A counterfeit HP ink cartridge says it's HP, but it's not. None of these products claim to be HP. One bears no brand mark at all. One is "Ankink" brand. Same for Epson: we have "MYTONER" and "LEMERO".

Amazon is a flea market trafficking in huge quantities of suspect goods. When I go on there I know to be on guard. But the article is wrong when it says that goods that do not bear an HP, Canon, or Epson brand mark - with some of them bearing clear brand marks for other companies - are "counterfeit" or even "knock-offs".

This doesn't even seem to be a problem to me - if you shop at a flea market, be on guard lest you get junk. If you don't like it, try avoiding the flea market.

What I hate is outright counterfeits. Especially given Amazon's commingling of product sourced by third-party "sellers". (Solely due to counterfeits, I don't buy OTC pharmaceuticals on Amazon, I mostly avoid buying flash and SSD devices on Amazon, and I've recently started buying shoes and clothing direct from the brands' DTC Web sites when possible.)

I hate counterfeits so much, I worked at an anti-counterfeiting early startup.

In our marketing and sales efforts -- analyzing many kinds of product categories, and approaching many companies (unfortunately, much of it during peak Covid panic) -- we actually didn't have much success getting brands willing to pay for an anti-counterfeiting solution.

For reasons unclear to me, we had more success by pitching the same tech&process cost as anti-gray-market-diversion, rather than for the rampant counterfeiting of their brand that we could show. (Maybe sometimes because there were always a bunch of execs charged with global distribution, and this was on their plates.)

More predictably, some brands seemed most interested in using variations on the technology for end consumer engagement. Once stakeholders brought into enterprise sales meetings started latching on, when you initially approached with anti-counterfeiting or anti-gray-market story. I can see that, but please let me end counterfeits in the process.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeUNC7z5MM0

I personally find that one of Amazon's main affronts is interfering with customer reviews in order to maintain artificially higher ratings. For example, my reviews stopped processing and would never post. This happened after leaving honest critical reviews. Note that +90% of my reviews are neutral or positive. Additionally, they removed my ability to search reviews, replacing it with Rufus, a completely incompetent and worthless search bot. This, I believe, cleverly prevents prospective buyers from accessing useful customer feedback or experience unless the buyer is willing to manually parse all reviews, which ain't happening.

Amazon does a lot to convolute reviews, including jumping to the wrong review after selecting a product to review from the order history.

It's an extremely useful and convenient resource, but thoroughly rotten. The algorithms are flagrantly evil and a very deliberate and specific search for a high-end product, the desired product will often be displayed below several or many more cereal-box quality products worth less than their packaging.

Where they win is shipping, variety and pricing. Hard to beat, but I never order anything serious on Amazon unless the seller is the actual company of the product, and even then...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kTTGGv6-syA

Amazon still has a huge problem with its third party vendors. We got screwed with several ‘new’ Lenovo laptops that went belly up in six months. And I don’t believe Amazon has fully sorted out their SKU problem where third party vendors launder used products with new. If you see something cheap on Amazon, there’s almost always a reason.

Disclaimer: I haven't worked at Amazon for 3 years - my info is likely stale.

I literally do not buy things off amazon that fall into these "binning problem" categories, or anything easily counterfeitable. I'll buy from amazon for things that essentially cannot be counterfeit (GPUs, hard drives, things where counterfeits would be more likely to be a brick of the same weight rather than something that worked but was crappy or dangerous), or where i'm essentially trying to get "counterfeit"-grade stuff (stuff like plastic or metal garden spikes, where i just want the cheapest possible thing that will hold my irrigating tubing in place).

Everything else comes from target or the OEM's website store.

  Packaging meant to emulate a brand’s design without using its logo can be a violation of copyright laws. HP actually won a federal court case in March against a Chinese manufacturing company called Ejet, which HP accused of infringing upon its “trade dress,” the technical term for packaging design.

You can google 2tb flash drives and see a ton advertised for <$100. These are all fake. Surprisingly Amazon doesn’t have any!

(Amazon refused to accept a return as it was foodstuff and I didn’t have the energy to spend 45 minutes on the phone/chat arguing with them.)

Luckily it was a direct replacement for the same one I purchased > 3 years ago so could compare.

Amazon provided no way to report the counterfeit and when talking to their support just wanted me to return it as fault. No doubt this will go back into the supply chain and someone unbeknownst to counterfeits will receive it.

I've actually found ads on Amazon to be more detrimental to my experience than marketplace shenanigans and ALLCAPS sellers.

Anything you order from Amazon has to be tested for counterfeit. If you can’t verify it’s not counterfeit then assume it is. Even if Amazon is listed as the seller they are clearly swapping in someone else’s fakes. Mine has a secondary retail barcode label on them.

