This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal everyday life in much of Asia for decades. Any successful brand will see counterfeits and, indeed, sometimes before the quality brand even launches. A prestige brand’s logo will be thrown on some cheap, low-quality anonymous thing, and ordering online you are just as likely to get a counterfeit as the real thing.
Now it goes beyond physical products to media too; another example is blogs these days. Someone finds a successful blog, pays some developing-world person on a freelancer platform to rewrite every post just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown, and then puts the counterfeit site up with a heavy load of SEO and advertising. This started with recipe blogs – that cajun cooking site that claims to be by a born and bred Louisianan has grammatical mistakes suggesting an Eastern European or Southeast Asian author – but is now spreading through all kinds of other hobbies and interests. With recipe blogs, this phenomenon is now so mature that counterfeiters are copying from previous counterfeits.
It's everywhere. DIY sites are full with trash tutorials written by people with no clue what they are doing, but $1 more in their pocket for writing the trash. Quora, that wretched hell hole, is full of nobodies giving the most ridiculous answers since being paid pennies for it. Medium since their monetization push has lots of people who decided their place in the world is pushing out badly copied useless tech tutorials. There are whole SaaS AI sites helping you expand a few keywords into more trash writing. Google hasn't so much made the worlds knowledge searchable, they have poisoned the well.
(Oh, and there are a lot of these people on HN who think writing garbage blogspam for their latest project is a great "growth hack". A hearty fuck you to you, too.)
> Google hasn't so much made the worlds knowledge searchable, they have poisoned the well.
This happened to Google already with translation. Their translation system started with documents with known translation (e.g. EU and UN official documents). Then they started to use documents on the web that offered their own translations...until Google translate got good enough that people started using it to translate their own websites.
This "inbreeding" or bad feedback made the translations worse until this was figured out and I believe they long gave up automatically using translations found in the wild to improve training. Source: friend who worked on GT at the beginning.
Tech blogs and sites are mostly useless. There are good places MDN, official docs sites (when they aren't written by Google that is). But there is so much just machine generated, or amateur 3rd world generated trash out there that its difficult. Front end development is much worse than other areas with this.
This summer I had a lot of trouble finding information for something specific in Angular on how to do some specific thing, where the official docs didn't cover it in depth enough, and then searching for it online was impossible as it was thousands of "blogs" with the same copy pasted tutorial with a few key words changed around that show the same hello world example.
This is one striking thing about Go. The signal to noise ratio for online resources is excellent. The resources you turn up in a Google search feel professional and practical. When I search Java problems there is a lot more blog-spam, half-assed / misguided copypasta, and a very high ad:information ratio.
We often talk about size of the community as an important consideration when adopting programming tools. But really there is a sweet spot, where a community has enough serious people to produce the right information but not enough unserious people (yet) to bury it. Communities at this stage can be better than those for universal standards.
After reading your comment I realized that I have the exact same experience. I use Java and JS professionally and it's often a pain to find good information for specific issues. As a side interest, I've been using rust for several projects and find information significantly quicker.
For Java I now rely mostly on some more reliable source for information that I tend to directly search rather than go through Google/DDG. Baeldung and Mkyong come to mind.
Surprisingly, some discord groups have also become my go to source for help.
In my experience, there's a strong negative correlation between popularity of a technical topic and the average quality of what comes up in a Google search.
Popular things like Java or JS have page after page of pure crap. Rust or Haskell will have generally pretty good content. Python used to have decent content, but has been trending downwards sharply.
Yeah, I made a very similar observation in a comment last year (which I can't be bothered to find right now).
A lot of it is due to excited beginners wanting to write about $topic. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing as such; and I'm a bet less cynical about it than some others in this thread. It's pretty neat that anyone can write something and put it online. I just wish there was a way to filter this kind of stuff.
This is where the "throw everything in a big bag"-model of the web comes with some pretty big downsides. But I don't really know how to do it better either.
I think it’s a combination of popularity and desirability: are you trying to learn something because you’re genuinely interested or just because it’s what you need to close a ticket and get paid? That’s rarely going to be at either end of the spectrum but Java has been the default choice for corporate body shops for three decades and it really shows in the amount of content aimed at the latter camp. This is amplified by the high frequency of people in that world LARPing as Very Serious Architects layering on gratuitous complexity trying to make business CRUD apps seem more challenging (i.e. expensive) and since statistically nobody understands the system at that point there’s a built-in SEO market catering to the people looking for a quick copy-paste answer.
Interesting, I got the sense that it’s the amateurs / lifestyle strivers who are the market for producing and consuming this content. Go being not very much fun kind of keeps these people away.
Many times I look up something, and all the YouTube videos and tutorials are telling the exact same thing and it's clear there was no effort at all or even if the author knows what they're talking about or even tested that code at all.
The filetype:pdf well has also been poisoned, and the results are always just PDFs stuffed with SEO keywords and a link to the real content you were looking for -- except the link goes to a scam/advertising/malware site.
