nastier
| alternative handlebar bag - complete with tracking details and
| proof of delivery. This isn't out of benevolence: it fulfils
| their contractual obligations, and removes the ammunition for
| buyers to dispute the transaction with PayPal or their bank._
|
| I don't understand how it removes ammunition at all.
|
| I show eBay or my bank a photo of what was advertised, a photo of
| what I received, the charge gets reversed, and if this happens
| too many times to the company they lose the ability to take
| credit cards or to list on eBay at all.
|
| What am I missing? Is this specifically a bank account - PayPal -
| AliExpress combo or something? Marketplaces don't usually exist
| very long if they provide zero buyer protection from
| fraudulent/deceptive sellers.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Neither eBay nor PayPal care enough to even have a human review
| the disputes most of the time. A valid tracking number (even if
| the package is empty) is often enough to lose a dispute. If
| you're lucky, you're going to get a monkey reviewing it which
| isn't paid enough nor is competent enough to evaluate the
| quality of the item received based on the pictures.
|
| Your bank will indeed care more but most people don't bother or
| value access to PayPal more than the scam money (since PayPal
| will often close your account if you file a chargeback with the
| bank).
| fattybob wrote:
| I really struggle to see how the bag they show as a copy is
| anything remotely like a scam copy, now the duper duper bag I
| could easily see as a copy of numerous other handlebar bags
| though. Sorry , can't see their problem here re scam copies at
| least. Scam advertising may be a better headline.
| wtallis wrote:
| I don't understand what you're trying to say. Are you saying
| this isn't really a scam? It obviously _is_ , because what the
| scammers are advertising isn't what they're actually shipping.
|
| Or are you saying that Route Werks has nothing to complain
| about because the scammers are shipping bags that obviously do
| not resemble the Route Werks bag? Because there's still the
| problem that the scammers are using the Route Werks product
| images to advertise.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding. The scammers are using the
| pictures and branding from the kickstarter but sending a
| completely different bag.
| ljp_206 wrote:
| A family member of mine got a start out of college working for a
| medium-sized law firm that sent out cease and desist and etc.
| notices to counterfeit sellers. They were a 'full service' system
| that sent notices and handled takeovers/shutdowns of websites,
| through ICANN and various channels, I believe. The firm did this
| full time for really large clients (think designer handbags).
| This was back some ten years maybe - it was long ago that we were
| wary of the fact that the job was a newfangled remote position,
| which he nabbed off of Craigslist via a local ad.
|
| All that to say, it's not surprising there is a market for taking
| care of this problem. I wonder if there are smart folks out there
| who have made some kind of service out of this for littler guys
| than the global size clients that firm used to serve.
| hycaria wrote:
| What do these AliExpress/Wish buyers expect exactly ?
|
| I don't understand why some people keep using these crap
| platforms. Also this is not a curious case at all, routine stuff
| on chinese crap resellers..
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They have pretty good dispute resolution, and after ~70
| transactions on AliExpress I never had such a thing happen
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Using Aliexpress is a skill, you need to figure out which
| sellers are full of crap and which are actually reputable.
|
| Wish is 100% scam preying on those without the skills to use
| Aliexpress. Wish translates the UI for multiple languages along
| with the product names/descriptions and provides direct payment
| without credit cards (Klarna).
| woleium wrote:
| It's not often the best solution is to "send the boys round", but
| in this case it may be the only workable option.
| mint2 wrote:
| Violence is not the answer and it's also not even feasible
| to"send the boys around". Send them where? You'd have to hire a
| team of investigators just to have the possibility of finding
| the location of the perpetrators. And then when you did they're
| likely going to be on another continent. It's not a brick and
| mortar store or flea market stall or guys on street corners
| selling the fakes.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| You'd be surprised. Often times it's usually one guy. There's
| tons of these scams. Often they're selling stolen
| merchandise, or found some super cheap inventory left over
| somewhere... which is why they can make money. They're not
| manufacturing this stuff.
|
| But... they're also usually engaged in other criminal
| activity. So while "sending the boys around" might not be the
| best idea, actually uncovering the identity and sending law
| enforcement for a check could bring dividends. Companies and
| people treat them like other companies that care about
| letters from lawyers. Those just go in their shredder. But
| police and fed calls usually get them spooked.
|
| If enough of these con men had some heat they may stop, but
| the problem is most companies just don't follow through on
| that level and accept it as business as usual as in the
| article.
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