I’m going to send them back with a note in a text file saying they are fake. See if Amazon resells them.

Canon or Epson or HP or someone with enough clout? Yeah, here, our "CCU" will assist so you don't go running to the courts.

It is also true that there's a flood of cheap knockoffs that don't claim to be Brand X. That's fine, although I usually go to Aliexpress when that's when I want and wind up paying a lot less.

I ordered an All-Clad frying pan, was at the same price as other online retailers. Only when it arrived I realized it was unfortunately, “Shipped by Amazon, sold by XYZ”.

The pan was in a suspicious brown box, with zero product/marketing images, and inside was the pan in transparent plastic bag. On first look it did feel ok/genuine/unused, but I didn’t have anything from AllClad to compare. I did notice some minor imperfections though, such as the riveted handle not being fully flush with the pan and a minor scratch in another place.

The brown box did have a number imprinted on it though. Upon searching online, I found it was a product code from some legitimate store that sells factory-seconds for around 1/3rd the price. These are original items, except they didn’t pass quality inspection and hence sold for less.

This scammer seller was buying seconds and selling them as new at original price. I looked at the seller info which had the name and the business registration info. I ended up finding that it’s some dude peddling courses on how to successful in FBA, found their IG profile. What he did with me reselling a factory second as new is pure fraud, I wish the worst to scum like that.

1. went to Mitutoyo website to get list of authorized sellers

2. surprised Amazon itself is on the list

3. Purchased a number of authentic Mitutoyo calipers and micrometers from Amazon itself

4. Ran down Clough42 list of 17 signs to double check if the tool is fake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG6I2gNGVwM

5. Successfully registered equipment on Mitutoyo website

6. Checked quality on reference standards

Note, Starrett has a website with an estore, so is far easier to verify NIST certificate.

If the work is low tolerance, than accuracy and repeatability won't matter anyway. However, when it comes to metrology or PPE the high-end products set the best possible outcome for your workmanship and safety.

Mind you, I couldn't convince a golden retriever to stop obsessing over the taste of free garbage. =3

HP would claim that the simple statement "compatible with HP xyz printer" makes it counterfeit, an improper use of HP trademarks in the statement. HP wants a world where anyone searching for "Ink for HP printer" will only ever see HP-licensed products.

The problem here is a near-monopoly enabling a flea market that skirts just this site of legality. Sure, it's a lookalike, not a counterfeit, but with misleading copy to make sure people fall for it.

Amazon in many cases does.

Now it’s like, well, what else can I do? I guess I’m boycotting Amazon, but is it really boycotting when their store is “here’s a random electronic device, maybe it is what you ordered,” I mean, why would I place an order for that in the first place?

I’m also boycotting gun store that only sells footguns.

one was obviously a return by someone else, it was in completely different unofficial packaging and was DOA

getting the bot like staff to accept that it wasn't me that had broken it was such fun I ended up deleting my 20 year amazon account

and haven't bought anything since

I am very uncomfortable buying electronics and hygiene products from many places because of this problem. For example, years ago, on what became my final Amazon purchase, I received used underwear (yuck!). Knowing that Amazon tends to sell returned products as new, I had explicitly bought a brand that is sealed, shrink wrapped, and promises to dispose returned items, but that wasn't enough.

Recently, I was reading a newspaper article where they described how a criminal gang bought Google Pixel and high-end Samsung phones from reputable online and department stores. They opened them, installed malware, returned the product, and you can guess what happened next. Lots of stolen bank credentials. People tend to buy stuff, test drive it for a few days and return it as new abusing pro-customer regulations. Many shops are unwilling to take a loss and resell these things as new. Very dishonest, should be better regulated.

Could you say which you've had luck with?

I would say Not enough for how many engineers they had. It had all of the promise, and was frankly mismanaged.

They kept promoting engineers who wanted it to become an AWS service (agnostic of Amazon) rather than solving the Amazon problems at hand.

For example they built a new product identifier… Amazon did not need yet another database of products. This stuff was constantly slowing them down to less than a crawl.

Last I heard all of that was canceled, and their focus brought back to Amazon Retail only problems. But tech debt and culture issues like that are really hard to unwind.

(HN entrepreneurs: I'd love a map-based consumer-products search engine where I could just type an item description into a search bar and see a map of stores in my area with prices and inventory.)

I wouldn’t be so sure, a good friend of mine ordered a GPU and it was an older and much cheaper model with the shroud replaced and flashed to call itself the newer model in windows. He would not have found out except he immediately ran a benchmark that returned an extremely low score and then investigated from there.