People defrauding companies like Amazon just erodes consumer privileges for the rest of us. Abusing return systems is going to make legitimate returns much harder. I had to return a 1k dollar...
People defrauding companies like Amazon just erodes consumer privileges for the rest of us. Abusing return systems is going to make legitimate returns much harder. I had to return a 1k dollar tablet to Amazon as it wasn't the right model, and it took over 2 months and verifying my identity via my drivers license to get the money back.
I bought a UPS from Amazon in late december (sold by the official APC store on Amazon, delivered by Amazon). What I received a week later was a unit clearly not just used but on its last legs. It...
I bought a UPS from Amazon in late december (sold by the official APC store on Amazon, delivered by Amazon). What I received a week later was a unit clearly not just used but on its last legs. It had been shoved haphazardly into a plastic wrapping, it had the stickers in the wrong places, and the battery came with both poles plugged in. When turned on, it made a strong metallic crackling which could have been faulty cooling or electricity arcing (I was told).
When I requested a replacement or refund, Amazon sent me a new unit (this one was good), but told me they'd charge my credit card again for the cost of the UPS if I didn't return the broken one or (this immediately pissed me off) if it wasn't in the same condition it was sold as, which seems like a stupid thing to write considering that was the problem in the first place (fortunately they don't seem to have enforced that).
The return process was initiated by Amazon and used Amazon's choice of logistics company. They were supposed to contact me the next day to schedule a pickup within 3 workdays. Rules were that I couldn't reschedule it and it could happen whenever during waking hours, but it would be scheduled.
The courier never called, neither did they show up. When I called them, they acknowledged they had to come and pick up the thing, but once again they didn't. This happened three times, and due to the "can happen whenever" rule it basically ruined two weeks of my life. Eventually (after two attempts) I got amazon's call center in India to schedule a pickup using a different company. The work order didn't arrive at the new courier within the time period amazon claimed, which I was told was "normal", so I had to spend a late evening waiting in a freezing cold parking lot (pickup spot refused to let me wait there). Once the package was finally on the way, tracking didn't work. Eventually - in February - amazon sent me an e-mail claiming the package had arrived and was under evaluation.
Throughout this process, I was repeatedly threatened by amazon. Their website, their deliverers, their call center agents all told me I was going to get double charged if I didn't complete this process successfully, to the point that I outright had to tell the last one I was going to hang up and call a lawyer if he didn't cut the crap. I was an innocent customer who made an expensive purchase, they fucked up somewhere on their side, yet I was treated like a scumbag criminal, with the utmost contempt (the call center agents' well trained "I'm so very sorry this has happened to you"s aside).
In mid-February, amazon double charged my card anyway, claiming I hadn't completed the delivery. I had to get in touch with their call center again and point out, very calmly (believe me, that was hard) that they themselves had also claimed they had received the delivery two weeks earlier. They did refund me a short time after that.
I'm not feeling any consumer privilege, nor any desire to ever buy any electronics from amazon in the conceivable future.
In early days Amazon accepted returns for any reason. But now the frauds have increased so much both Amazon and Flipkart have tightened their return policy. Worst hit is smartphones category,...
In early days Amazon accepted returns for any reason. But now the frauds have increased so much both Amazon and Flipkart have tightened their return policy. Worst hit is smartphones category, specially on Flipkart - they'll make you install a third party app with full adminstrator permission to check for any issues, and if it display 'no issue' forget ever returning the phone.
In future if you order any expensive electronic items make sure to check everything at time of delivery and have it recorded otherwise they do hard time accepting returns.
Also if you want to contact Amazon support do not call them. There is a chat option in the app. I always use it for returns. Call centre people waste a lot of time.
No chat option outside the US; all of their websites operate independently. Socially around these parts it's difficult to check things at the time of delivery. Even if I encountered the courier at...
No chat option outside the US; all of their websites operate independently.
Socially around these parts it's difficult to check things at the time of delivery. Even if I encountered the courier at the door (doesn't always happen for a variety of reasons) I'd have had to make them wait while I unpacked and set up the UPS. I was surprised by the battery poles being plugged, the noise while it ran, etc. but those things are not immediately visible. The person who dropped off the package probably had another 200 to delivery on that day and nobody ever enforces any signature/PIN/confirmation methods for accepting packages; either they would have left with the item way before I found anything, in which case I'd be begging for the package to disappear in the system and for me to be treated like a criminal anyway, or they would have left it behind, in which case I'd still have a broken device in my hands... There's no winning unless you're lucky.
I mean, even in the US, the chat is impossible to get through to a human, and when you do, they really can't do much because of how limiting the software is on their end.
I mean, even in the US, the chat is impossible to get through to a human, and when you do, they really can't do much because of how limiting the software is on their end.
I would caution against believing this so readily, if nothing else than for the fact that Amazon would still do it even without returns fraud, as part of enshittification. I won’t argue that fraud...
I would caution against believing this so readily, if nothing else than for the fact that Amazon would still do it even without returns fraud, as part of enshittification.
I won’t argue that fraud doesn’t make it happen faster, but it’s just important to remember that Amazon – and virtually all for-profit companies generally as a function of size – is inherently immoral and will screw over everyone else as much as possible by default.
I have no optimism left for late-stage capitalism, but I think changes in corporate policy like this are a direct result of people trying to get one over on the system one too many times. Amazon...
I have no optimism left for late-stage capitalism, but I think changes in corporate policy like this are a direct result of people trying to get one over on the system one too many times. Amazon wants people to use their service and has always offered a pretty generous returns policy in order to entice people (similar to Costco) but there's only so many times you can bite that hand before it pulls back.
I don’t entirely disagree, frankly. I just feel that this perspective forgets that Amazon will remove any and all enticements the moment it feels doing so would be profitable. Theft isn’t so much...
I don’t entirely disagree, frankly. I just feel that this perspective forgets that Amazon will remove any and all enticements the moment it feels doing so would be profitable. Theft isn’t so much the cause as it is an accelerant, if you ask me.
They have started to crack down on this unofficially by flagging accounts that legitimately returned X many items" in Y time frame. I've gathered that it's more focused on the total dollar amount...
They have started to crack down on this unofficially by flagging accounts that legitimately returned X many items" in Y time frame. I've gathered that it's more focused on the total dollar amount spent vs. returned than the number of items, though.
Still, I always ask myself when ordering, "Do I want the hassle of returning this, eating the cost if it's shit, or having my account earmarked? Screw it, I'll keep the $20 poorly advertised garbage water fountain and cash in my chips when something is REALLY screwed up."
I've gone the opposite way. I've decided they can earmark my account all they want. If I order something crappy, I want my money back and Amazon can deal with returning the item. Recently, I...
I've gone the opposite way. I've decided they can earmark my account all they want. If I order something crappy, I want my money back and Amazon can deal with returning the item. Recently, I purchased a new cane that literally fell apart the second day I used it, and Amazon tried to charge me $40 to return the item, and it was a $75 cane. I sent them pictures of the issue, and had to talk on the phone to someone, but in the end, I got my money back.
A few years ago, I was trying to find a wedding dress, and bridal shops were still mostly closed or had very limited options/appointments due to covid, and I couldn't get in. I ordered probably $3K worth of dresses to my house to try on, and Amazon let me return every single one of the dresses hassle-free, after giving me an incredibly hard time about returning some house-hold storage items just a month prior that were maybe $30 each.
I still remember the days when I could complain about an item, and Amazon would tell me to keep/donate the item and give me a free month of prime along with it. Before Amazon was the monopoly that it is, they would have done anything to make sure their customers were happy. Now, they have our business, and it's almost impossible to go anywhere else to get things in a reasonable timeframe, and they can do whatever they want. Thanks to late-stage capitalism.
It doesn't personally upset me because I'm not affected by it. But I can't help but read stuff like this and be astounded by how stupidly brazen people can be about things that have legit legal...
It doesn't personally upset me because I'm not affected by it. But I can't help but read stuff like this and be astounded by how stupidly brazen people can be about things that have legit legal consequences. Like I don't want one pair of shoes enough to risk prison -- or at least a huge fine -- let alone a hundred.
I used to not care about stuff like this because I thought it didn't affect me, but it really does affect us. Physical retail theft affects us when retailers leave certain neighborhoods and cite...
Exemplary
I used to not care about stuff like this because I thought it didn't affect me, but it really does affect us.
Physical retail theft affects us when retailers leave certain neighborhoods and cite shoplifting as a reason. It affects us when you go to the store and picking up a single item takes 20 minutes because the store had to lock it in a case. It affects us when the prices are increased beyond normal inflation to account for shoplifting.
Now online retail theft may make it more difficult to get help if your package is legitimately stolen or you have an actual return.
It's one thing to steal because you're starving and really have no other option, but when people are stealing for profit, and we end up paying the price with worse shopping experiences and higher prices it's upsetting.
I have spent many words in this thread talking about the ethical implications of stealing from megacorporations. But though I stand by what I say, I can’t ignore the fact that it very likely looks...
I have spent many words in this thread talking about the ethical implications of stealing from megacorporations. But though I stand by what I say, I can’t ignore the fact that it very likely looks as though I wholesale support stealing as much from big companies as possible. And in light of your well-written comment, I feel I should clarify that I do not.
The knee-jerk reaction most have upon hearing of fraud is to condemn it, because obviously; it hurts people, and they know it would be awful if it happened to them. This is good! But I’m pushing back against this idea in the specific context of a multi-billion-dollar corporation being stolen from and barely noticing. Where it gets written off as an expected cost and forgotten about.
The truth is, though, that you are right. This is often an idealized scenario. Rarely does theft not cause harm.
I just want to caution people against treating huge companies the same way they do their neighbors. Corporate personhood is a fiction, and acts against a company do not hold the same implications as those against people.
Thanks for clarifying. I think you can make any act seem okay or not by imagining the right circumstances. Maybe it’s Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed his sister’s starving children? Or someone...
Thanks for clarifying.
I think you can make any act seem okay or not by imagining the right circumstances. Maybe it’s Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed his sister’s starving children? Or someone who wants to imagine a less sympathetic criminal might imagine that it’s a crack addict stealing to feed their habit?
But this is imagining things. The argument that fraud is okay just because it’s a business being defrauded, without knowing anything else about the circumstances, seems rather weak to me and makes me wonder what other weak excuses that person would use to justify lying, cheating, or stealing. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to come up with some other excuse for whatever they want to do?
That’s a slippery slope argument and maybe not entirely convincing, but I still think it’s a good norm to assume that fraud is not okay by default. I wouldn’t want to work with people who are openly advocating for it. Seems like a bad crowd? What could you trust them with?
We can talk about the breakdown of trust in general, but this is also the breakdown in trust in specific people. One side effect of being an untrustworthy person is that nobody will want to hire you - or wouldn’t, if they knew. If you think it’s bad to be unemployed then maybe you shouldn’t go around encouraging people to be untrustworthy?
There are whole companies that are pretty far gone, where everyone is out for themselves and both management and workers are dishonest. I think they are bad places to work! I guess it’s understandable that some people will join in when everyone else is doing it, but I think a better idea is to find somewhere else to work, because the longer you stay, the more soul-deadening it is. Better to leave with your integrity intact.
Oh yeah I definitely don’t want to sound like a champion for Wal-Mart and Amazon. I don’t think those are ethical companies, but I just know that they won’t lose. If someone steals from them they...
Oh yeah I definitely don’t want to sound like a champion for Wal-Mart and Amazon. I don’t think those are ethical companies, but I just know that they won’t lose. If someone steals from them they will get that money back from their employees or from their customers.
They already killed most of the small businesses competition, so they know they can raise prices or ruin the shopping experience and people will still show up to buy.
This honestly feels like a prisoner scenario where if a few people act up, the guards will punish everyone. I don’t know what the best way to fight against large corporations would be, but stealing just doesn’t seem like it works.
One concern I have is that I rarely return items, and when I do it is because the product is materially faulty, incorrect, etc, not just me changing my mind. I don't want my return processes to be...
One concern I have is that I rarely return items, and when I do it is because the product is materially faulty, incorrect, etc, not just me changing my mind. I don't want my return processes to be worsened by changes driven by people abusing the system.