Quora doesn't pay for stupid answers. It pays for the stupid questions that bring in those stupid answers. The stupid answers are generated for free, and get shown ads while they're doing it.
Hopefully this is spelling the end of all this ridiculous "digital economy". I'd love to just go and buy stuff in a physical store - that i find not by googling but because friends recommended me. Buying airline tickets in a physical booking office (ideally still with a debit card, not cash). Reading paid news sites with no ads and no bullshit.
Many people outside of the industry don't know it, but so-called "copywriters" are people who are paid around 1-1.5x minimum wage with the expectation of being able to write texts on ANY topic. I know a girl who does this. Almost all of texts are bs and she is a top performer in her company. She does it because it makes bit more than being a waitress with bit less effort (and given covid, she'd lose a job if she was a waitress, and "copywriter" job is quite secure).
Shall we get surprised with the results?
By the way, a question - bullshit answers on Quora from paid posters - who's paying them and why? Or you mean those Putin trolls and wumaos? Their content tends to be very biased, but of decent quality...
A reverse scam scheme exists too: somebody buy an OEM product, and markets it as its own development.
I see it being rather common on sites like Kickstarter.
A slightly less egregious variation of this is when such is done with OEM's knowledge, and/or some customisation is done specifically to conceal an OEM origin of the product.
I believe this kind of op makes a double digit of all Kickstarter hardware projects.
I myself encountered such in Vancouver once. A woman was claiming a CEO of a medical start-up doing "deep machine learning" bluetooth pulse oximeter of own design, and was pitching on HackerNest Vancouver at around 2013-2014. I cannot imagine that she somehow managed to get few millions in funding for that.
I sent a photo with with an RFQ to Alibaba, and got quotes from trade companies in minutes, and then posted a screenshot on the HackerNest's meetup page.
Then, I ran onto a trio claiming the idea, and design of a flexible silicone keyboard as their own on either Kickstarter, or Indigogo. After sending emails to the platform few times over few months, they quietly deleted the project page without much public comment to either me, or the public.
I see it being rather common on sites like Kickstarter.
The classic example of this that I keep seeing over and over again is the standard kayak bag that gets rebranded as an exercise weight filled with sand. The ad copy makes it sound like some innovative new exercise product, but it's just a kayak bag with branding.
I've never understood why recipe blogs have so much extra text, unless it's an SEO thing to start with. The text all feels useless fluff to me anyway; all I'm there for is the actual recipe card itself. And from a user's perspective, it's impossible to tell the difference between the original and a "counterfeit", both are full of borderline malware ads, too much scrolling, and infuriating modal popups wanting my email address.
I don't want your newsletter. I don't want your life story. I don't want intrusive ads. I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself.
> I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself.
There's the rub. You can copyright your story. It's easy to scrape recipes from webpages. It's harder to translate a story into a recipe. If you post a plain & simple recipe to the internet, it will be copied and folks (and the bots behind search engines) won't have a clear incentive to visit/link your recipe over the numerous copies. If you've got a clear copyright violation, there's a chance you can get the copies taken down, or at least hidden by search engines. If it's just the functional, non-copyrightable recipe itself, no such luck. And then, with all the expense of creating and hosting the content, plus fighting the deluge of spammers, how do you monetize? The easy way: the borderline malware ads, modal popups, dickbars, etc. Blech. I'm with you, it sucks. But it's not just "an SEO thing"; it's also a case study on how "information wants to be free" meets the gritty reality of the internet economy.
Google tracks your behavior during searches so the longer it takes you to press the back button to return to the results, the higher that page scores. All the recipe sites seem to have figured out that score weighs heavily in Google's rankings.
I worked on a better recipe site/product last year out of frustration with the existing options. I also wanted something I could earn some money with though, and doing that with a recipe website is rather tricky without resorting to this sort of bullshit, so I ended up shelving it for the time being (I still want to finish it at some point though, as it has some nice ideas IMO).
I could use a subscription model, I suppose, but I'm less than confident this will actually succeed. There's so much free content out there and I found that a lot of people are willing to jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid paying.
It is google algorithm. It pushes doen pure receipts in result, so they add fluff to go up in search.
The text is useless fluff. They gotta have something that looks like ranking worthy text to google and takes as little effort as possible (since humans will skip it).
Do you see any other way for it? Google and FB created an eyeball economy by supplying both the marketplace and the serving platforms, which created unsolicited Mechanical Turk army for content creation that runs on exceptionally thin margins, burning through humanity attention span.
It's no longer possible to find organic high quality ad supported content(except maybe on YouTube, it still has some great stuff). Places like HN have other motivations to keep running high quality forum but the vast majority of the content out there is made with lowest possible quality. This even goes for the news.
Lately I live in Turkey and trying to follow the Turkish media but it is so lazy or so politically motivated that I cannot take it.
Turkish mainstream media outlets no longer create articles for human consumption but for bot consumption, so the articles are unreadable due to keyword spamming. The news part is one sentence but they manage to multiply it to a wall of text through repeating the same thing using synonyms etc, it doesn't even make sense grammatically.
