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back to article Dodgy dealer on Amazon lures marks towards phishing site

Amazon UK customers would do well to be vigilant about the post-holiday deals they find on the retail site following the discovery of a sophisticated scam. A rogue merchant, called Sc-Elegance, is primarily offering high-end electronics, advertising them as "used – like new" at significantly lower costs than in the shops. …

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  1. Lotaresco
    Holmes

    Same old, same old

    A few years ago there was an e-shopping site that offered all sorts of electronic tat consumer electronics at deep discounts. The problem being that all of the content had been copied from other sites, including all the user reviews which were copy and paste from the Co-op and Tesco sites. The police were notified.

    It turned out to be run from a council house just outside Penzance. No goods. A genuine Pirate of Penzance.

    12 0 Reply
  2. Pen-y-gors

    Worrying

    It's worrying that this can be run via the amazon site - surely amazon can detect code that redirects the checkout? Odd that they have to axe individual accounts. Is there no pattern?

    20 0 Reply
    1. VinceH
      Reply Icon

      Re: Worrying

      There isn't any code - the El Reg article doesn't describe how it works in detail, so it's worth reading the page they link to.

      It's simply a matter of tricking the customer into contacting the seller outside of Amazon's system, and then conning them into believing that a order is being manually set up on the Amazon system (including sending a spoof Amazon email) and getting them to pay by other means.

      Amazon are almost entirely faultless in this, AFAICS - the only possible issue is the seller being able to reveal an email address, but even if that wasn't possible, there are simple techniques that could be employed to direct people off site to make that contact.

      2 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Worrying

        "Amazon are almost entirely faultless in this, AFAICS"

        Article: "Since we contacted Amazon, the seller account still exists, but its products are no longer for sale. Notably, Amazon only shut the account down after we pointed out the scam and provided them with all of the evidence published in this post despite customers publicly complaining two months ago."

        They don't appear to have correctly filtered out the (only slightly) munged email address intended to lure customers outwith their own email system. You can argue whether or not they're to blame for that.

        Amazon appears to have a growing problem with policing dodgy sellers in general, and in particular counterfeiters which appear to be out of control. (This is worse because apparently all goods supplied by third parties but "fulfilled by Amazon" are binned together for the same nominal item, which makes the trustworthiness of seller X irrelevant if the one Amazon ship to you was from counterfeiter Y. I've no idea if the rumour that they were binning some of their *own* stock together with all that is true- if so, it's worrying).

        When they first launched in the UK, Amazon were really good at what they did. The growing number of third-party sellers and inability to filter them out easily- which can only be intentional on Amazon's part- has reduced this advantage. They're more like a jumped-up eBay cum Costco-style member's club with the pushing of Prime these days. (The latter to the extent of making certain (regular) goods "Prime only" at certain times along with other related actions).

        Remember when Amazon just sold stuff and it turned up a day or two later?

        15 0 Reply
        1. VinceH
          Reply Icon
          Facepalm

          Re: Worrying

          'Article: "Since we contacted Amazon, the seller account still exists, but its products are no longer for sale. Notably, Amazon only shut the account down after we pointed out the scam and provided them with all of the evidence published in this post despite customers publicly complaining two months ago."'

          Oops, yes - because I was looking more at the method, my brain skipped that little nugget.

          0 0 Reply
        2. Cynic_999
          Reply Icon

          Re: Worrying

          "

          Remember when Amazon just sold stuff and it turned up a day or two later?

          "

          They still do. Last year I bought scores of items from Amazon ranging in price from a few £ to over £1000. Almost everything that had been listed as next day delivery (>50% of my purchases) indeed arrived the following day, with most of the rest arriving within a week. Only a single item that I ordered failed to arrive - and Amazon gave me an immediate refund. The exception was items shipped from China which usually take over a month to arrive - which I expected and which is clearly announced when the order is placed.

          Overall I am extremely happy with Amazon's service, and the majority of items I have bought are considerably cheaper than the same item ordered from a UK web site.

          2 1 Reply
        3. Alan Brown Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Worrying

          "Amazon appears to have a growing problem with policing dodgy sellers in general, and in particular counterfeiters which appear to be out of control. "

          Counterfeiting on Amazon is a major problem and has been for a while.