I think it’s the realization that many many people have different moral standards to me. I already know about the big loud crazy people with terrible morals (terfs, trump followers, etc.). But...
I think it’s the realization that many many people have different moral standards to me. I already know about the big loud crazy people with terrible morals (terfs, trump followers, etc.). But there’s probably low single digit people out there that I closely align with.
In scenarios like this, why? What value does that integrity have? Who does it help? For that matter, what makes “not stealing from multibillion businesses” the path of integrity at all? If you are...
In scenarios like this, why? What value does that integrity have? Who does it help? For that matter, what makes “not stealing from multibillion businesses” the path of integrity at all?
If you are against it because you believe a poor sap working for them will end up being made to eat the loss, that’s fine; stealing from the workers of these companies is easily wrong for many reasons, and if you steal from the company knowing this is what they will do, you are stealing from the worker. But you sound opposed to the concept even if this doesn’t happen, no? So I remain puzzled.
Is stealing unethical by its very nature, even when nobody is hurt, and the loss is not felt? What if it isn’t even noticed? I’ll remind you that multibillion businesses can and do regularly lose...
Is stealing unethical by its very nature, even when nobody is hurt, and the loss is not felt? What if it isn’t even noticed?
I’ll remind you that multibillion businesses can and do regularly lose millions of dollars and they don’t even blink.
I would say yes, absolutely it's unethical by nature, but let's get into it. You come into my house and take $10. I don't notice, $10 has absolutely no bearing on my overall financial health, and...
Is stealing unethical by its very nature, even when nobody is hurt, and the loss is not felt? What if it isn’t even noticed?
I would say yes, absolutely it's unethical by nature, but let's get into it. You come into my house and take $10. I don't notice, $10 has absolutely no bearing on my overall financial health, and I do not feel the loss.
Was the action you took ethical? I would argue that it was not. Kant would ask "if everybody did this action, would the world be better or worse?", and to me it seems clear that the world would be worse. Moving away from philosophy, even the golden rule ("treat others as they would like to be treated") would clearly argue against stealing, regardless of whether I was hurt by the loss.
I’ll remind you that multibillion businesses can and do regularly lose millions of dollars and they don’t even blink.
Without more context - seeing the full "proof", as it were - I really don't think this supports your argument. If my garage burns down and I lose a bunch of money, that doesn't have any bearing on whether it's ethical for you to steal from me, even if I don't blink over the loss. If I routinely incur losses from theft and don't blink over that either, that also doesn't have any bearing on whether it's ethical for you to steal from me.
I want to start by saying that I do appreciate your responses here. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread that you loved debating philosophy, which I've found I can often relate to! I should note...
I want to start by saying that I do appreciate your responses here. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread that you loved debating philosophy, which I've found I can often relate to! I should note that I've no formal education in this space – only that which I've picked up piece by piece from finding educational content of interest across the internet – and so I may trip up here and there, but the reality is that this just largely makes this conversation another opportunity to learn.
Was the action you took ethical? I would argue that it was not. Kant would ask "if everybody did this action, would the world be better or worse?", and to me it seems clear that the world would be worse. Moving away from philosophy, even the golden rule ("treat others as they would like to be treated") would clearly argue against stealing, regardless of whether I was hurt by the loss.
I would find that the major difference between your hypothetical and that which I am working off is that you and a massive business are far from similar, let alone identical. Your argument as to stealing's lacking morals makes sense when we're talking about people, but companies aren't people. In particular, I feel the following is a sampler of what changes the moral calculus of the act:
Businesses, by way of not being human, lack empathy. Indeed, I firmly believe that the profit motive itself is highly corrupt and the greed it encourages leaves every for-profit business around destined to hurt the society it takes part in out of pressure applied by its' shareholders and their desire to get a return on their investment. I veer into politics here, but the key takeaway is this: Businesses are often unethical, and use their power to do unethical things. Theft is one (admittedly ineffective) way of taking this power from them, and thereby preventing heinous acts.
Massive businesses, of the like Amazon can count itself among, frequently perform many varieties of theft of their own as part of their operations – think wage theft, tax evasion/loopholes, etc – and so for many thefts targeting them, an argument could be made that what's being stolen could be said to have once belonged to the so-called thief to begin with.
Businesses of such a caliber as to have millions of dollars or more in spare funds could not be said to have lost anywhere near the equivalent of your $10 when someone steals from them, unless the theft amounts to a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars at once, which is decidedly atypical. You might argue this changes nothing, and that your arguments still apply — I would argue that at some point, the golden rule and similar principles' relevancy approaches zero as the effects of the act on the target approach null. To address Kant: If everyone on Earth stole a billionth of a penny from you, would you care? Should you?
Things like these are why I bring up multibillion businesses' losses. I firmly believe stealing from a business of such a size is in many important ways very different from someone stealing from you or I, and that is why I believe it can, in narrow scenarios, be very much ethical to steal from them.
Sure. If you like, you can replace me in my argument with a small business I own: you come and steal a small amount from my small business. Everything else is the same (I don't notice, my business...
Your argument as to stealing's lacking morals makes sense when we're talking about people, but companies aren't people.
Sure. If you like, you can replace me in my argument with a small business I own: you come and steal a small amount from my small business. Everything else is the same (I don't notice, my business isn't harmed, etc.) My small business is not a person. Does that materially change the ethics of the situation?
I would argue that at some point, the golden rule and similar principles' relevancy approaches zero as the effects of the act on the target approach null. To address Kant: If everyone on Earth stole a billionth of a penny from you, would you care? Should you?
If I may, you're arguing here that "it's not that bad, nobody gets hurt" basically. First, I'm not convinced - as other posters have pointed out, large-scale fraud hurts us all in a very concrete way by making it more difficult for us to engage in legitimate returns. Second, arguing that it's not that bad is very far from convincing me that
It can... Be very much ethical to steal from [multibillion dollar businesses].
Emphasis added. Kant's categorical imperative ("if everyone did this thing, would the world be better or worse") was designed in part specifically to address questions of "is it really that bad." Kant would agree that no - it's not really that bad. If you steal a small amount from me, I am not particularly harmed. But he would still hold that the action is unethical, because if everyone stole - regardless of the amount - the world would be a worse place.
Businesses are often unethical, and use their power to do unethical things. Theft is one (admittedly ineffective) way of taking this power from them, and thereby preventing heinous acts.
Apologies for copying something I wrote elsewhere, but I'm not sure I can phrase it any better:
The closest model off the top of my head here is virtue ethics, which argues that the same action can be virtuous (ethical) or not, depending on the motives of the actor. A classic example is stealing in order to feed your family, but I think "stealing in order to take down a villain" works just fine too.
However: does that really apply here if I'm scamming Amazon out of retail goods? You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that these scammers have virtuous motives. Moreover, even if they did, I think you'd also need to convince me that their actions realistically had a chance of bringing about a virtuous outcome. As an example: murder is generally considered unethical. Murdering one person in order to stop a war, however, may well be considered ethical by most people. The key criterion there, though, would be that you reasonably expected that murdering that one person had a realistic chance of stopping the war - if you were murdering a general, for instance. You couldn't just go murder some random citizen of that country and hope that somehow the war stopped. In the same way, I would be extremely skeptical if you argued that stealing retail goods from Amazon had a realistic chance of toppling that company or preventing them from engaging in unethical actions of their own.
Also - Is the retail theft we're discussing so unnoticeable to Amazon that they are unharmed and thus the relevance of Kant's moral imperative is approaching null? Or is this theft sufficient to take power away from Amazon and prevent them from engaging in unethical actions? It can't be both.
Massive businesses, of the like Amazon can count itself among, frequently perform many varieties of theft of their own as part of their operations – think wage theft, tax evasion/loopholes, etc – and so for many thefts targeting them, an argument could be made that what's being stolen could be said to have once belonged to the so-called thief to begin with.
I think there is a pretty enormous series of leaps from "Amazon doesn't have to pay as much in taxes as I think they should" to "therefore they are stealing from me and so I'm just getting my own stuff back." Amazon doesn't pay taxes to you, they pay taxes to the government. I can't establish a particularly plausible chain of logic here and I didn't want to put words in your mouth by writing a bad one. If you have something more coherent, would enjoy discussing it.
But either way, just establishing we have been harmed doesn't establish why it's okay for us to steal. Look at wage theft - that's the most reasonable argument thus far, I think, but we have processes in place to address this, which is why Amazon keeps getting sued. To return to my small business example, if I make you work without breaks and you steal money out of the till to get your back wages, you have still committed a crime. Saying "well, she made me work without breaks" doesn't absolve you, it just means that we're both in trouble for separate things. (The law and ethics are not synonymous, but I find the law is often useful to get a sense of how most people are thinking about things.)
I think we're at risk of going in circles here, so let me reiterate my views for clarity's sake: It is possible (if rare) for it to be ethical to steal, particularly from a large business, because...
I think we're at risk of going in circles here, so let me reiterate my views for clarity's sake:
It is possible (if rare) for it to be ethical to steal,
particularly from a large business,
because large businesses and people are fundamentally different.
It is with these ideas in mind that I address your comment.
Sure. If you like, you can replace me in my argument with a small business I own: you come and steal a small amount from my small business. Everything else is the same (I don't notice, my business isn't harmed, etc.) My small business is not a person. Does that materially change the ethics of the situation?
To a degree, yes. But not to the same degree that it does with regard to an Amazon-sized business.
If I may, you're arguing here that "it's not that bad, nobody gets hurt" basically. First, I'm not convinced - as other posters have pointed out, large-scale fraud hurts us all in a very concrete way by making it more difficult for us to engage in legitimate returns.
I don't disagree! I address this in my other comment here. But I also believe it's not necessarily a given that this occurs in all theft, and that it is possible for theft to not cause this issue. Part of why the size of the business is something I keep bringing up is because I firmly believe that the odds of the theft causing harm decrease as the business gets larger (assuming the amount taken does not scale with it).
[...] if everyone stole - regardless of the amount - the world would be a worse place.
I could, theoretically, argue that the benefit of the thief outweighs this negativity, but that's more utilitarian than I'm comfortable with, frankly. I instead feel that my argument as to the smallness of the impact applies better here, though I suppose it argues more to a moral neutrality rather than any sort of positive impact.
I would be extremely skeptical if you argued that stealing retail goods from Amazon had a realistic chance of toppling that company or preventing them from engaging in unethical actions of their own.
Fair point!
Also - Is the retail theft we're discussing so unnoticeable to Amazon that they are unharmed and thus the relevance of Kant's moral imperative is approaching null? Or is this theft sufficient to take power away from Amazon and prevent them from engaging in unethical actions? It can't be both.
True, it can't be both. But it can be one or the other. In the former, it can be said to be a neutral act, or at least close enough to such. In the latter, however, it could – provided it also meets the "reasonable expectation" limitation you mention, which I do believe is fair – be considered an ethical act.
I think there is a pretty enormous series of leaps from "Amazon doesn't have to pay as much in taxes as I think they should" to "therefore they are stealing from me and so I'm just getting my own stuff back." Amazon doesn't pay taxes to you, they pay taxes to the government.
I should emphasize that I said an argument could be made here. I am aware it is tenuous and should not be made lightly, and depending on how it is developed it may indeed not hold up to scrutiny. But it could be made, if not least for the fact that since the government provides services for the sake of the public good, and because Amazon is stealing from it, I don't think it's much of a leap to say that Amazon is stealing from the public good. And besides, "as I think they should" is a bit disingenous, I feel; there's an amount of tax that Amazon is meant to be paying, and they are employing leagues of lawyers to pay less than that to what is likely an enormous degree. The law itself, as written, may not be violated insofar as we know, but the spirit of it most likely is.
This leads directly into your next point, too, which is where I would point out that yes, we do have means to address wage theft. But they are deeply inadequate in many ways, and often favor employers — especially large ones with big legal teams and big lobbying budgets. Many cases of wage theft do not get properly addressed, and in such cases where the law provides for no sufficient means to deal with such a plight, what can you expect a wronged and desperate individual to do but seek justice the only way they know how?
Who's to say the person who made you work without breaks will get in trouble at all, and what should you do if they don't?
In the same manner it becomes ethical to stand against and break unethical laws. If the business is imposing unethical outcomes on an individual or a society, is it unethical to bring that...