They also do SEO spam by generating articles from the exact same template for each popular topic. For example, if you search for opening times of a supermarket, you will have the first few pages of results filled with mainstream newspaper pages that start with "Recently people start showing interest to market opening times but is it safe to search for shop opening times? Besides, what does 'opening times' really mean? To find out about opening times continue reading". Yo Have the same format for all kind of stuff.
The incentives of the current content economy are perverse. You ether want to make it cheap as possible, just enough to lure someone to it and send them somewhere else through ad click or you want to influence someone to do something after consuming your content.
> It's no longer possible to find organic high quality ad supported content(except maybe on YouTube, it still has some great stuff).
Was it ever possible? I've been on the Internet for quite a while, and since the earliest days, my heuristic was, if it's ad-supported, it's garbage. There's very few exceptions to that rule. Good content, written by people who care, is either paid, done for non-monetary reasons, or a loss leader billed under some company's marketing budget (though there's of course also some garbage in that last category too).
I am the other way about Youtube: often the content is simply someone talking at the computer in a single take, or with minimal editing. It takes longer to view than to read something that someone actually thought about and wrote down.
This is my issue with Youtube tutorials and unedited podcasts.
It'd be much faster to consume the content if it was written down - but when Spotify and Youtube give you monetisation with pretty much zero extra effort, people tend to take that route.
Nowadays you can click and get the transcript (in a tiny window), so my use of YT, such as it is, is: open transcript, scan it (it's like reading a bunch of tweets :-( ), and if something looks like it would actually be interesting to see as video, click on the transcript to jump to that point.
Also you can just turn on captions and watch at 2X.
Alternatively, I'll listen to (but not view) many videos using mpv. (MPV can also be used to view videos in a native player, either downloaded or streaming.)
I agree about YouTube tutorials on subjects that can be described well with text and still images: it's often easier and faster to read a written explanation. On subjects that involve motion, sound, and human action, though, YouTube tutorials can be great: how to play a musical instrument, how to do a dance move, how to use a tool, how to cook. When I was young, if I didn’t have somebody to teach me, the only way to learn such things was from books, which could be extremely frustrating.
Even YouTube isn't immune. Many times I search and the top result is text-to-speech trash with a stock image. Countless channels exist that just do text-to-speech and auto-upload of news articles found online, without even citing them.
I literally never got a result like this. Are you searching for something too niche to actually have quality content on YouTube? Or is your search buble such a sad place?
Disclaimer: I work in Google, but nowhere near any of this.
Try culling your watch history. It influences what you’re shown. If you want some clickbait trending video (even for a few seconds), it’ll influence your video selection for quite a while unless you remove it.
I actually turned my watxh history off altogether. For a couple of years I only got recommendations for stuff directly related to videos that I clicked Like on (mixed in with stuff I'd already watched, which is expected since I have no watch history), and I manually curated everything with the Not Interested button. But lately YT has beem recommending utter trash that is not relevant to me in any way.
I recently tried a new niche - I tried to choose binoculars. 90% of results seem to be, admittedly well shot and edited, folks reading out the marketing materials. I think we're reaching peak "content".
On aliexpress, pretty much every thing is now "xiaomi"... from towels, toothbrushes to manicure sets..... Sometimes looking at review photos and trying to look for bad-quality marks helps... sometimes, sadly... not.
> This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal everyday life in much of Asia for decades.
"For decades" is right. When I was a kid in the 60s we always picked up all sorts of clones when in HK, TW, SG, MY, ID etc (didn't go to mainland China in those days but doubt this would have been true there at that time...)
I encountered a similar situation to one mentioned in the article on Etsy - a scammer made a fake store for a real shop in Brooklyn selling high-end aprons. To me it looked like the legitimate web-presense of the store.
After placing the order I received no response, and after disputing the charge a month later they sent a tracking number. (The package never came, and a helpful UPS rep broke the rules to tell me the tracking number wasn't even addressed to me - a saving grace and made me wonder if tracking numbers from legitimate purchases are resold to run this scam.)
Etsy refused to take any part in helping with the refund, and despite deleting the store they refused to tell paypal to refund people's (including my) purchases.
Paypal had the tracking number, and could ask UPS for the address and recipient, but refused to help and made me feel like I was the scammer for wanting my money back. They insisted to the end that they could do nothing, despite knowing the Etsy storefront was banned and that the seller never sent me a package.
I would have been out $100 if not for Chase, who did the chargeback and got paypal in line. I will never use paypal or Etsy again, as it is clear they don't care about criminals using their platform to steal money from trusting consumers.
The lack of response from Paypal in this article is no surprise - a lot of their business comes from people using their platform to steal from their users.
Can anyone who works at Etsy or Paypal explain why this system is so broken and anti-consumer?
This is why I stopped using PayPal back in the early 00s. They would staunchly side with a charge/seller over their actual customer for any reason and just frustrate the process. Even when their company had all the info, like eBay purchases.
