The other day I mentioned that you needed to be careful when purchasing photography gear off of Amazon… because it’s easy to be scammed when it comes to photography gear and scams are out of control lately.
Unfortunately, it genuinely feels like we’re back to the old days when ebay just started taking off and every other call was a telemarketer.
Non-stop scams and bullsquirt.
The Example…
Well, I thought I’d remind you that we seem to be back in ye olden scammy times with a fun Amazon example.
This wonderful Kingstoom 32 GB micro SD card was being sold on Amazon, being recommended in fact, despite the few reviews all saying the cards don’t work.
And well…
Kingstoom?
Kingston?
The cards are also deceptively named.
Kingston is a legitimate and quality brand of computing products.
But these Kingstoom people somehow managed to get away with selling deceptively named non-functioning cards. And… wait a second…
Kingstoom also has some clearly fraudulent reviews to boost its ratings.
On top of that, Kingstoom also only makes two whole products! No other size of SD card! And they don’t have any information about themselves on their Amazon page or online!
Kingstoom is clearly a scam account with scam products.
And yet none of these things were apparently suspicious to Amazon. And unfortunately for some, none of these things are immediately noticeable to a person who is just clicking “add to cart” after buying a camera or phone or whatever.
Getting ripped off on Amazon is not as hard as they would like you to think… and despite Amazon’s incredibly inane and bureaucratic seller sign-up process meant to deter exactly this kind of thing, these people are still able to set up shop.
Frankly, it feels like Amazon is the new Google. Or the old eBay. The only thing that matters is their own bureaucratic rules, the only things Amazon employees care about is those rules, and the only thing that upper management cares about is the numbers. They have lost the spirit of what they do on their way to a larger company. You don’t even matter anymore. Not to Amazon, or Google, or Facebook.
So you need to be the one looking out for the dangerous stuff that they no longer care about.
Keep on your toes y’all.
No need to lose $1500 on a lens scam on the Amazon dot com.