In the same manner it becomes ethical to stand against and break unethical laws.
If the business is imposing unethical outcomes on an individual or a society, is it unethical to bring that business down through theft or other means?
u/LukeZaz does a good job naming the ways this can happen in this thread:
• Amazon has billions if dollars in profit annually and could suffer immense, widespread loss and theft and still win. Refund fraudsters almost certainly cannot.
• People stealing from Amazon are people, and thus need to eat, drink, have medicine and shelter, luxury, et cetera. Amazon needs none of this.
• Amazon pays an exceedingly low tax rate relative its immense wealth. Depending on your economics, this could be seen as them stealing from the rest of the nation by shifting tax burdens on to everybody else.
I do not believe everyone should steal from Amazon, to be clear. There is a (distant) breaking point where severe issues would eventually appear. But I don’t see a reason to care when someone does, so long as the working class stuck underneath aren’t hurt as a result.
I won't say I'm 100% ok with this sort of fraud and organized crime, but I'm not losing any sleep over this.
Disclaimer: I love ethics and philosophy, so I'll debate this stuff all day. The closest model off the top of my head here is virtue ethics, which argues that the same action can be virtuous...
Disclaimer: I love ethics and philosophy, so I'll debate this stuff all day.
If the business is imposing unethical outcomes on an individual or a society, is it unethical to bring that business down through theft or other means?
The closest model off the top of my head here is virtue ethics, which argues that the same action can be virtuous (ethical) or not, depending on the motives of the actor. A classic example is stealing in order to feed your family, but I think "stealing in order to take down a villain" works just fine too.
However: does that really apply here if I'm scamming Amazon out of retail goods? You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that these scammers have virtuous motives. Moreover, even if they did, I think you'd also need to convince me that their actions realistically had a chance of bringing about a virtuous outcome. As an example: murder is generally considered unethical. Murdering one person in order to stop a war, however, may well be considered ethical by most people. The key criterion there, though, would be that you reasonably expected that murdering that one person had a realistic chance of stopping the war - if you were murdering a general, for instance. You couldn't just go murder some random citizen of that country. In the same way, I would be extremely skeptical if you argued that stealing retail goods from Amazon had a realistic chance of toppling that company.
People stealing from Amazon are people, and thus need to eat, drink, have medicine and shelter, luxury, et cetera. Amazon needs none of this.
Barring more context/explanation, I don't think this is relevant. Let's say I own a small business. You steal from my business. My business is also not a person and does not need to eat/drink/etc. Does that really have any bearing on whether it was ethical to steal from my small business?
Amazon pays an exceedingly low tax rate relative its immense wealth. Depending on your economics, this could be seen as them stealing from the rest of the nation by shifting tax burdens on to everybody else.
Right on. For one thing, I think that there's a higher bar for arguing an entity is engaged in unethical behavior if they are following the law. It's not impossible! Lots of laws are unethical. But there's a lot of rhetorical leg work that needs to be done beyond "well my economic philosophy holds that amazon should pay more taxes than they're currently required to do, so they are stealing." And second - even if we accept that this is true and that Amazon is acting immorally, all that does is provide the background for the first point: "if someone is doing something unethical, is it then unethical to bring them down through theft." Even if we accept that Amazon is acting immorally, we still haven't demonstrated that it is then moral for us to do something like steal from them.
Oh - and if you meant to tag LukeZaz, you need to do it with @, not u/. ; )
It sounds to me like you're talking about an individual defrauding a company. It's true that individuals are paying for these services, but an organized company is actually taking the action. Is...
It sounds to me like you're talking about an individual defrauding a company. It's true that individuals are paying for these services, but an organized company is actually taking the action.
Is paying for something ethically the same as doing that thing? Is this also the same as paying for a candy bar despite the horrific things Nestle does?
Generally speaking, no, but that doesn't absolve either actor. If I pay for someone to be killed, it's not the same as committing the murder, but I have still acted unethically. Full disclosure,...
Is paying for something ethically the same as doing that thing?
Generally speaking, no, but that doesn't absolve either actor. If I pay for someone to be killed, it's not the same as committing the murder, but I have still acted unethically.
Is this also the same as paying for a candy bar despite the horrific things Nestle does?
Full disclosure, I'm not really sure where you're going with this. It's phrased like a gotcha question, but I don't really see the gotcha. Could you please expand on what you're thinking so we can discuss it?
This misunderstands the nature of Amazon's profits. Amazon reinvests virtually all of its profits, which means all that profit is going back into the economy instead of being hoarded.
Amazon pays an exceedingly low tax rate relative its immense wealth. Depending on your economics, this could be seen as them stealing from the rest of the nation by shifting tax burdens on to everybody else.
This misunderstands the nature of Amazon's profits. Amazon reinvests virtually all of its profits, which means all that profit is going back into the economy instead of being hoarded.
I actually don't feel as much of a moral issue from the workers. Amazon is definitely not paying them fairly. In my opinion almost all businesses that aren't ran as a socialist co-op are stealing...
I actually don't feel as much of a moral issue from the workers. Amazon is definitely not paying them fairly. In my opinion almost all businesses that aren't ran as a socialist co-op are stealing from their workers.
Everyone else, however, is just exploiting a weak point in a system. Just the same as when Amazon exploits non-unionized workers.
I agree heartily and am glad you feel this way! What I disagree with here is the idea that someone stealing from Amazon is akin to Amazon stealing from workers — it’s an apples-to-oranges...
In my opinion almost all businesses that aren't ran as a socialist co-op are stealing from their workers.
I agree heartily and am glad you feel this way!
Everyone else, however, is just exploiting a weak point in a system. Just the same as when Amazon exploits non-unionized workers.
What I disagree with here is the idea that someone stealing from Amazon is akin to Amazon stealing from workers — it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. They’re both fruits, but are otherwise quite different. For example:
Amazon has billions if dollars in profit annually and could suffer immense, widespread loss and theft and still win. Refund fraudsters almost certainly cannot.
People stealing from Amazon are people, and thus need to eat, drink, have medicine and shelter, luxury, et cetera. Amazon needs none of this.
Amazon pays an exceedingly low tax rate relative its immense wealth. Depending on your economics, this could be seen as them stealing from the rest of the nation by shifting tax burdens on to everybody else.
I do not believe everyone should steal from Amazon, to be clear. There is a (distant) breaking point where severe issues would eventually appear. But I don’t see a reason to care when someone does, so long as the working class stuck underneath aren’t hurt as a result.
And despite all of this, they are still more profitable than ever. Shrink has always been a part of the retail game. There's a reason that they'd transitioned to mandating receipts or having a...
And despite all of this, they are still more profitable than ever.
Shrink has always been a part of the retail game. There's a reason that they'd transitioned to mandating receipts or having a hard cap on refund value without one.
The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.
Ah, and as-always, it basically boils down to being able to get an insider to scan away merch. Technology is just making it easier to detect. We used to call this "falling off the truck".
As with most companies amazon is at the end of their "capture the market" stage so now they get to try and squeeze blood from the stone, and shrink is always one of the first places companies...
As with most companies amazon is at the end of their "capture the market" stage so now they get to try and squeeze blood from the stone, and shrink is always one of the first places companies look.
There are proper ways to handle this ,but I wouldn't be totally surprised if it just becomes whatever is easiest for amazon to implement even if it's a pain in the ass for the legit consumer.
I would think it would be much more likely that they would be explaining how it's actually better for the customer to get store credit or perhaps it comes with some "benefit" for the customer to...
I would think it would be much more likely that they would be explaining how it's actually better for the customer to get store credit or perhaps it comes with some "benefit" for the customer to make it sound like they're being the good guy.
Refund fraud, which involves tricking retailers into refunding a customer for a purchase without an item being physically returned, has become so pervasive that groups now market their services on Reddit, TikTok and Telegram. Type in “refund method” — or “r3fund,” to skirt content moderators — on TikTok and videos will pop up of users showing off piles of cash, sneakers and iPhones. One video has the caption, “me after realizing you can get a refund on any Rick Owens if the ‘package never came,’” referring to the minimalist fashion brand. The clip shows a hand endlessly tossing shoes to the ground.
...
An Amazon spokesperson said the company is addressing the issue “head on” through specialized teams and machine learning tools that detect and prevent refund fraud. Amazon says its work with law enforcement has led to arrests, the dismantling of organized retail crime groups and civil lawsuits.
...
Here’s how it works: A shopper buys a product online and sends the order information to a group such as Rekk, which then poses as the customer in requesting a refund. Amazon refunds the money to the customer, who then pays the fraud group usually between 15% and 30% of the refund amount, often via PayPal or with bitcoin. That means the customer ends up buying the product for what amounts to a huge discount.
The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.
Retailers and law enforcement agencies are catching onto the trend. In September, a 25-year-old man in Michigan, Sajed Al-Maarej, was arrested and charged with conspiracy, wire fraud and mail fraud after he allegedly ran a return fraud service called Simple Refunds that targeted more than 50 retailers. The following month, 10 men were indicted in Oklahoma, and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud for allegedly operating a refund fraud service named Artemis Refund Group. And a 24-year-old U.K. man was convicted of fraud in December after running the KeptSecrets refund service, which targeted retailers including Amazon, Walmart and Wayfair, according to court documents.
...
CNBC viewed several active refund fraud services on encrypted messaging app Telegram, each with thousands of followers. Updates are posted almost daily of new stores on their services, or new retailers that have been successfully targeted. Amazon and Apple are frequently hit, along with Nike, eBay, Saks Fifth Avenue and Ralph Lauren. Some groups even offer their services for DoorDash and Uber Eats orders, claiming users can “eat for free.”
...
In the past, such illicit behavior ran rampant on the dark web and required VPNs and a special browser, said Brittany Allen, a trust and safety architect at fraud detection software company Sift. These days the perpetrators regularly discuss their activities openly on forums and in messaging apps, which Allen described as the “democratization of fraud.”
I nearly got nailed in an Amazon refund scam. Ordered a $700 item, and turned out both the pic and the description were wrong. Returned it as per Amazon's policy and complained to the seller....
I nearly got nailed in an Amazon refund scam. Ordered a $700 item, and turned out both the pic and the description were wrong. Returned it as per Amazon's policy and complained to the seller. Suddenly my refund timeline disappeared off Amazon and I got no communication. Put in a cashback request to VISA and it took SIX months and sending them the same verification info twice plus another hour long call to Amazon and sending them the return verification twice to finally get my money back.
I checked and the same damn item is still listed with the same wrong description - they're doing it purposely and hoping people wont be tenacious in demanding a refund.
Amazon is getting scammed on both ends (and apparently also by employees, according to this article), and it's often not worth it to them to figure out who's really at fault. At least at first. As...
Amazon is getting scammed on both ends (and apparently also by employees, according to this article), and it's often not worth it to them to figure out who's really at fault.
At least at first. As word gets out, they will need to care more.
The real answer is treating employees like people and not disposable cattle. Amazon's 'churn and burn' approach to warehouse employees is biting them in the ass. If you like your job, are paid...
The real answer is treating employees like people and not disposable cattle. Amazon's 'churn and burn' approach to warehouse employees is biting them in the ass.
If you like your job, are paid well, and value your job security, you're far less likely to rob your employer. If you lack those things, your employer obviously doesn't respect you and so why should you respect them?
In my mind at least, there is a material difference between not respecting my employer and robbing them. I feel like I’m in a distinct minority position here whenever the topic of “is stealing...
In my mind at least, there is a material difference between not respecting my employer and robbing them. I feel like I’m in a distinct minority position here whenever the topic of “is stealing from businesses wrong?” comes up.
When someone’s desperate and their employer is a 1) piece of shit that treats you like garbage and 2) has shitloads of money and will never feel the loss, what do you expect people to do? What...
When someone’s desperate and their employer is a 1) piece of shit that treats you like garbage and 2) has shitloads of money and will never feel the loss, what do you expect people to do? What makes it immoral, even when desperation is not a factor?
Remember, by the way, that Amazon is a company, not a person. It has no soul, and cannot feel.
I mean is stealing from a non-profit food pantry immoral? It's not like a food pantry is a person. Same if I cheat on my taxes and lie about my compensation. Organizations and society run on...