People say companies like American Express are a scam. But I can, and have in these instances just filed a charge back and walked. To the point that if a place won’t take American Express (like Costco) I’ll just move along.
The number of times I’ve avoided scams and headaches because I can get a rep on in under 5 minutes is incredible. Everything from someone be swiping my numbers and running up charges online (that the store won’t discuss even when I give them the charge auth #), to car rental companies playing games with tolls when traveling in places like Denver. It’s frankly odd to me it’s not the standard.
> People say companies like American Express are a scam. But I can, and have in these instances just filed a charge back and walked. To the point that if a place won’t take American Express (like Costco) I’ll just move along.
I have never heard anyone say companies like AmEx are a scam in my 20 years as an adult.
And Visa/MasterCard/Discover all offer the same chargeback mechanisms AmEx does, so there is nothing special about AmEx.
And the craziest thing to me is thinking Costco’s extremely liberal return policies are inferior to a credit card network’s chargeback policies. You can get a refund for fruit at Costco if you don’t like the way it tastes. You can’t do that with AmEx.
I accidentally bought the wrong type of cheese, and they gave me a refund even though they had to throw it away due to the law not allowing them to resell returned perishable food items. (I didn’t find out they were throwing it away until the cashier already refunded to the card...otherwise I would have just kept the cheese).
Ive heard it multiple times. Mainly because there is a membership fee.
And I disagree about the chargeback process on visa/MasterCard. Ive only ever had to do it once. It took a very long time to open. The experience lasted close to 12 weeks and I had to appeal the finding a to a “manager” when the company I filed the chargeback with simply said “nah it’s valid” and visa attempted to find against it b
Even the initial call was a typical call center experience that took over an hour, and a couple long holds.
Amex has very good customer service. Ive never been on a hold for over 5 minutes that I can remember. And the few reports, fraud, chargebacks etc were very easy. They took everything up front and straight said “if you don’t hear back by x date, consider the matter settled”
I stopped shopping at costco for multiple reasons, mostly how other customers acted and how crowded chaotic it got. But then stopping Amex charges was the straw. I carry an alternative card just in case, but try to run all purchases through one so I have one bill to pay. I didn’t feel the need to chnage that process so I could buy bulk TP (which was mostly all we bought there). Even the gas lines are silly here.
FYI, Visa and MasterCard don’t handle chargebacks, they are simple payment networks. The bank that issued your card is the one you interact with for chargebacks. Your experience with one bank that issues Visa/MasterCard credit cards has no bearing on any other. I suspect there’s different level of customer service based on different annual fees, even at the same bank.
Yes, the other cards say they have the same chargeback policies, but having used both extensively for years, I can say that AmEx is FAR better. No significant hold times, and very prompt response. One time I had a question about a charge that didn't even seem that off, and almost before I even finished my description, the rep was asking where I was, telling me that may card was cancelled and a new one would be out FedEx tomorrow - and it was. Apparently, that charge was some kind of serious red flag in their system.
Also, the AmEx points system usage and transferability is far better (although I've never found anything worthwhile in their own catalog.
Really key is that the availability of my historical data goes back for many more years than my bank or other cards. I don't often need it, but when I do need to find something from 4 years ago, it is really nice to have it.
While they sell their service on all the concierge-type services, I've never found those useful, but the disputes, points admin, and data availability are key differentiators for me.
I think AmEx has tiered service levels just like everyone else. I’ve tried Platinum and Hilton Aspire and Sapphire Reserve and other fee cards, and I don’t think AmEx is anything special, at least not anymore.
There was a promo last year where if you purchased $10+ at a non chain restaurant, you got $5 back up to 10x. I signed up for the promo using my account, which shows the AmEx card I used. But I never got the cash back, because technically, my wife owns the credit card, and I’m only the authorized user. So because I didn’t sign up for the promo using my wife’s online account, we didn’t get it. They wouldn’t even award me the $50 cash back even after escalating it to supervisors, and this is on $450 annual fee card, just because of a technical glitch.
I think AmEx started experiencing declines in profit and service levels 10 years or so ago when Chase and the other banks upped their offers for high annual fee cards, and AmEx had to respond by gaining more market share by attracting lower income customers with AmEx debit cards and no fee credit cards. I never thought I’d see the day when they would do that, since they had so long been the brand of the “upper classes”.
Yup, similar experience here w/the higher membership levels -- just wasn't as much value as expected. But the basic elements of 1) really good customer service w/typically zero hold times, 2) solid support for disputes vs the typical dismissive approach elsewhere, 3) long-term data availability (which is also a key Amazon feature), 4) points program that is really low-hassle and high usability, all make it worthwhile to prioritize AmEx, even with the basic level.
I'm also surprised that AmEx is going downmarket, but I suspect that has more to do with being able to keep merchants on board vs really wanting those customers.
AAAnnnd, I just went to AmEx to search for an old transaction about 3 years ago, and it's gone.
Poof.
Just records back about 18 months. Just like all the rest.
AmEx counts it's longstanding "members" as it's strategic assets, and used to have this great ability to search online records instantly. It is a GREAT customer-retention feature, and hot data storage has never been cheaper.