          The vast majority of counterfeit stuff for sale _isn't_ suspiciously cheap, which makes it a lot harder to identify. It most cases it's the same price as the real item or only a tiny amount cheaper.

          Amazon are completely useless at taking action, and notifying trading standards might as well be a black hole.

          1 0 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Worrying

        > t's simply a matter of tricking the customer into contacting the seller

        > outside of Amazon's system,

        Aha, a close shave for me then. I was looking for a particular camera, and found a rather too-good price on Amazon. The listing said to email before placing the order, the email being in a {at}aaa{dot}co{dot}uk format rather than @aaa.co.uk. I assumed it was just obfuscated, but somehow it didn't look right. It just smelt off, so I whois'ed the domain and found it to be .ru. I fear my prejudices may have saved me. But it smelt like poo, looked like poo and squished when poked with a stick, so I didn't step in it.

        10 1 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Worrying

          At the beginning of December I was looking for a camera lens, the cheapest price (not on Amazon, but from a well known photo gear shop) I found was €1799 (list price IIRC is around €2000). Then, on Amazon appeared offers at €640 - with the request to send a mail. Because my scam detector has priority on my greed, I thought "or it is is a scam, or it is a stolen item - in both cases it's better to stay away". Being unable to order directly from Amazon would have rung more alarm bells.

          Didn't thought to report it, though - believed Amazon cared more about its reputation to identify dodgy sellers itself...

          2 0 Reply
      3. Steve Knox
        Reply Icon
        Flame

        Re: Worrying

        "Amazon are almost entirely faultless in this, AFAICS"

        No. Aside from the issues brought up by others, Amazon is allowing a seller to list in their marketplace but then redirect buyers to a purchase page outside of their marketplace.

        That is just plain stupid, if not actually malicious.

        3 1 Reply
        1. VinceH
          Reply Icon

          Re: Worrying

          @Steve Knox

          Spot the person who didn't read what I wrote and the link from the article which I helpfully included in my comment. An important point was "the only possible issue is the seller being able to reveal an email address, but even if that wasn't possible, there are simple techniques that could be employed to direct people off site to make that contact."

          Simple obfuscation, as LDS mentions in a later post (just above this one) is one such simple method - and while Amazon could make some effort to spot such things, it wouldn't be possible to catch all such attempts, and the scammers also have the possibility of providing more verbose instructions than a simple obfuscated address, which would make it even more difficult for Amazon.

          1 1 Reply
  3. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    I am surprised the address is visible

    Amazon actually obfuscates, removes and redirects any address put by the merchant into email or pages to point to its system so it can track it. I had a couple of dealings with various cheap electronics suppliers from china and they had to make the address into an image and insert it into the email for it to go through.

    1 1 Reply
    1. Charles 9
      Reply Icon

      Re: I am surprised the address is visible

      They either use Unicode lookalike characters or images that Amazon's algorithms can't grok (though you would think at this point they'd be running images through something like Tesseract to get around this trick).

      0 0 Reply
  4. reghark
    Thumb Down

    Reported

    I reported these sellers several months ago, a couple of times via online help, and when they kept appearing I emailed Amazon Security. No response.

    They've been active for a long time now, with *many* different seller names, on possibly all Amazon EU sites (often Germany), and target popular electronics, camera lenses etc. The descriptive text always says to email an address prior to purchase and "used for advertising purposes in my store only!!!" etc. They have slowly changed the format of text, presumably to work around keyword/email address searches done by Amazon.

    It only pissed me off because it triggered my CamelCamelCamel & Firefox Distill extention alerts.

    3 1 Reply
    1. Lotaresco
      Reply Icon

      Re: Reported

      "I emailed Amazon Security. No response."

      I've had similar from eBay. I spotted several compromised "auctions" on eBay. It wasn't difficult to do. I was looking for a camera and spotted hundreds of ads for the same camera at silly prices. All ads stated that the seller would only take BACS payment and that the "auction" was for a lens cap. All the ads had the same photos but those photos were copied from other places (mostly from Jessops). I let eBay know, their only response was to accuse me of "interfering with a valid auction". When the auctions ended there was a flurry of posts in online forums warning people that the seller was a rip-off merchant and the goods had not arrived.

      Amazon, eBay and the rest are only interested in their fees. They will take action if there's a chance that their business could be affected but they will take the line of least resistance. It's often easier to wash their hands than to do anything.