I mean is stealing from a non-profit food pantry immoral? It's not like a food pantry is a person. Same if I cheat on my taxes and lie about my compensation.
Organizations and society run on trust. Especially for revolutionaries and reformists that wish society worked differently, how do you get there if everyone lies and steals all the time? It's hard for people to trust each other and build strong social systems if theft is rampant.
Wage theft is the biggest source of theft in the country, and Amazon is one of the biggest thieves in the US. I suspect that the non-profit food bank has not had class action lawsuits for wage...
if theft is rampant
Wage theft is the biggest source of theft in the country, and Amazon is one of the biggest thieves in the US.
I suspect that the non-profit food bank has not had class action lawsuits for wage theft.
You are asking people to take the high road when dealing with an entity that is actively stealing from its employees.
Employees absolutely shouldn't have their time stolen by a company. I just don't see how that justifies committing more fraud. An eye for an eye is a terrible system. I have issues with anyone...
Employees absolutely shouldn't have their time stolen by a company. I just don't see how that justifies committing more fraud.
An eye for an eye is a terrible system. I have issues with anyone making a living from fraud.
Eh, I'd at least somewhat disagree with that, especially at the individual level. Bear in mind eye for an eye is also intended as a way of limiting punishment, rather than say chopping off hands...
An eye for an eye is a terrible system
Eh, I'd at least somewhat disagree with that, especially at the individual level. Bear in mind eye for an eye is also intended as a way of limiting punishment, rather than say chopping off hands for theft.
While it's denounced by pacifists, the pacifists often have a violent counterpart movement that they can point to to say 'would you rather this get worse?'
MLK wouldn't have been nearly as effective if not for the Black Panthers and Malcom X.
Fair point as far as social movements are concerned. In this case, I meant moreso that two wrongs don't make a right. I just don't like an eye for an eye as a moral principle; especially when it's...
Fair point as far as social movements are concerned. In this case, I meant moreso that two wrongs don't make a right.
I just don't like an eye for an eye as a moral principle; especially when it's used to promote proportional punishments like the death penalty. I hadn't considered it might be used to limit punishments. I've mostly heard the phrase from hellfire-and-brimstone types, so thanks for enlightening me!
I'm opposed to the death penalty because the state should not be empowered to kill, and that innocent people get killed because of bad justice. Doesn't mean I feel murders/rapists deserve to live....
I'm opposed to the death penalty because the state should not be empowered to kill, and that innocent people get killed because of bad justice. Doesn't mean I feel murders/rapists deserve to live.
I would add that I don't think eye for an eye is a virtue either. Just more of a neutral than an evil.
Like many things, I feel it is suitable in some situations and not others. Especially with respect to monetary compensation, it makes a lot of sense.
We aren’t talking about a food pantry, which has a positive impact on its community and exists to give to the needy. We are talking about Amazon. Amazon does not have morals and does not know...
We aren’t talking about a food pantry, which has a positive impact on its community and exists to give to the needy. We are talking about Amazon. Amazon does not have morals and does not know generosity except as is required for them to obtain positive PR or the occasional tax break.
Like it or not, there are points where the morality of theft changes as a result of who or what is being stolen from. One of the most important ones is: “Will they be hurt by this?”
Most people default to thinking of theft from the perspective of their fellow man getting mugged. Amazon is not a human, and is not in that situation. I bring up its nature to defuse such a framing, and remind people that the answer to the above question is virtually always “no.” Thus, the question of morality: If the target of the theft will not be meaningfully hurt whatsoever by the act, is it immoral, and if so, why?
You seem to believe it is so because it would damage important lines of trust that keep society afloat. But your phrasing suggests a belief that perceiving theft against Amazon as moral goes hand-in-hand with perceiving theft generally as moral. I think it’s rather safe to say that nobody here is advocating that, and the idea that Amazon alone taking these losses (losses that, for them, are very easy to take) will somehow disrupt society is not one I find convincing.
So for-profit corporations that defraud their employees are okay to steal from? How do you square the circle and draw lines on "acceptable" levels of theft? By your measure of "Will they be hurt...
So for-profit corporations that defraud their employees are okay to steal from? How do you square the circle and draw lines on "acceptable" levels of theft?
By your measure of "Will they be hurt by this?" everyone should do a bit of shoplifting at profitable retailers occasionally. Sure, I could pay for the items but Aldi's has priced in some shrink and my family would appreciate some nicer food than usual. Of course, that store's profitability goes down if enough people start walking out with goods, but that might even be a good thing if you view all profit as theft.
The real world consequences of normalizing this behaviour is the local corner store starts locking up their goods and charging more. Those that don't steal have to pay more to cover the cost of theft-protection and higher shrink. Everything gets a bit harder and there's more friction. Now the clerks do more random bags checks. Stores start hiring private security because theft is so rampant the police don't even bother anymore.
The logical conclusion of normalizing theft is awful for everyone. Encouraging antisocial behaviour is always bad. Society is better when trust is high.
This discussion here has been fascinating and I agree with you here with the concern of the greater harm to trust in society with allowing this sort of behavior. I am not American and thus doesn't...
Exemplary
This discussion here has been fascinating and I agree with you here with the concern of the greater harm to trust in society with allowing this sort of behavior.
I am not American and thus doesn't have much direct experience with Amazon and it's negative effect on society. It does seem like a lot of what I can read between the lines in many comments here is outright hatred for Amazon. I can understand that perspective but also a bit saddened that America seems to be a society with so little general trust. Sure steal from Amazon, but do we really think the refund scammers will limit themselves to them? If it becomes more widely accepted it will over time lead to a general consensus that this sort of thing is acceptable and the bad side effects will spill over to other small businesses getting hurt.
I don't see this refund scam being widely tolerated here in Denmark. I would think most people expect to be treated fairly and will treat businesses fairly back. Whenever there these types of cases in the media they usually aren't condoned by many. But we also don't have anything resembling Amazon. The netshopping landscape is made up of a wide range of small to mid to large shops competing with each other.
It is a difficult problem to restore general trust in a society but I don't see this thing helping long term.
Understatement of the year, my friend. The USA is in a nasty spot right now, and the world should be worried. The president referenced the Civil War 3x in the state of the union talking about the...
I can understand that perspective but also a bit saddened that America seems to be a society with so little general trust.
Understatement of the year, my friend. The USA is in a nasty spot right now, and the world should be worried.
The president referenced the Civil War 3x in the state of the union talking about the divisiveness. That is not a good sign.
Not exactly. My argument is that Amazon is actively stealing from its employees without repercussion, so they should have no problems with their employees stealing from them.
Not exactly. My argument is that Amazon is actively stealing from its employees without repercussion, so they should have no problems with their employees stealing from them.
Those seem to be different people than the fraud return scammers. Is the argument here that if John is stolen from by Amazon, that means Sally is morally entitled to steal from Amazon?
Those seem to be different people than the fraud return scammers. Is the argument here that if John is stolen from by Amazon, that means Sally is morally entitled to steal from Amazon?
Exactly. If an entity makes money by committing theft then it should not be a problem when theft happens to the entity. You ask about morality, which I am not concerned with. Amazon has no morals....
Exactly. If an entity makes money by committing theft then it should not be a problem when theft happens to the entity.
You ask about morality, which I am not concerned with. Amazon has no morals. Amazon is not a person. No interaction with it should be considered part of a moral issue, purely a financial one.
Is it wrong for a cashier to take their back wages directly from the till? I wouldn't think so. If they're only stealing within the bounds of what would be a reasonable compensation boost, I'd...
Is it wrong for a cashier to take their back wages directly from the till? I wouldn't think so.
If they're only stealing within the bounds of what would be a reasonable compensation boost, I'd contend they're just taking what they're rightfully owed.
If they're defrauding to the tune of hundreds of thousands or more, that's a different story. But I'm betting few employees are doing it at that scale, as that would get noticed real quick.
What they’re rightfully owed is what they agreed to be paid in their employment contract. Anything more than that is definitionally not something they are owed. What even is this thought process?...
If they're only stealing within the bounds of what would be a reasonable compensation boost, I'd contend they're just taking what they're rightfully owed.
What they’re rightfully owed is what they agreed to be paid in their employment contract. Anything more than that is definitionally not something they are owed.
What even is this thought process? "Oh, this contract doesn't pay as much as I'd like, but that's ok -- I'll just steal from the company to make up the difference, so it's ok to sign"?
Well considering we're commenting under an article about how fraudsters have become increasingly brazen, I'd say people have caught on! It's just a difficult problem to address if the behavior...
Well considering we're commenting under an article about how fraudsters have become increasingly brazen, I'd say people have caught on! It's just a difficult problem to address if the behavior becomes widespread and normalized.
I'd rather the employee got their back pay legally settled, but I know there are barriers and working with a government labor department takes more time and effort. I'm definitely more sympathetic to your argument of proportional "theft" to get what the employee is legally owed. It's a rough situation that I wish was never relevant.
If the company has stolen from the employee by not actually paying what they agreed to pay, that's quite different than an employee deciding to give themselves a "compensation boost".
reasonable compensation boost
get what the employee is legally owed
If the company has stolen from the employee by not actually paying what they agreed to pay, that's quite different than an employee deciding to give themselves a "compensation boost".
No disagreement that it'd be better if it never came up. But I think it is somewhat the natural consequence of inequality. 'Fuck Bezos, he's getting his, I'm getting mine" is a pretty easy, if...
No disagreement that it'd be better if it never came up.
But I think it is somewhat the natural consequence of inequality. 'Fuck Bezos, he's getting his, I'm getting mine" is a pretty easy, if flawed, moral justification for an individual.
And then one of my core beliefs: People whom are not suffering generally do not steal. Fraud is bad, but punishing fraud is only addressing part of the problem. We must ask why people feel motivated to steal in large quantities. And that 'why' often leads to systemic issues like poor pay and discrimination.
Treating the symptom but not the cause, if you will.
Its going to change their refund policy when it finally puts a dent in their bottom line. Given the billions in profits and near monopoly on cheap shipped goods, that could be awhile. And if you...
Its going to change their refund policy when it finally puts a dent in their bottom line. Given the billions in profits and near monopoly on cheap shipped goods, that could be awhile.
And if you saw the exposé on how much of their returned items just get shredded, its obvious they're not even close to concerned yet.
Some real privileged takes in here. I'm watching food deserts become more common in my city as impoverished neighborhoods lose grocery stores that decided they can't continue to lose money due to...
Some real privileged takes in here. I'm watching food deserts become more common in my city as impoverished neighborhoods lose grocery stores that decided they can't continue to lose money due to way higher shrinkage than they can handle. Who does retail theft affect? Everyone, in the form of higher prices or fewer choices.
People whom are not desperate generally do not steal. If the grocers want to place some blame, it's generally due to poverty. While it's not the grocer's responsibility to solve that on their own,...
People whom are not desperate generally do not steal.
If the grocers want to place some blame, it's generally due to poverty. While it's not the grocer's responsibility to solve that on their own, they do bear somewhat of a civic duty to provide access to food regardless of the losses.
Demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they do not give you bread, take bread.
If only that were true. Unfortunately, everything I've turned up says that the rich are far more likely to shoplift. Obviously we should reduce inequality, but I don't think that'll fix theft....
People whom are not desperate generally do not steal.
If only that were true. Unfortunately, everything I've turned up says that the rich are far more likely to shoplift. Obviously we should reduce inequality, but I don't think that'll fix theft.
Assuming that statistic is correct, then it would probably be that the types of stores are different per neighborhood and sales and margins are different per store and per neighborhood as well?...
Assuming that statistic is correct, then it would probably be that the types of stores are different per neighborhood and sales and margins are different per store and per neighborhood as well?
You can handle way more than 2x the theft rate of a grocery store if the grocery store margins are 2% versus 30%+ at a cosmetics store (spitballing here).
This whole discussion stems from an article about people who aren't desperate that are stealing. Who are in fact turning stealing into a billion dollar enterprise. Grocers are supposed to continue...
People whom are not desperate generally do not steal.
This whole discussion stems from an article about people who aren't desperate that are stealing. Who are in fact turning stealing into a billion dollar enterprise.
they do bear somewhat of a civic duty to provide access to food regardless of the losses.