The longer a customer stays, the more valuable to them is being able to search all the old transactions. It is a key Amazon feature to be able to search all my old purchases over 20 years back.
Yet now, it is just like the rest. If I'm going to just lose everything in 18 months anyway (no, requesting and mailing old statement copies is no substitute), why not leave?
You can use Amex points directly on Amazon purchases. Not the most efficient use but generally what I do.
However if you return an item bought with points you may have to call to have them refunded. Which isn’t a hassle but worth considering. I just only use them on something I’m very sure I won’t return.
I got screwed in the opposite direction. I sold an online service with PayPal, delivered the goods (files to set up a web forum), only to have the client file a fraudulent chargeback claiming they never received the site files (they used the files to set up a successful site which they are still using; I pointed this out to the PayPal rep and they ignored it). I never got a cent and actually had a negative balance thanks to the fees.
It’s probably very hard to be PayPal, but the incident left a bad taste in my mouth. I no longer accept or send any transactions via their platform.
> To the point that if a place won’t take American Express (like Costco) I’ll just move along.
I understand the sentiment and I will use my Amex preferentially over any other card for the same reason. But it’s kinda funny to use Costco as the example. They have a famously customer friendly return policy.
I've bought and sold plenty on ebay using paypal exclusively and can't say my experience is the same. As a buyer, I know that opening a paypal dispute they'll side with me, and as a seller I know in screwed if the buyer does so. Two anecdotes - I bought a phone that was "new" and when it arrived it was locked to a carrier I wasn't on. I tried to get it unlocked officially, but apple or the carrier wouldn't help. Seller said no refunds. Paypal sided with me because they didn't explicitly put it in the correct ebay category.
As a seller, I sold a processor, listed it with 2nd class signed for postage and the buyer asked if I could ship it first class (next day vs 3-5 days). I said sure, paid the difference out of pocket and uploaded the tracking number. 24 hours later I got a paypal dispute saying item not received, that it wasn't sent by the right means. He had signed for it, I had the tracking. No dice, I was out a £200 part.
Paypal so heavily sides with the buyer in every scenario, it's why it's popular!
I think they're very inconsistent honestly. I ordered a 400 dollar item last summer, it was shipped by Fedex, and Fedex said they delivered it. I live in a house on a private drive way out in the country - nobody is porch pirating here. It never showed up. I tried to work with the seller but they never responded with anything other than the copy pasted tracking number. Ebay denied my claim saying that a tracking number proves delivery. PayPal did the same. Chase ultimately sided with me and processed the chargeback.
I've had other bizarre issues with Fedex as well, like the time they said they delivered a wrench but they didn't, then it showed up 6 weeks later after the seller had already sent me a replacement.
I think Fedex drivers sometimes just mark items as delivered that they won't get around to until the next day. I don't know how to explain it other than that. I've experienced the same thing (driver marked delivered, but it wasn't) and the package showed up the next day or two. Only with Fedex...
> Chase ultimately sided with me and processed the chargeback.
Doesn't this mean that both your paypal account and ebay account get locked? I know that if you issue a chargeback to amazon they lock your account until you give them another card to charge.
This reminds me of an interesting story. A couple years ago I was trying to sell my broken x1 carbon laptop in ebay. I was looking for $400 and after posting and getting a few questions I realized I would not be able to close the sale because I had promised myself to never use PayPal again. So I removed my listing and contacted one of the users that got in touch. I tried to reason with him and explain that I would not deal with such a shady company but he denied my request (obviously) and said I could mail him the laptop and he would mail me back a $400 check. After thinking for a few minutes I decided to do just that and trust him. In my mind I'd rather give this laptop away (risking being conned) to somebody that will make some money out of its parts than give another cent to PayPal. About a week later I got my $400 and a message from him thanking me for trusting a stranger on the internet. Felt really good to stick to my gut and do something nice for a change.
> People say companies like American Express are a scam
Have not heard this!
I agree with you: Amex is great at looking after their customers (card holders) and are so jealous about their info (for charge cards, don’t know about credit) that they share much less.
I do use visa for local small businesses (family restaurants etc) because the fee Amex charges merchants is higher than the others’. But especially online, their guarantees are worth it.
Why not just visa if amex is not accepted? They offer (at least mine done) the exact same purchase protection and I’ve called up my bank and had charges reversed too.
I have ever only had to do one chargeback on a Bank of America Visa. I think it’s still visa I dealt with and the process isn’t bank/carrier specific but I’m not sure.
It was not fun. Took a very long time to open the case. Had to appeal a couple times and was a multiple week endeavor.
A trip to Denver was an eye opener. We rented a car and charged it on Amex. Denver has a very weird toll setup that camera/LP reader based and weeks after we returned we started getting charges trickling in for the tolls, totalling a couple hundred bucks. But we had paid for a toll pass with the rental co. I called them and got nowhere fast. I called Amex, sent them the rental agreement and they reversed the charges and said they would handle it. Never had to think about it again and it was about 20 minutes of my time, mostly spent chatting while the scan of the rental agreement was sent to them.
