Amazon's big freeloading case has been cracked! It has caused sellers millions of losses

Another major case of free orders broke out overseas this week. A consumer in North Carolina, USA, bought nearly $300,000 worth of goods from Amazon for free by not returning the goods for a refund!

On Monday, local police arrested a man named Hudson Hamrick. He was accused of conducting more than a hundred transactions on Amazon from 2016 to the present, and successfully applied for non-return refunds for more than 300 of them. The value of the free goods was as high as 30 billion US dollars!

Hamrick would order an expensive product from Amazon, submit a return and ask Amazon customer service for a full refund, claiming he had not received the product, and sometimes forging evidence to get a refund. Court documents allege that in addition to receiving free orders, Hamrick also used a method of subterfuge, receiving high-value products and returning them as counterfeits or even junk to obtain a full refund, involving more than 270 orders.

If the above request is not accepted by the customer service, he will also seek a partial refund on the grounds that the product is defective, damaged, or does not work. In short, it is just a freeloader! The amount involved in the case is more than 300,000 US dollars. I don’t know how many sellers have suffered. Now that this person has been arrested and sentenced, it can be said that it is gratifying. He will face wire fraud and a prison sentence of about 5 years.

There are too many people who deliberately refuse to return products for refunds. This is all because of Amazon's lax review of customer return policies. Everyone knows that if you don't review returns strictly, you will get free stuff. There are even video tutorials online that teach you how to get free stuff step by step. This is scary. Should Amazon shut down these free stuff dogs?

We have previously analyzed that Amazon is seeking more supporters from both the B-end and C-end, and needs both sellers and buyers to stand up for it and jointly fight against the upcoming antitrust regulation. Sellers have suffered too much from Amazon for too long, and the two announcements failed to win the support of sellers. Instead, some sellers submitted more evidence to the government through Amazon's channels to prove Amazon's unfair policies, scaring Amazon away from mentioning the co-branded sellers. Now Amazon has changed its direction and started to win over consumers, hoping that this group will stand on its side when Amazon faces a split, and use their natural distrust of government organizations to prevent antitrust sanctions against them.

Amazon's relaxed refund review is definitely an important factor in attracting consumers. Therefore, we can imagine that Amazon will not give up its advantage and favorable policies for consumers at this juncture. The entire refund review is likely to remain as relaxed as before, and real sellers who need returns and refunds can still easily pass the review.

However, Amazon will never do nothing, as this would betray its business principles. Since it cannot take action through policy, it can only manage those who are professional freeloaders, so that they will not become a trend and cause too much loss and impact. In this way, normal sellers will have a good return experience, and those who want to get something for free will have to weigh the consequences. This can be considered as an operation that takes both buyers and sellers into consideration.

The freeloaders who had been lurking for several years and were caught this time are a typical example of the cooperation between Amazon and law enforcement agencies. With Amazon's data support, law enforcement agencies can easily screen out these abnormal situations, catch the lawbreakers behind them and bring them to justice. The next step will definitely be to deal with those online "refund agencies" to clean up the professional freeloaders and effectively put an end to the current situation of freeloading of Amazon products.

Amazon has recently undergone many policy changes and various rectification actions. Many sellers have not yet digested them and are still using their old understanding to deal with some new policies, which can easily lead to accidents.