Grocers are supposed to continue to operate at a loss because of a civic duty? Who actually pays for the supplies? Setting the morals aside, how does this work economically when theft outpaces profits?
If the losses continue too long, they’ll run out of money to pay for the suppliers & employees who keep the food pipeline running. Groceries are a low margin business to begin with, so there’s not...
If the losses continue too long, they’ll run out of money to pay for the suppliers & employees who keep the food pipeline running. Groceries are a low margin business to begin with, so there’s not some 30% profit buffer to run charity neighborhoods.
Everyone’s got a right to steaks and wine! :) More seriously, I think there are big differences between situations where the government distributing food keeps people from starving and situations...
Everyone’s got a right to steaks and wine! :)
More seriously, I think there are big differences between situations where the government distributing food keeps people from starving and situations where many poor people are overweight. Basic food distribution isn’t exactly the issue in the US? It’s more subtle than that.
Also, I expect that people who consider stealing from a business to be a victimless crime would also treat stealing from the government to be a victimless crime? After all, the government is not a person. Any large organization could be seen that way, public or private.
Apparently there’s a real funhouse-mirror version of morality in some places in Africa. From a long article on the Ivory Coast:
Tragically, just as everywhere else in West Africa, corruption in the Ivory Coast became utterly endemic to every part of the state and society. FHB’s personal corruption only amplified its omnipresence. The great cash crop economy was stuffed with police checkpoints, government regulators, and dockworkers who extorted their cuts. According to Kenyon, middle-class parents purposefully sought jobs for themselves and their kids with “bribe-potential.” The rare individuals who didn’t take bribes weren’t seen as unusually brave or moral, but as “deviants” since they clearly didn’t care about making more money to take care of their families. Kenyon again summarizes:
“If someone secured a job in the civil service, at whatever level, it was their duty to make it pay.”
I don’t think Africa-level amounts of corruption are likely in the US any time soon, and I’m not sure morality in the US is declining rather than changing? Or maybe we just hear more about it now?
Still, it seems pretty clear that building an effective organization out of untrustworthy people is hard. Building a system where you don’t have to trust people is hard, too.
Treating people right helps, but you also need to be careful who you hire. Corruption is costly.
I don’t think they were arguing for nationalization specifically due to shoplifting, rather, since food is an essential component of living, it should not be distributed through private,...
I don’t think they were arguing for nationalization specifically due to shoplifting, rather, since food is an essential component of living, it should not be distributed through private, for-profit channels, instead going through things like farmers markets, co-ops, direct farm-to-table sales, etc.
Which is a more reasonable discussion, but I'd posit that grocers are some of the least exploitative corporations in the abstract. Their low profit margins of 2-3% point to healthy competition and...
Which is a more reasonable discussion, but I'd posit that grocers are some of the least exploitative corporations in the abstract. Their low profit margins of 2-3% point to healthy competition and minimal profiteering.
If anything, food prices have way more to do with farmer-centric policies from basically every government around the world (which there are reasonable arguments for but that's off topic).
Considering a large quantity of people only have access to a single monoploy or duopoly now, it's not really a functional change, but prices would be lower.
Considering a large quantity of people only have access to a single monoploy or duopoly now, it's not really a functional change, but prices would be lower.
Do you happen to have any functional examples of a nationalized grocer in peace times? I'm totally supportive of co-ops and sectorial bargaining, but I think those tend to bring higher prices.
Do you happen to have any functional examples of a nationalized grocer in peace times? I'm totally supportive of co-ops and sectorial bargaining, but I think those tend to bring higher prices.
Where do you draw the line between exploiting a loophole and benefiting from someone's conscious incompetence? Do you view them both as morally equivalent? I apologize for simplifying this...
Where do you draw the line between exploiting a loophole and benefiting from someone's conscious incompetence? Do you view them both as morally equivalent?
I apologize for simplifying this discussion with an analogy, but morally, I cannot see taking advantage of a neighbor leaving their door open to steal their TV as the same as the neighbor leaving the TV on the porch despite repeated warnings that it could be stolen, and responding with, 'I don't really care if it's stolen or not, to be honest,' only for you to take it the next day.
The guy even informed their superior about the situation. How is this corruption? Is every act of taking advantage of a situation a type of corruption?
We don't actually know what they found, but this topic is about fraud, they were working in the fraud department, and apparently it bothered them enough to report it? Maybe we should wait to hear...
We don't actually know what they found, but this topic is about fraud, they were working in the fraud department, and apparently it bothered them enough to report it?
It bothered them until they realized they were the only person who it bothered. The company (which it is important to remember is not a person, by the way) didn’t care, ignored warnings, and even...
It bothered them until they realized they were the only person who it bothered. The company (which it is important to remember is not a person, by the way) didn’t care, ignored warnings, and even factored it in to their costs. That’s about as victimless as fraud gets. Why shouldn’t they do what they did?
Call me naive but it's simply unethical and I'd rather at worst ignore unethical actions rather than encourage others to be unethical. I'm no snitch and everyone has their own situation, but it's...
Call me naive but it's simply unethical and I'd rather at worst ignore unethical actions rather than encourage others to be unethical. I'm no snitch and everyone has their own situation, but it's just a bad road for me to go down in my eyes.
I suppose if we want to be more precise with our language the proper word here "immoral", but I'm no philosopher. but the line of thought is simple: There's an intended method of accruing...
I suppose if we want to be more precise with our language the proper word here "immoral", but I'm no philosopher.
but the line of thought is simple: There's an intended method of accruing compensation and an intrinsic agreement. People found an unintended exploit and broke that agreement. It is both a form of cheating and breaking of a promise, which are both considered immoral. Likewise, encouraging others to be immoral is immoral There's probably no moral intention behind using the exploit, so there's no Robin Hood argument without more evidence.
Now, spreading this further on why this is a moral to uphold (Because morals shouldn't simply be proclaimed as some way to be on a high ground or chastise others with different viewpoints. Morals are followed int order to maintain an orderly society), there's a simple logistical explanation:
There's probably no point (as I explained in another comment) in pursuing a few dozen immoral actors* as a million dollar company given the costs to investigate and fix the exploit. But if everyone starts doing it, it will be patched and everyone loses out. Tragedy of the commons. It also causes a rush to exploit the next time something does come up, because the moral people got nothing last time. They weren't rewarded nor the immoral people punished, so where's the incentive to be moral?
It's simply a way to stop an oft slippery slope. At least, without having thousands of petty immoral actors having the book thrown at them.
*elaboration on a potential counterargument
personally, I wouldn't consider this implicit permission. If someone steals $5 from you and you choose not to chase the pursuer due to having $10,000 in cash available, that's just weighing costs of running and reporting. petty theft is still theft
But I'll reiterate again: I'm no snitch, everyone has their own situation. I'm not really judging personally so much as holistically explaining my state of mind that would lead to me just keeping quiet.
I expect stories like this become more frequent as more of the regular people class wake up to the social contract not being worth what it used to. Who cares about abstract concerns like the slow...
I expect stories like this become more frequent as more of the regular people class wake up to the social contract not being worth what it used to. Who cares about abstract concerns like the slow degradation of the rule of law when there is increased social capital from being the one who shared free money cheat codes to your friends?
It is accounted for. This is a strategy even in brick and mortar. Part of pricing a product involves prices that take into account the fact that X% of items will be stolen, damaged before...
It is accounted for. This is a strategy even in brick and mortar. Part of pricing a product involves prices that take into account the fact that X% of items will be stolen, damaged before purchased, or simply refunded without any viable way to resale it (easier to write it off than risk getting fined by some merchant law). So technically you can say all things are a bit more expensive becsuse they are expected to be stolen.
For the big rings they'll pursue it for damages, but otherwise it's simply not cost effective to bother putting work into. If 100 people are stealing $300 everyday but the consultant needed to stop them costs $10000/hour (and that's probably a cheap consultant) and a few months of labor, it's unprofitable to bother.
One thing I feel is being largely overlooked in these comments is that Amazon is not the only one selling products on Amazon. There are lots of smaller businesses and individual sellers who use...
One thing I feel is being largely overlooked in these comments is that Amazon is not the only one selling products on Amazon. There are lots of smaller businesses and individual sellers who use Amazon as essentially a storefront, and these kinds of scams have the potential to impact them much more than Amazon itself (because Amazon isn't going to let the money come ultimately out of their own pocket in these scenarios). There's been a post circulating around Tumblr about an independent author owing Amazon money because of these refund schemes (I believe the specific one in that case involves reading the book and then returning it). I have no sympathy for Amazon as a company but they are almost certainly the least negatively impacted party here aside from the scammers themselves.
One of the more interesting darknet market services that was once sold (probably still is, I really could not say) was by Amazon refund fraud specialists. Now of course who knows but the nature of...
One of the more interesting darknet market services that was once sold (probably still is, I really could not say) was by Amazon refund fraud specialists.
Now of course who knows but the nature of these marketplaces quickly rooted out people who weren't actually selling what they said they were. I remember reading about their ability to obtain buy one-get two on even very expensive products from Amazon by simply following the script as far as claiming the item was not received, the fraudster basically only needed a few details about the order to obtain the desired result.
Certainly anyone who has ever returned anything to Amazon will know the process seems absurdly easy in comparison to many retailers, it's a great thing and I think the Amazon way of doing things has caused many others to follow along but... it very obviously leads to a whole lot of fraud.
I don’t care about Amazon’s profit margin. But anyone making money through fraud upsets me. Integrity is important.
People defrauding companies like Amazon just erodes consumer privileges for the rest of us. Abusing return systems is going to make legitimate returns much harder. I had to return a 1k dollar tablet to Amazon as it wasn't the right model, and it took over 2 months and verifying my identity via my drivers license to get the money back.
I bought a UPS from Amazon in late december (sold by the official APC store on Amazon, delivered by Amazon). What I received a week later was a unit clearly not just used but on its last legs. It had been shoved haphazardly into a plastic wrapping, it had the stickers in the wrong places, and the battery came with both poles plugged in. When turned on, it made a strong metallic crackling which could have been faulty cooling or electricity arcing (I was told).
When I requested a replacement or refund, Amazon sent me a new unit (this one was good), but told me they'd charge my credit card again for the cost of the UPS if I didn't return the broken one or (this immediately pissed me off) if it wasn't in the same condition it was sold as, which seems like a stupid thing to write considering that was the problem in the first place (fortunately they don't seem to have enforced that).
The return process was initiated by Amazon and used Amazon's choice of logistics company. They were supposed to contact me the next day to schedule a pickup within 3 workdays. Rules were that I couldn't reschedule it and it could happen whenever during waking hours, but it would be scheduled.
The courier never called, neither did they show up. When I called them, they acknowledged they had to come and pick up the thing, but once again they didn't. This happened three times, and due to the "can happen whenever" rule it basically ruined two weeks of my life. Eventually (after two attempts) I got amazon's call center in India to schedule a pickup using a different company. The work order didn't arrive at the new courier within the time period amazon claimed, which I was told was "normal", so I had to spend a late evening waiting in a freezing cold parking lot (pickup spot refused to let me wait there). Once the package was finally on the way, tracking didn't work. Eventually - in February - amazon sent me an e-mail claiming the package had arrived and was under evaluation.
Throughout this process, I was repeatedly threatened by amazon. Their website, their deliverers, their call center agents all told me I was going to get double charged if I didn't complete this process successfully, to the point that I outright had to tell the last one I was going to hang up and call a lawyer if he didn't cut the crap. I was an innocent customer who made an expensive purchase, they fucked up somewhere on their side, yet I was treated like a scumbag criminal, with the utmost contempt (the call center agents' well trained "I'm so very sorry this has happened to you"s aside).
In mid-February, amazon double charged my card anyway, claiming I hadn't completed the delivery. I had to get in touch with their call center again and point out, very calmly (believe me, that was hard) that they themselves had also claimed they had received the delivery two weeks earlier. They did refund me a short time after that.
I'm not feeling any consumer privilege, nor any desire to ever buy any electronics from amazon in the conceivable future.
In early days Amazon accepted returns for any reason. But now the frauds have increased so much both Amazon and Flipkart have tightened their return policy. Worst hit is smartphones category, specially on Flipkart - they'll make you install a third party app with full adminstrator permission to check for any issues, and if it display 'no issue' forget ever returning the phone.