I still carry a visa for emergencies/just in case.
I don’t carry a debit card and haven’t for a very long time. Just run it through credit and pay in full at the end of the month. Basically the only thing we do with a bank is pay the bills or deposit/withdraw cash. We try to keep a degree of separation from what we spend on, and where we hold our money (if that makes sense)
The chargeback process is with the bank. Your takeaway from this should be that Bank of America has crappier customer service than AmEx, which matches every report I've heard as well as my personal experience.
Some premium cards have additional concierge features and your AmEx may have had that kind of thing re: the Denver experience.
Guess it’s different with American banks, I’m Canadian so might be different (I know our debit cards are often very different)
May I ask why you don’t carry a debit card? I find that very strange, how do you pull out money/purchase something at a store that doesn’t take either? Just avoid it?
I've only had a few recently as a way to recoup some of the increased pandemic costs, and they do venmo/zelle. which might be outside of the apps' TOS but not really my problem.
in canada quite a few stores (smaller corner stores or restaurants) do not take credit - debit or cash only because credit costs them too much in comparison. And in europe i've ran into it a number of times too.
I've heard a lot of complaints that Paypal staunchly sides with the customer over retailers. I think it's just that sometimes scammers beat the system, and Paypal is occasionally wrong in either directions.
Counter-Point: I've had three disputes resolved via PayPal and all in my favour (fairly, I want to add). In fact, I've heard quite a few small online traders refuse PayPal, as they've been scammed in the past (as sellers) and PayPal did not side with them.
I'm not a fan of PayPal for other reasons and this is anecdotal as well, but in my experience PayPal is very biased towards the buyer.
When I reached out to them, they basically shrugged their shoulders and said there was nothing they could do about scammers ripping people off. Unfortunately, I was patient enough that I had run out the clock on the charge back from my bank.
I've also been scammed with Ebay + PayPal. Now that I know how useless PayPal is I will never use them again. Never had any issues (or heard of people having issues) with requesting a chargeback with Citi or Chase.
I've had a similar scam experience on Etsy. The seller initially provided a bogus tracking number from a foreign country (the purported location of the store) and sandbagged delivery for 1.5 months to wait out most of the period during which consumers can issue credit card chargebacks. Only after opening an Etsy non-delivery case did they send an item (with a different tracking number, from the US). The delivered item didn't match the advertisement (both in quality and size). And the seller will not provide return instructions or issue a refund.
I'm still contesting the charge with Chase but Etsy's lack of help here has burned it for me as a platform.
Loeg, I think this exactly what they did to me - I had good luck with chase (CSR if it matters?). Submitted the chargeback in early Dec and received confirmation at the end of the month.
I had all the tracking information, recordings, etc, but was never asked for any information from chase. I had tried to go through PayPal’s dispute mechanism first around dec 5 - so 43 days after the order was placed.
Hope some of this is helpful to you.
I think Etsy should own the refund process when they detect these fake stores and scams. If they can delete the store, they should be able to have PayPal reverse all the charges associated with it, right?
One interesting thing I learned about Etsy from my experience: you can only open an issue/case once on any given order!
So in my experience, I opened an "item not delivered" (as opposed to: some other problem with the delivered product) case when nothing showed up after 1.5 months; THEN the merchant sent the item; THEN when it arrived I closed the issue as it had been delivered. But five seconds later when I opened the packaging and noticed the item was total garbage, I could not open another case on the order. Bah.
I think the scam sellers on Etsy know this, and intentionally induce customers to open a case they can cheaply satisfy, but will prevent contesting real problems with the purchase later (on the Etsy platform).
Mine was also charged to a Chase CSR, amusingly enough! The merchant disputed the chargeback, so I've had to supply evidence to Chase, and they're still deliberating internally. I don't care about the money lost (~$80), but I really don't want the fucking scammer to get it!
Totally agree that Etsy should own refunding when they detect fake stores and scams. I don't know what their relationship with Paypal is, but it's the right thing to do as a platform.
> Bizarrely, the buyer doesn’t leave empty-handed, because the scammer then actually sends them a much cheaper and nastier alternative handlebar bag – complete with tracking details and proof of delivery. This isn’t out of benevolence: it fulfils their contractual obligations, and removes the ammunition for buyers to dispute the transaction with PayPal or their bank.
I don't understand how it removes ammunition at all.
I show eBay or my bank a photo of what was advertised, a photo of what I received, the charge gets reversed, and if this happens too many times to the company they lose the ability to take credit cards or to list on eBay at all.
What am I missing? Is this specifically a bank account - PayPal - AliExpress combo or something? Marketplaces don't usually exist very long if they provide zero buyer protection from fraudulent/deceptive sellers.
The point is to confuse the situation just enough to give them some cover to get their money out.