      1 0 Reply
  5. inmypjs Silver badge

    I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

    I noticed a scammer using 3 compromised marketplace accounts to offer 170 pages of items almost all at lowest price and all with item details advising the customer to contact an email address to check stock before ordering.

    I laboriously reported it via online chat and after struggling to explain and convince the advisor they said they would sort it out.

    Following day I checked that something had been done and sure enough it looked like those accounts were back in control of their owners. Looking at just one of the items in those 170 pages showed the scammer was back with another compromised account which again I reported via chat.

    Following day I checked again and same story, scammer back on a 5th compromised account. Reported via chat again and didn't bother checking.

    It took me less than a minute to follow up and find the scammer again - why the hell wasn't someone from Amazon doing it?

    7 0 Reply
    1. Andrew Beardsley
      Reply Icon

      Re: I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

      I saw a couple of these before Christmas when I was looking for some camera gear. One seller claiming to be from Holland had what I was looking for much cheaper than the going rate with the 'used to display in shop' description. It had the 'contact us before ordering' line. Seemed too good to be true but I thought that I would be covered by the Amazon A-Z guarantee. I added to my basket and tried to checkout. However, it would not accept any payment methods. Now pretty sure that it was not kosher, I sent an email to the seller through the Amazon system. Not surprisingly there was no reply.

      The quantity available kept decreasing; so they had either managed to con some people or it was another part of the trick to create a level of urgency. My suspicions were confirmed when an almost identical listing appeared as soon as this one disappeared. This time claiming to be from somewhere in East Europe.

      Lucky escape.

      3 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

      @ inmypjs ; It obviously raises questions of Amazon's (claimed lack of) liability if the problem originated with them failing to police their own system correctly and follow up reports as you describe.

      4 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

      I'm not, they are going the way of E-Bay.

      Punter greed is also to be considered, I know someone who was after an expensive (1000+) item

      on EBay, bid for , seller said contact me for a private sale, cut out EBay, punter sent check, check cashed, no item, phoney phone number, no protection.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

        "punter sent check, check cashed, no item, phoney phone number, no protection."

        Perhaps it's time to scam back. Send them FAKE checks with fake names and return address and see how they like it. Like paying for a laptop of potatoes with counterfeit notes.

        0 0 Reply
    4. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

      Amazon are far too busy with their goal of becoming the only retailer in the western world to be bovvered with silly little things like this.

      1 0 Reply
    5. tiggity Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

      I did the same with Amazon (with little seemingly done by Amazon) about dodgy accounts (the ones I found where legit accounts that had been pwned by bad actors - confirmed this by phoning a few of the affected parties).

      Also mailed some info about it to el Reg as potential story but never noticed anything come of that!.

      This was in run up to Xmas, where in some popular categories e.g. laptops, a significant proportion of the entries were dubious.

      0 0 Reply
  6. Phil101

    Amazon Could (Should) Do More

    In this particular case a monitoring system that caught order failures like this and then tried to submit an order that should be accepted could take the merchant offline if that failed.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Charles 9
      Reply Icon

      Re: Amazon Could (Should) Do More

      Except the shysters are prepared for this. They just play whack-a-mole and reappear as another seller, then another, then another. They could have hundreds of accounts stashed away and can probably make dozen's more on a moment's notice with help from CAPTCHA farms.

      0 0 Reply
  7. Hans 1
    WTF?

    > A rogue merchant, called Sc-Elegance, is primarily offering high-end electronics, advertising them as "used – like new" at significantly lower costs than in the shops. However, when the shopper adds the item to their basket and checks out, it redirects them away from Amazon to make the payment at a convincing phishing site.

    If I get this, customer clicks "Add to basket" (or whatever it is called) then "checkout" on amazon.co.uk and the customer is "somehow" redirected to a third party site, then, sorry for you Amazon, but you are accomplice to fraud.

    Are we 100% sure customer does not click a link in the description or something ? Is customer REALLY using the Amazon's checkout button ? How is this possible ?