In future if you order any expensive electronic items make sure to check everything at time of delivery and have it recorded otherwise they do hard time accepting returns.
Also if you want to contact Amazon support do not call them. There is a chat option in the app. I always use it for returns. Call centre people waste a lot of time.
Same modus operandi used in India for return frauds the gangs are actually US based also operating in India
No chat option outside the US; all of their websites operate independently.
Socially around these parts it's difficult to check things at the time of delivery. Even if I encountered the courier at the door (doesn't always happen for a variety of reasons) I'd have had to make them wait while I unpacked and set up the UPS. I was surprised by the battery poles being plugged, the noise while it ran, etc. but those things are not immediately visible. The person who dropped off the package probably had another 200 to delivery on that day and nobody ever enforces any signature/PIN/confirmation methods for accepting packages; either they would have left with the item way before I found anything, in which case I'd be begging for the package to disappear in the system and for me to be treated like a criminal anyway, or they would have left it behind, in which case I'd still have a broken device in my hands... There's no winning unless you're lucky.
I mean, even in the US, the chat is impossible to get through to a human, and when you do, they really can't do much because of how limiting the software is on their end.
I would caution against believing this so readily, if nothing else than for the fact that Amazon would still do it even without returns fraud, as part of enshittification.
I won’t argue that fraud doesn’t make it happen faster, but it’s just important to remember that Amazon – and virtually all for-profit companies generally as a function of size – is inherently immoral and will screw over everyone else as much as possible by default.
I have no optimism left for late-stage capitalism, but I think changes in corporate policy like this are a direct result of people trying to get one over on the system one too many times. Amazon wants people to use their service and has always offered a pretty generous returns policy in order to entice people (similar to Costco) but there's only so many times you can bite that hand before it pulls back.
I don’t entirely disagree, frankly. I just feel that this perspective forgets that Amazon will remove any and all enticements the moment it feels doing so would be profitable. Theft isn’t so much the cause as it is an accelerant, if you ask me.
They have started to crack down on this unofficially by flagging accounts that legitimately returned X many items" in Y time frame. I've gathered that it's more focused on the total dollar amount spent vs. returned than the number of items, though.
Still, I always ask myself when ordering, "Do I want the hassle of returning this, eating the cost if it's shit, or having my account earmarked? Screw it, I'll keep the $20 poorly advertised garbage water fountain and cash in my chips when something is REALLY screwed up."
I've gone the opposite way. I've decided they can earmark my account all they want. If I order something crappy, I want my money back and Amazon can deal with returning the item. Recently, I purchased a new cane that literally fell apart the second day I used it, and Amazon tried to charge me $40 to return the item, and it was a $75 cane. I sent them pictures of the issue, and had to talk on the phone to someone, but in the end, I got my money back.
A few years ago, I was trying to find a wedding dress, and bridal shops were still mostly closed or had very limited options/appointments due to covid, and I couldn't get in. I ordered probably $3K worth of dresses to my house to try on, and Amazon let me return every single one of the dresses hassle-free, after giving me an incredibly hard time about returning some house-hold storage items just a month prior that were maybe $30 each.
I still remember the days when I could complain about an item, and Amazon would tell me to keep/donate the item and give me a free month of prime along with it. Before Amazon was the monopoly that it is, they would have done anything to make sure their customers were happy. Now, they have our business, and it's almost impossible to go anywhere else to get things in a reasonable timeframe, and they can do whatever they want. Thanks to late-stage capitalism.
It doesn't personally upset me because I'm not affected by it. But I can't help but read stuff like this and be astounded by how stupidly brazen people can be about things that have legit legal consequences. Like I don't want one pair of shoes enough to risk prison -- or at least a huge fine -- let alone a hundred.
I used to not care about stuff like this because I thought it didn't affect me, but it really does affect us.
Physical retail theft affects us when retailers leave certain neighborhoods and cite shoplifting as a reason. It affects us when you go to the store and picking up a single item takes 20 minutes because the store had to lock it in a case. It affects us when the prices are increased beyond normal inflation to account for shoplifting.
Now online retail theft may make it more difficult to get help if your package is legitimately stolen or you have an actual return.
It's one thing to steal because you're starving and really have no other option, but when people are stealing for profit, and we end up paying the price with worse shopping experiences and higher prices it's upsetting.
I have spent many words in this thread talking about the ethical implications of stealing from megacorporations. But though I stand by what I say, I can’t ignore the fact that it very likely looks as though I wholesale support stealing as much from big companies as possible. And in light of your well-written comment, I feel I should clarify that I do not.
The knee-jerk reaction most have upon hearing of fraud is to condemn it, because obviously; it hurts people, and they know it would be awful if it happened to them. This is good! But I’m pushing back against this idea in the specific context of a multi-billion-dollar corporation being stolen from and barely noticing. Where it gets written off as an expected cost and forgotten about.
The truth is, though, that you are right. This is often an idealized scenario. Rarely does theft not cause harm.
I just want to caution people against treating huge companies the same way they do their neighbors. Corporate personhood is a fiction, and acts against a company do not hold the same implications as those against people.
Thanks for clarifying.
I think you can make any act seem okay or not by imagining the right circumstances. Maybe it’s Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed his sister’s starving children? Or someone who wants to imagine a less sympathetic criminal might imagine that it’s a crack addict stealing to feed their habit?
But this is imagining things. The argument that fraud is okay just because it’s a business being defrauded, without knowing anything else about the circumstances, seems rather weak to me and makes me wonder what other weak excuses that person would use to justify lying, cheating, or stealing. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to come up with some other excuse for whatever they want to do?
That’s a slippery slope argument and maybe not entirely convincing, but I still think it’s a good norm to assume that fraud is not okay by default. I wouldn’t want to work with people who are openly advocating for it. Seems like a bad crowd? What could you trust them with?
We can talk about the breakdown of trust in general, but this is also the breakdown in trust in specific people. One side effect of being an untrustworthy person is that nobody will want to hire you - or wouldn’t, if they knew. If you think it’s bad to be unemployed then maybe you shouldn’t go around encouraging people to be untrustworthy?
There are whole companies that are pretty far gone, where everyone is out for themselves and both management and workers are dishonest. I think they are bad places to work! I guess it’s understandable that some people will join in when everyone else is doing it, but I think a better idea is to find somewhere else to work, because the longer you stay, the more soul-deadening it is. Better to leave with your integrity intact.
Oh yeah I definitely don’t want to sound like a champion for Wal-Mart and Amazon. I don’t think those are ethical companies, but I just know that they won’t lose. If someone steals from them they will get that money back from their employees or from their customers.
They already killed most of the small businesses competition, so they know they can raise prices or ruin the shopping experience and people will still show up to buy.
This honestly feels like a prisoner scenario where if a few people act up, the guards will punish everyone. I don’t know what the best way to fight against large corporations would be, but stealing just doesn’t seem like it works.
One concern I have is that I rarely return items, and when I do it is because the product is materially faulty, incorrect, etc, not just me changing my mind. I don't want my return processes to be worsened by changes driven by people abusing the system.
I think it’s the realization that many many people have different moral standards to me. I already know about the big loud crazy people with terrible morals (terfs, trump followers, etc.). But there’s probably low single digit people out there that I closely align with.
In scenarios like this, why? What value does that integrity have? Who does it help? For that matter, what makes “not stealing from multibillion businesses” the path of integrity at all?
If you are against it because you believe a poor sap working for them will end up being made to eat the loss, that’s fine; stealing from the workers of these companies is easily wrong for many reasons, and if you steal from the company knowing this is what they will do, you are stealing from the worker. But you sound opposed to the concept even if this doesn’t happen, no? So I remain puzzled.
How does it become ethical to steal if you're stealing from a "multibillion dollar business"?
Is stealing unethical by its very nature, even when nobody is hurt, and the loss is not felt? What if it isn’t even noticed?
I’ll remind you that multibillion businesses can and do regularly lose millions of dollars and they don’t even blink.
I would say yes, absolutely it's unethical by nature, but let's get into it. You come into my house and take $10. I don't notice, $10 has absolutely no bearing on my overall financial health, and I do not feel the loss.
Was the action you took ethical? I would argue that it was not. Kant would ask "if everybody did this action, would the world be better or worse?", and to me it seems clear that the world would be worse. Moving away from philosophy, even the golden rule ("treat others as they would like to be treated") would clearly argue against stealing, regardless of whether I was hurt by the loss.
Without more context - seeing the full "proof", as it were - I really don't think this supports your argument. If my garage burns down and I lose a bunch of money, that doesn't have any bearing on whether it's ethical for you to steal from me, even if I don't blink over the loss. If I routinely incur losses from theft and don't blink over that either, that also doesn't have any bearing on whether it's ethical for you to steal from me.
I want to start by saying that I do appreciate your responses here. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread that you loved debating philosophy, which I've found I can often relate to! I should note that I've no formal education in this space – only that which I've picked up piece by piece from finding educational content of interest across the internet – and so I may trip up here and there, but the reality is that this just largely makes this conversation another opportunity to learn.
I would find that the major difference between your hypothetical and that which I am working off is that you and a massive business are far from similar, let alone identical. Your argument as to stealing's lacking morals makes sense when we're talking about people, but companies aren't people. In particular, I feel the following is a sampler of what changes the moral calculus of the act:
Things like these are why I bring up multibillion businesses' losses. I firmly believe stealing from a business of such a size is in many important ways very different from someone stealing from you or I, and that is why I believe it can, in narrow scenarios, be very much ethical to steal from them.
Sure. If you like, you can replace me in my argument with a small business I own: you come and steal a small amount from my small business. Everything else is the same (I don't notice, my business isn't harmed, etc.) My small business is not a person. Does that materially change the ethics of the situation?
If I may, you're arguing here that "it's not that bad, nobody gets hurt" basically. First, I'm not convinced - as other posters have pointed out, large-scale fraud hurts us all in a very concrete way by making it more difficult for us to engage in legitimate returns. Second, arguing that it's not that bad is very far from convincing me that
Emphasis added. Kant's categorical imperative ("if everyone did this thing, would the world be better or worse") was designed in part specifically to address questions of "is it really that bad." Kant would agree that no - it's not really that bad. If you steal a small amount from me, I am not particularly harmed. But he would still hold that the action is unethical, because if everyone stole - regardless of the amount - the world would be a worse place.
Apologies for copying something I wrote elsewhere, but I'm not sure I can phrase it any better:
The closest model off the top of my head here is virtue ethics, which argues that the same action can be virtuous (ethical) or not, depending on the motives of the actor. A classic example is stealing in order to feed your family, but I think "stealing in order to take down a villain" works just fine too.
However: does that really apply here if I'm scamming Amazon out of retail goods? You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that these scammers have virtuous motives. Moreover, even if they did, I think you'd also need to convince me that their actions realistically had a chance of bringing about a virtuous outcome. As an example: murder is generally considered unethical. Murdering one person in order to stop a war, however, may well be considered ethical by most people. The key criterion there, though, would be that you reasonably expected that murdering that one person had a realistic chance of stopping the war - if you were murdering a general, for instance. You couldn't just go murder some random citizen of that country and hope that somehow the war stopped. In the same way, I would be extremely skeptical if you argued that stealing retail goods from Amazon had a realistic chance of toppling that company or preventing them from engaging in unethical actions of their own.
Also - Is the retail theft we're discussing so unnoticeable to Amazon that they are unharmed and thus the relevance of Kant's moral imperative is approaching null? Or is this theft sufficient to take power away from Amazon and prevent them from engaging in unethical actions? It can't be both.
I think there is a pretty enormous series of leaps from "Amazon doesn't have to pay as much in taxes as I think they should" to "therefore they are stealing from me and so I'm just getting my own stuff back." Amazon doesn't pay taxes to you, they pay taxes to the government. I can't establish a particularly plausible chain of logic here and I didn't want to put words in your mouth by writing a bad one. If you have something more coherent, would enjoy discussing it.