If the ship nothing, then they’ll get shut down immediately. If they ship a thing, and in fact it is a handlebar bag, then they can report back to the card companies that it’s an ordinary customer dispute over quality of the goods, and they’ll likely win some of the chargebacks, and more importantly keep them in play while they continue to collect money. The majority of customers probably will just keep the piece of junk and be bitter about it.
They aren’t aiming to stay in business for a long time. Just long enough to collect money from a few thousand customers.
The vast majority of consumers will file a chargeback under the wrong reason, or give insufficient evidence, or will lose the chargeback due to an automated system siding with the merchant because there is a tracking number present.
For example, someone who receives such a crappy knock off bag may tell their bank that they "didnt receive" what they bought. Then the merchant provides the bank with a tracking number and wins the case. Disputing product quality or claiming deceptive advertising are less likely to work out for the buyer.
If you want to win a chargeback as a buyer, file it as a fraudulent charge (implying your card details were stolen).
Neither eBay nor PayPal care enough to even have a human review the disputes most of the time. A valid tracking number (even if the package is empty) is often enough to lose a dispute. If you’re lucky, you’re going to get a monkey reviewing it which isn’t paid enough nor is competent enough to evaluate the quality of the item received based on the pictures.
Your bank will indeed care more but most people don’t bother or value access to PayPal more than the scam money (since PayPal will often close your account if you file a chargeback with the bank).
I don't even know how to file a dispute without a human involved. Customer service handles it. When you deal with them over the phone it's usually pretty reasonable. They're not evaluating the cut of a diamond. All the photos in the article would obviously be settled in favor of the buyer.
Also why would PayPal close a buyer's account after a chargeback? They'll just debit the seller. Why would PayPal even care? I searched online and can't find a single instance of anyone complaining about that having happened.
Customer service is not always the one actually making the decision. They might be some early-stage filter to guard against obvious mistakes/misunderstandings, but after that it can very well go into a queue where either a automation or an underpaid human handles it. That's the only reason I can think of for the various horror stories where people have been left out of pocked by PayPal despite evidence that would convince any reasonable person.
> Also why would PayPal close a buyer's account after a chargeback
It's common in "big tech" to close entire accounts in retaliation after a chargeback (I've heard of Google doing it, and maybe others) so I'm assuming PayPal would do the same. Chargebacks also cost them a fee (in addition to the disputed amount) so there is a business case for discouraging chargebacks. And when a huge chunk of your business is based on screwing people and the margins are already razor-thin, do you really want to keep customers who demonstrated their ability to fight back?
Sorry, but sounds to me like all you have are assumptions rather than facts.
I don't know why you think chargebacks are handled by an "automaton" (not true) or "underpaid" (irrelevant) human. And you're admitting you're extrapolating from the behavior of consumer companies to PayPal. But PayPal is different because it's not eating the cost of anything. It passes it onto the seller. It has zero business motivation to block such a buyer if they buyer is in the right. And since it's not easy to find any complaints of them doing so... it looks like they're not.
> you think chargebacks are handled by an "automaton" (not true) or "underpaid" (irrelevant) human
I am talking about PayPal disputes (within the PayPal platform), not disputes/chargebacks from your bank. There are plenty of stories out there (both as a seller and as a buyer) where PayPal sides with the wrong side despite ample amounts of evidence. The only explanation could be (bad) automation or idiots.
Edit: Indeed, I have mostly assumptions. I have not personally used PayPal enough to get into any trouble (because I didn't trust them for anything high-value in the first place), though the possibility of said trouble (and other nasty stuff they're doing, like their data sharing processes) was enough for me to completely stop doing business with them.
I have however worked at a business that used PayPal to broker payments (we weren't the seller - just a marketplace linking up sellers and buyers) and the dispute process was hit and miss. Some disputes were completely legitimate and had plenty of evidence and yet PayPal sided with the wrong party.
I have also read stories online about how scammers are abusing the PayPal dispute process to steal goods by sending back empty/bogus returns (which PayPal considers legitimate because of the tracking number).
I also know people whose PayPal accounts were closed because they were processing payments that PayPal didn't "like" for some reason (despite being totally legal), and the process was to close the account had hold the funds hostage for about a year before the seller can finally withdraw them. This does not take as long with any legitimate bank.
As a reason I have more than enough evidence to conclude that the company is scummy and use this to base my assumptions upon.
Off topic, but might I suggest being careful using the word “monkey”? It’s probably not what you meant, but an unsympathetic reader might interpret it like you meant to call the actual people reviewers “monkeys”. And “monkey” is a known racial slur when applied to people.
You're missing that 'nothing arrived' is clear cut, while 'it's not quite what I was expecting' is extremely subjective. I know the products are clearly not what was advertised, but even answering the question 'did your package arrive' with 'yes' probably makes the dispute go from an immediate refund to a long protracted process. Someone has to look at the photo, they may not know about the product domain and not be able to tell... etc.
The product is too niche for this to be some small-time scam, this is more likely the result of streamlined and specialized parts of organized businesses. This dynamic is likely not even the brain-child of any one individual; it's entirely plausible that it's the result of AliExpress drop shippers that offer commissions for sales referrals and don't look too closely at the process that generates them. The drop shippers take on the payment/chargeback risk for the spread above ordering directly from AliExpress, and pass along part of that spread to the SEO and advertising specialists figuring out the cheapest way to funnel the most traffic to the highest-commission targets.