    1 2 Reply
    1. Graham Dawson Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      The linked blog post explains it properly. When they try to check out, Amazon throws up an error of some sort and advises the user to contact the seller directly to sort it out. The seller then tricks the buyer into paying directly with a fake amazon email. There's no automated redirect as implied in the article

      1 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    These scams make searching by price difficult

    For some high price high demand items there's so many of these low ball priced items trying this scam on that it's difficult to see the real price without looking at all those offering the item. Has caused me to make purchases I might of made through Amazon elsewhere. I assume they'll take more action when it starts to annoy customers enough and hits sales.

    5 0 Reply
  9. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    ISTM that whether or not Amazon have liability is only part of their problem. It affects their reputation which they should be guarding. Time and again we see reports of what appears to be over-zealous protection of trademarks and yet here we see an instance of what in effect is passing off not being policed by the trademark owner.

    0 0 Reply
  10. JCF2009

    Scam abounds in U.S. as well

    I've noticed a very similar scam conducted with pricey electronics and camera gear on the U.S. amazon site. The scammers instruct prospective buyers to contact them directly using an email address in the seller listinf notes or even the seller name. The reply email directs the buyer to purchase an Amazon Gift Card and send the card number back to the seller, who will then place the amazon order "on behalf of the purchaser".

    I don't know what percentage of interested buyers fall for the entire scheme, but I've noticed quite a few of the bogus seller offerings over the past few months. The offers seem to appear and then disappear a few hours later.

    2 0 Reply
  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Consumers Could (Should) Do More

    While you're at it, do yourself a favour and only buy crap on Amazon that is shipping from Amazon. I always see tons of crap sellers; no, or low, ratings, very new, not shipping from Amazon, not shipping from US(or locally in other words). There are tons of clues. I will sometimes purchase from a seller, if they have been on Amazon for some time, and have lots of good ratings. Especially if they are a small brick and mortar store and have an old or rare item, but by and large I only get stuff shipping from Amazon. If the product descriptions are weak, or the shipping comes from some dodgy country, steer away from the "bargain" and get an actual seller.

    2 0 Reply
    1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Consumers Could (Should) Do More

      If it's not "Prime", I'm not "buyin'"

      Seems to be a (crude but effective) way of weeding out the most blatant scam/Marketplace sellers.

      The other trick is to look for "fulfilled by Amazon" near the price.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Alan Brown Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Consumers Could (Should) Do More

        "The other trick is to look for "fulfilled by Amazon" near the price."

        No, it isn't. I've had counterfeit stuff show up via this path.

        0 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Consumers Could (Should) Do More

          "No, it isn't. I've had counterfeit stuff show up via this path."

          What you want is SOLD by Amazon, since that means it comes from their own stocks. If a counterfeit item is SOLD by Amazon, they're going to have to explain themselves before a federal court.

          Fulfilled by Amazon means they're picked up by Amazon and shipped through their own network. Doesn't necessarily mean they checked the product for authenticity, but at least this gives you a chance to ratchet up the pressure if Amazon does fulfill a counterfeit item. Pretty sure Amazon doesn't want to become another eBay, so at some point they'll have to start paying attention.

          0 0 Reply
  12. Haku

    I used to use Play.com a lot until their service became 'watered down' by allowing 3rd party sellers to operate on their site, it got to the point where I once tried to find a USB microSD card reader and discovered finding a non-generic one was futile - one seller had put over 8000 duplicate listings for the same card reader, totally ruining the site's search capability.

    I completely gave up using that site after then - if they can't maintain their own site properly then I don't want to have to deal with them if say I had to return something.

    0 0 Reply
  13. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    Amazingly, Amazon have NO SYSTEM for reporting this; after looking for a LG TV and finding nothing but email scams, plus one eStore that had obviously been hijacked, I tried to contact them - to no avail.

    In the end (after 2 days) I posted a comment in the item reviews, the review was rejected 20 minutes later, and the offending eStore removed 10 minutes after that.

    There were HUNDREDS of email scam entries under TVs the week before Christmas, and they were removing any chance of finding the genuine price on anything; but Amazon dont care.

    I am closing my own eStore this month, I have no confidence in them any longer; it is safer to buy stuff on line from China.

    Eat This Amazon

    1 0 Reply
  14. FlamingDeath Silver badge

    A to Z of screwing you over

    Amazon is not a nice company, they've been in the news alot of late, and not for good reasons.

    They say sociopaths tend to concentrate into groups...

    1 0 Reply

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