But either way, just establishing we have been harmed doesn't establish why it's okay for us to steal. Look at wage theft - that's the most reasonable argument thus far, I think, but we have processes in place to address this, which is why Amazon keeps getting sued. To return to my small business example, if I make you work without breaks and you steal money out of the till to get your back wages, you have still committed a crime. Saying "well, she made me work without breaks" doesn't absolve you, it just means that we're both in trouble for separate things. (The law and ethics are not synonymous, but I find the law is often useful to get a sense of how most people are thinking about things.)
I think we're at risk of going in circles here, so let me reiterate my views for clarity's sake:
It is with these ideas in mind that I address your comment.
To a degree, yes. But not to the same degree that it does with regard to an Amazon-sized business.
I don't disagree! I address this in my other comment here. But I also believe it's not necessarily a given that this occurs in all theft, and that it is possible for theft to not cause this issue. Part of why the size of the business is something I keep bringing up is because I firmly believe that the odds of the theft causing harm decrease as the business gets larger (assuming the amount taken does not scale with it).
I could, theoretically, argue that the benefit of the thief outweighs this negativity, but that's more utilitarian than I'm comfortable with, frankly. I instead feel that my argument as to the smallness of the impact applies better here, though I suppose it argues more to a moral neutrality rather than any sort of positive impact.
Fair point!
True, it can't be both. But it can be one or the other. In the former, it can be said to be a neutral act, or at least close enough to such. In the latter, however, it could – provided it also meets the "reasonable expectation" limitation you mention, which I do believe is fair – be considered an ethical act.
I should emphasize that I said an argument could be made here. I am aware it is tenuous and should not be made lightly, and depending on how it is developed it may indeed not hold up to scrutiny. But it could be made, if not least for the fact that since the government provides services for the sake of the public good, and because Amazon is stealing from it, I don't think it's much of a leap to say that Amazon is stealing from the public good. And besides, "as I think they should" is a bit disingenous, I feel; there's an amount of tax that Amazon is meant to be paying, and they are employing leagues of lawyers to pay less than that to what is likely an enormous degree. The law itself, as written, may not be violated insofar as we know, but the spirit of it most likely is.
This leads directly into your next point, too, which is where I would point out that yes, we do have means to address wage theft. But they are deeply inadequate in many ways, and often favor employers — especially large ones with big legal teams and big lobbying budgets. Many cases of wage theft do not get properly addressed, and in such cases where the law provides for no sufficient means to deal with such a plight, what can you expect a wronged and desperate individual to do but seek justice the only way they know how?
Who's to say the person who made you work without breaks will get in trouble at all, and what should you do if they don't?
In the same manner it becomes ethical to stand against and break unethical laws.
If the business is imposing unethical outcomes on an individual or a society, is it unethical to bring that business down through theft or other means?
u/LukeZaz does a good job naming the ways this can happen in this thread:
I won't say I'm 100% ok with this sort of fraud and organized crime, but I'm not losing any sleep over this.
Disclaimer: I love ethics and philosophy, so I'll debate this stuff all day.
The closest model off the top of my head here is virtue ethics, which argues that the same action can be virtuous (ethical) or not, depending on the motives of the actor. A classic example is stealing in order to feed your family, but I think "stealing in order to take down a villain" works just fine too.
However: does that really apply here if I'm scamming Amazon out of retail goods? You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that these scammers have virtuous motives. Moreover, even if they did, I think you'd also need to convince me that their actions realistically had a chance of bringing about a virtuous outcome. As an example: murder is generally considered unethical. Murdering one person in order to stop a war, however, may well be considered ethical by most people. The key criterion there, though, would be that you reasonably expected that murdering that one person had a realistic chance of stopping the war - if you were murdering a general, for instance. You couldn't just go murder some random citizen of that country. In the same way, I would be extremely skeptical if you argued that stealing retail goods from Amazon had a realistic chance of toppling that company.
Barring more context/explanation, I don't think this is relevant. Let's say I own a small business. You steal from my business. My business is also not a person and does not need to eat/drink/etc. Does that really have any bearing on whether it was ethical to steal from my small business?
Right on. For one thing, I think that there's a higher bar for arguing an entity is engaged in unethical behavior if they are following the law. It's not impossible! Lots of laws are unethical. But there's a lot of rhetorical leg work that needs to be done beyond "well my economic philosophy holds that amazon should pay more taxes than they're currently required to do, so they are stealing." And second - even if we accept that this is true and that Amazon is acting immorally, all that does is provide the background for the first point: "if someone is doing something unethical, is it then unethical to bring them down through theft." Even if we accept that Amazon is acting immorally, we still haven't demonstrated that it is then moral for us to do something like steal from them.
Oh - and if you meant to tag LukeZaz, you need to do it with @, not u/. ; )
Off topic
I think
u/R3qn65works just fine. Just gotta use a lowercase u like u/BuckyMcMonks instead of U/R3qn65.Ack! TY for pointing that out. Will edit.
No kidding - look at that.
It sounds to me like you're talking about an individual defrauding a company. It's true that individuals are paying for these services, but an organized company is actually taking the action.
Is paying for something ethically the same as doing that thing? Is this also the same as paying for a candy bar despite the horrific things Nestle does?
Generally speaking, no, but that doesn't absolve either actor. If I pay for someone to be killed, it's not the same as committing the murder, but I have still acted unethically.
Full disclosure, I'm not really sure where you're going with this. It's phrased like a gotcha question, but I don't really see the gotcha. Could you please expand on what you're thinking so we can discuss it?
This misunderstands the nature of Amazon's profits. Amazon reinvests virtually all of its profits, which means all that profit is going back into the economy instead of being hoarded.
I actually don't feel as much of a moral issue from the workers. Amazon is definitely not paying them fairly. In my opinion almost all businesses that aren't ran as a socialist co-op are stealing from their workers.
Everyone else, however, is just exploiting a weak point in a system. Just the same as when Amazon exploits non-unionized workers.
Their class action lawsuits would agree, and it is not an accident.
I agree heartily and am glad you feel this way!
What I disagree with here is the idea that someone stealing from Amazon is akin to Amazon stealing from workers — it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. They’re both fruits, but are otherwise quite different. For example:
I do not believe everyone should steal from Amazon, to be clear. There is a (distant) breaking point where severe issues would eventually appear. But I don’t see a reason to care when someone does, so long as the working class stuck underneath aren’t hurt as a result.
And despite all of this, they are still more profitable than ever.
Shrink has always been a part of the retail game. There's a reason that they'd transitioned to mandating receipts or having a hard cap on refund value without one.
Ah, and as-always, it basically boils down to being able to get an insider to scan away merch. Technology is just making it easier to detect. We used to call this "falling off the truck".
As with most companies amazon is at the end of their "capture the market" stage so now they get to try and squeeze blood from the stone, and shrink is always one of the first places companies look.
There are proper ways to handle this ,but I wouldn't be totally surprised if it just becomes whatever is easiest for amazon to implement even if it's a pain in the ass for the legit consumer.
I foresee it being "due to rampant fraud, we no longer directly issue refunds"
Yep, although wrapped up in PR to sound like there's some way you can, but it's really an arcane process designed to bounce you out no matter what.
I would think it would be much more likely that they would be explaining how it's actually better for the customer to get store credit or perhaps it comes with some "benefit" for the customer to make it sound like they're being the good guy.
From the article:
...
...
...
...
I nearly got nailed in an Amazon refund scam. Ordered a $700 item, and turned out both the pic and the description were wrong. Returned it as per Amazon's policy and complained to the seller. Suddenly my refund timeline disappeared off Amazon and I got no communication. Put in a cashback request to VISA and it took SIX months and sending them the same verification info twice plus another hour long call to Amazon and sending them the return verification twice to finally get my money back.
I checked and the same damn item is still listed with the same wrong description - they're doing it purposely and hoping people wont be tenacious in demanding a refund.
Amazon is getting scammed on both ends (and apparently also by employees, according to this article), and it's often not worth it to them to figure out who's really at fault.
At least at first. As word gets out, they will need to care more.
The real answer is treating employees like people and not disposable cattle. Amazon's 'churn and burn' approach to warehouse employees is biting them in the ass.
If you like your job, are paid well, and value your job security, you're far less likely to rob your employer. If you lack those things, your employer obviously doesn't respect you and so why should you respect them?
In my mind at least, there is a material difference between not respecting my employer and robbing them. I feel like I’m in a distinct minority position here whenever the topic of “is stealing from businesses wrong?” comes up.
When someone’s desperate and their employer is a 1) piece of shit that treats you like garbage and 2) has shitloads of money and will never feel the loss, what do you expect people to do? What makes it immoral, even when desperation is not a factor?
Remember, by the way, that Amazon is a company, not a person. It has no soul, and cannot feel.
I mean is stealing from a non-profit food pantry immoral? It's not like a food pantry is a person. Same if I cheat on my taxes and lie about my compensation.
Organizations and society run on trust. Especially for revolutionaries and reformists that wish society worked differently, how do you get there if everyone lies and steals all the time? It's hard for people to trust each other and build strong social systems if theft is rampant.
Wage theft is the biggest source of theft in the country, and Amazon is one of the biggest thieves in the US.
I suspect that the non-profit food bank has not had class action lawsuits for wage theft.
You are asking people to take the high road when dealing with an entity that is actively stealing from its employees.
Employees absolutely shouldn't have their time stolen by a company. I just don't see how that justifies committing more fraud.
An eye for an eye is a terrible system. I have issues with anyone making a living from fraud.
Eh, I'd at least somewhat disagree with that, especially at the individual level. Bear in mind eye for an eye is also intended as a way of limiting punishment, rather than say chopping off hands for theft.
While it's denounced by pacifists, the pacifists often have a violent counterpart movement that they can point to to say 'would you rather this get worse?'
MLK wouldn't have been nearly as effective if not for the Black Panthers and Malcom X.
Fair point as far as social movements are concerned. In this case, I meant moreso that two wrongs don't make a right.
I just don't like an eye for an eye as a moral principle; especially when it's used to promote proportional punishments like the death penalty. I hadn't considered it might be used to limit punishments. I've mostly heard the phrase from hellfire-and-brimstone types, so thanks for enlightening me!
I'm opposed to the death penalty because the state should not be empowered to kill, and that innocent people get killed because of bad justice. Doesn't mean I feel murders/rapists deserve to live.
I would add that I don't think eye for an eye is a virtue either. Just more of a neutral than an evil.
Like many things, I feel it is suitable in some situations and not others. Especially with respect to monetary compensation, it makes a lot of sense.
We aren’t talking about a food pantry, which has a positive impact on its community and exists to give to the needy. We are talking about Amazon. Amazon does not have morals and does not know generosity except as is required for them to obtain positive PR or the occasional tax break.
Like it or not, there are points where the morality of theft changes as a result of who or what is being stolen from. One of the most important ones is: “Will they be hurt by this?”
Most people default to thinking of theft from the perspective of their fellow man getting mugged. Amazon is not a human, and is not in that situation. I bring up its nature to defuse such a framing, and remind people that the answer to the above question is virtually always “no.” Thus, the question of morality: If the target of the theft will not be meaningfully hurt whatsoever by the act, is it immoral, and if so, why?
You seem to believe it is so because it would damage important lines of trust that keep society afloat. But your phrasing suggests a belief that perceiving theft against Amazon as moral goes hand-in-hand with perceiving theft generally as moral. I think it’s rather safe to say that nobody here is advocating that, and the idea that Amazon alone taking these losses (losses that, for them, are very easy to take) will somehow disrupt society is not one I find convincing.
So for-profit corporations that defraud their employees are okay to steal from? How do you square the circle and draw lines on "acceptable" levels of theft?
By your measure of "Will they be hurt by this?" everyone should do a bit of shoplifting at profitable retailers occasionally. Sure, I could pay for the items but Aldi's has priced in some shrink and my family would appreciate some nicer food than usual. Of course, that store's profitability goes down if enough people start walking out with goods, but that might even be a good thing if you view all profit as theft.
The real world consequences of normalizing this behaviour is the local corner store starts locking up their goods and charging more. Those that don't steal have to pay more to cover the cost of theft-protection and higher shrink. Everything gets a bit harder and there's more friction. Now the clerks do more random bags checks. Stores start hiring private security because theft is so rampant the police don't even bother anymore.
The logical conclusion of normalizing theft is awful for everyone. Encouraging antisocial behaviour is always bad. Society is better when trust is high.
See u/gary's comment
This discussion here has been fascinating and I agree with you here with the concern of the greater harm to trust in society with allowing this sort of behavior.
I am not American and thus doesn't have much direct experience with Amazon and it's negative effect on society. It does seem like a lot of what I can read between the lines in many comments here is outright hatred for Amazon. I can understand that perspective but also a bit saddened that America seems to be a society with so little general trust. Sure steal from Amazon, but do we really think the refund scammers will limit themselves to them? If it becomes more widely accepted it will over time lead to a general consensus that this sort of thing is acceptable and the bad side effects will spill over to other small businesses getting hurt.
I don't see this refund scam being widely tolerated here in Denmark. I would think most people expect to be treated fairly and will treat businesses fairly back. Whenever there these types of cases in the media they usually aren't condoned by many. But we also don't have anything resembling Amazon. The netshopping landscape is made up of a wide range of small to mid to large shops competing with each other.
It is a difficult problem to restore general trust in a society but I don't see this thing helping long term.
Understatement of the year, my friend. The USA is in a nasty spot right now, and the world should be worried.
The president referenced the Civil War 3x in the state of the union talking about the divisiveness. That is not a good sign.
This is it exactly, the argument really seems to come down to: it's ok to steal from someone I don't like.
Not exactly. My argument is that Amazon is actively stealing from its employees without repercussion, so they should have no problems with their employees stealing from them.
How are you defining stealing here? Because I don't understand what you're saying. Are they not paying the salaries that they agreed to?
Correct
Their class action lawsuits keep coming
Those seem to be different people than the fraud return scammers. Is the argument here that if John is stolen from by Amazon, that means Sally is morally entitled to steal from Amazon?
Exactly. If an entity makes money by committing theft then it should not be a problem when theft happens to the entity.
You ask about morality, which I am not concerned with. Amazon has no morals. Amazon is not a person. No interaction with it should be considered part of a moral issue, purely a financial one.
Is it wrong for a cashier to take their back wages directly from the till? I wouldn't think so.
If they're only stealing within the bounds of what would be a reasonable compensation boost, I'd contend they're just taking what they're rightfully owed.
If they're defrauding to the tune of hundreds of thousands or more, that's a different story. But I'm betting few employees are doing it at that scale, as that would get noticed real quick.
What they’re rightfully owed is what they agreed to be paid in their employment contract. Anything more than that is definitionally not something they are owed.
What even is this thought process? "Oh, this contract doesn't pay as much as I'd like, but that's ok -- I'll just steal from the company to make up the difference, so it's ok to sign"?
Also any and all applicable local laws, which Amazon repeatedly blatantly ignores and continues to get lawsuits over.
Well considering we're commenting under an article about how fraudsters have become increasingly brazen, I'd say people have caught on! It's just a difficult problem to address if the behavior becomes widespread and normalized.
I'd rather the employee got their back pay legally settled, but I know there are barriers and working with a government labor department takes more time and effort. I'm definitely more sympathetic to your argument of proportional "theft" to get what the employee is legally owed. It's a rough situation that I wish was never relevant.
If the company has stolen from the employee by not actually paying what they agreed to pay, that's quite different than an employee deciding to give themselves a "compensation boost".
No disagreement that it'd be better if it never came up.
But I think it is somewhat the natural consequence of inequality. 'Fuck Bezos, he's getting his, I'm getting mine" is a pretty easy, if flawed, moral justification for an individual.
And then one of my core beliefs: People whom are not suffering generally do not steal. Fraud is bad, but punishing fraud is only addressing part of the problem. We must ask why people feel motivated to steal in large quantities. And that 'why' often leads to systemic issues like poor pay and discrimination.
Treating the symptom but not the cause, if you will.
Its going to change their refund policy when it finally puts a dent in their bottom line. Given the billions in profits and near monopoly on cheap shipped goods, that could be awhile.
And if you saw the exposé on how much of their returned items just get shredded, its obvious they're not even close to concerned yet.
Or just get resold in bulk to secondary markets.
Some real privileged takes in here. I'm watching food deserts become more common in my city as impoverished neighborhoods lose grocery stores that decided they can't continue to lose money due to way higher shrinkage than they can handle. Who does retail theft affect? Everyone, in the form of higher prices or fewer choices.
People whom are not desperate generally do not steal.
If the grocers want to place some blame, it's generally due to poverty. While it's not the grocer's responsibility to solve that on their own, they do bear somewhat of a civic duty to provide access to food regardless of the losses.
If only that were true. Unfortunately, everything I've turned up says that the rich are far more likely to shoplift. Obviously we should reduce inequality, but I don't think that'll fix theft.
Then the excersize for the reader:
Why then do we only close the stores in poor neighborhoods?
Assuming that statistic is correct, then it would probably be that the types of stores are different per neighborhood and sales and margins are different per store and per neighborhood as well?
You can handle way more than 2x the theft rate of a grocery store if the grocery store margins are 2% versus 30%+ at a cosmetics store (spitballing here).
This whole discussion stems from an article about people who aren't desperate that are stealing. Who are in fact turning stealing into a billion dollar enterprise.
Grocers are supposed to continue to operate at a loss because of a civic duty? Who actually pays for the supplies? Setting the morals aside, how does this work economically when theft outpaces profits?
If the losses continue too long, they’ll run out of money to pay for the suppliers & employees who keep the food pipeline running. Groceries are a low margin business to begin with, so there’s not some 30% profit buffer to run charity neighborhoods.
Then maybe, just maybe, they shouldn't be privately operated. Access to food is an essential public service.
Everyone’s got a right to steaks and wine! :)
More seriously, I think there are big differences between situations where the government distributing food keeps people from starving and situations where many poor people are overweight. Basic food distribution isn’t exactly the issue in the US? It’s more subtle than that.
Also, I expect that people who consider stealing from a business to be a victimless crime would also treat stealing from the government to be a victimless crime? After all, the government is not a person. Any large organization could be seen that way, public or private.
Apparently there’s a real funhouse-mirror version of morality in some places in Africa. From a long article on the Ivory Coast:
I don’t think Africa-level amounts of corruption are likely in the US any time soon, and I’m not sure morality in the US is declining rather than changing? Or maybe we just hear more about it now?
Still, it seems pretty clear that building an effective organization out of untrustworthy people is hard. Building a system where you don’t have to trust people is hard, too.
Treating people right helps, but you also need to be careful who you hire. Corruption is costly.
Nationalization of grocery stores is a wildly disproportionate response to the problem of shoplifting.
I don’t think they were arguing for nationalization specifically due to shoplifting, rather, since food is an essential component of living, it should not be distributed through private, for-profit channels, instead going through things like farmers markets, co-ops, direct farm-to-table sales, etc.
Which is a more reasonable discussion, but I'd posit that grocers are some of the least exploitative corporations in the abstract. Their low profit margins of 2-3% point to healthy competition and minimal profiteering.
If anything, food prices have way more to do with farmer-centric policies from basically every government around the world (which there are reasonable arguments for but that's off topic).
Considering a large quantity of people only have access to a single monoploy or duopoly now, it's not really a functional change, but prices would be lower.
Centrally planned distribution of food sound like it would more likely lead to Soviet-era bread lines than reduced prices.
Do you happen to have any functional examples of a nationalized grocer in peace times? I'm totally supportive of co-ops and sectorial bargaining, but I think those tend to bring higher prices.
You lost me at the end. You're happy spreading corruption?
Where do you draw the line between exploiting a loophole and benefiting from someone's conscious incompetence? Do you view them both as morally equivalent?
I apologize for simplifying this discussion with an analogy, but morally, I cannot see taking advantage of a neighbor leaving their door open to steal their TV as the same as the neighbor leaving the TV on the porch despite repeated warnings that it could be stolen, and responding with, 'I don't really care if it's stolen or not, to be honest,' only for you to take it the next day.
The guy even informed their superior about the situation. How is this corruption? Is every act of taking advantage of a situation a type of corruption?
We don't actually know what they found, but this topic is about fraud, they were working in the fraud department, and apparently it bothered them enough to report it?
Maybe we should wait to hear more.
It bothered them until they realized they were the only person who it bothered. The company (which it is important to remember is not a person, by the way) didn’t care, ignored warnings, and even factored it in to their costs. That’s about as victimless as fraud gets. Why shouldn’t they do what they did?
Call me naive but it's simply unethical and I'd rather at worst ignore unethical actions rather than encourage others to be unethical. I'm no snitch and everyone has their own situation, but it's just a bad road for me to go down in my eyes.
How is it unethical, though? What makes it so?
I suppose if we want to be more precise with our language the proper word here "immoral", but I'm no philosopher.
but the line of thought is simple: There's an intended method of accruing compensation and an intrinsic agreement. People found an unintended exploit and broke that agreement. It is both a form of cheating and breaking of a promise, which are both considered immoral. Likewise, encouraging others to be immoral is immoral There's probably no moral intention behind using the exploit, so there's no Robin Hood argument without more evidence.
Now, spreading this further on why this is a moral to uphold (Because morals shouldn't simply be proclaimed as some way to be on a high ground or chastise others with different viewpoints. Morals are followed int order to maintain an orderly society), there's a simple logistical explanation:
There's probably no point (as I explained in another comment) in pursuing a few dozen immoral actors* as a million dollar company given the costs to investigate and fix the exploit. But if everyone starts doing it, it will be patched and everyone loses out. Tragedy of the commons. It also causes a rush to exploit the next time something does come up, because the moral people got nothing last time. They weren't rewarded nor the immoral people punished, so where's the incentive to be moral?
It's simply a way to stop an oft slippery slope. At least, without having thousands of petty immoral actors having the book thrown at them.
*elaboration on a potential counterargument
personally, I wouldn't consider this implicit permission. If someone steals $5 from you and you choose not to chase the pursuer due to having $10,000 in cash available, that's just weighing costs of running and reporting. petty theft is still theft
Ha, I just finished making a response to someone who had a similar question: https://tildes.net/~tech/1eyb/refund_fraud_schemes_promoted_on_tiktok_telegram_are_costing_amazon_and_other_retailers_billions_of#comment-cahr
But I'll reiterate again: I'm no snitch, everyone has their own situation. I'm not really judging personally so much as holistically explaining my state of mind that would lead to me just keeping quiet.
I expect stories like this become more frequent as more of the regular people class wake up to the social contract not being worth what it used to. Who cares about abstract concerns like the slow degradation of the rule of law when there is increased social capital from being the one who shared free money cheat codes to your friends?
It is accounted for. This is a strategy even in brick and mortar. Part of pricing a product involves prices that take into account the fact that X% of items will be stolen, damaged before purchased, or simply refunded without any viable way to resale it (easier to write it off than risk getting fined by some merchant law). So technically you can say all things are a bit more expensive becsuse they are expected to be stolen.
For the big rings they'll pursue it for damages, but otherwise it's simply not cost effective to bother putting work into. If 100 people are stealing $300 everyday but the consultant needed to stop them costs $10000/hour (and that's probably a cheap consultant) and a few months of labor, it's unprofitable to bother.
One thing I feel is being largely overlooked in these comments is that Amazon is not the only one selling products on Amazon. There are lots of smaller businesses and individual sellers who use Amazon as essentially a storefront, and these kinds of scams have the potential to impact them much more than Amazon itself (because Amazon isn't going to let the money come ultimately out of their own pocket in these scenarios). There's been a post circulating around Tumblr about an independent author owing Amazon money because of these refund schemes (I believe the specific one in that case involves reading the book and then returning it). I have no sympathy for Amazon as a company but they are almost certainly the least negatively impacted party here aside from the scammers themselves.
One of the more interesting darknet market services that was once sold (probably still is, I really could not say) was by Amazon refund fraud specialists.
Now of course who knows but the nature of these marketplaces quickly rooted out people who weren't actually selling what they said they were. I remember reading about their ability to obtain buy one-get two on even very expensive products from Amazon by simply following the script as far as claiming the item was not received, the fraudster basically only needed a few details about the order to obtain the desired result.
Certainly anyone who has ever returned anything to Amazon will know the process seems absurdly easy in comparison to many retailers, it's a great thing and I think the Amazon way of doing things has caused many others to follow along but... it very obviously leads to a whole lot of fraud.