Handlebar bags are not a big seller by any stretch of the imagination. I have spent years in the bicycle trade and have probably bought more handlebar bags for myself than I have sold to customers. This is not much of an exaggeration. Then the ones I do own are just for the grand tour rather than daily usage. That bracket on my handlebars is invariably not holding anything and there is invariably a bag on my back.
As much as I adore the handlebar barbag as a product and will gladly try and sell it to customers, truth be told is that it is niche. Baskets for shopper bikes outsell bar bags 100 to 1.
To get £45 out of a UK customer for a high quality handlebar bag is hard work. I can't imagine trying to get 179 dollars out of them for a handlebar bag. I wouldn't even pay that myself even though I like this product.
The unique selling points are interesting. So it goes with gravel bikes. You can mount your phone and lights to it.
The top isn't designed to hold a map which was 1970s USP.
Let's look at what other manufacturers offer. Nowadays that top map pocket is for putting your phone in. Brackets for lights are not so common but I have LED lights on both of mine, albeit with brackets that are less than ideal.
This 179 dollar bag lacks reflective strips which is weird. I also prefer standard Klickfix brackets as I can mount my handlebar bag behind the seat on my commuting bike, thereby getting better aero and handling.
I don't think that fake pages trying to sell knock off versions of products are uncommon. Using such tales to hype your product is something else.
Admittedly it is a curious story. Common sense would tell you that the cycling world needs this product. But try selling any handlebar bag to any customer on a busy Saturday in a wealthy area where customers happily spend 350 on cycling shoes. The handlebar bag is a hard sell.
As an avid cyclist, I've noticed a couple of problems with bike accessories. First is looks. Folks have an idea of how a bike should look for a certain activity. Second is the huge variation in bike designs that make it hard to standardize attachments. A handlebar bag is likely to conflict with your controls, cables, light, and so forth.
Gone are the days when a single Wald basket would fit on any bike that wasn't a racing bike. And the bike was already ugly. And if the basket messed with your brakes, it didn't matter, because the brakes never really worked anyway.
For myself, I took a pair of worn out jeans, cut off one of the legs, sewed it into a bag, and attached it to my handlebar or saddele with a couple of old toe straps. Then again the whole bike was assembled from spare parts. ;-)
Yeah, this bag looks pretty neat. Most bar bags swing a bit and don't work well with my wife's cantilever brakes.
But, the price tag is a bit much. I can get a handmade bag from any of a number of boutique bike bag producers for the same or less. Or, I can buy a small camera bag, rivet on a KlickFix and call it good enough for <$80.
Sad about the scams, but I admire the original maker's sticktoitiveness. The scammers are successful because, and these are my own words, that's an awesome handlebar bag. They wouldn't be successful honestly selling whatever basic-ass bags they have to ship.
So, I'm kinda glad for the scam, because it brought the product to me through this story. I'm gonna buy one for me, one for my mom, and one for my brother. And when I can buy an extra mount, I'll do that so I can swap my bag between bikes. Not because of charity, but because it's a damned good product and suddenly I've got birthday presents sorted for 2021.
A family member of mine got a start out of college working for a medium-sized law firm that sent out cease and desist and etc. notices to counterfeit sellers. They were a 'full service' system that sent notices and handled takeovers/shutdowns of websites, through ICANN and various channels, I believe. The firm did this full time for really large clients (think designer handbags). This was back some ten years maybe - it was long ago that we were wary of the fact that the job was a newfangled remote position, which he nabbed off of Craigslist via a local ad.
All that to say, it's not surprising there is a market for taking care of this problem. I wonder if there are smart folks out there who have made some kind of service out of this for littler guys than the global size clients that firm used to serve.
Counterfeit cycling parts have been around for a while. Mostly they're taking advantage of the obscene profit margins that western companies have been racking up over the last couple of decades. Look at the ridiculous prices for name brand carbon fiber bottle cages than go look at the Aliexpress knockoffs.
Are the AliExpress sellers using the exact media taken from the market leader's websites? This is what I have noticed, even for somewhat unbranded products (e.g. furniture).
I don't know about AliExpress, but the Rolex clones definitely use branding, marketing and other IP from the manufacturer.
Sometimes, the packaging is an exact match.
No kidding. Some of the knockoffs are so good, that heavy-duty watchmakers get fooled. I’m told they are pretty much indistinguishable, unless you open the watch.
Apple had a problem with apps on the App Store, where knockoff vendors would get their crappy apps approved, then would grab screenshots from big-name apps, and replace their pathetic screngrabs with the big-name ones, so people thought they were buying the big-name apps.
That's why Apple locked down the App Store, so you can't update screengrabs and previews, anymore.
Using Aliexpress is a skill, you need to figure out which sellers are full of crap and which are actually reputable.
Wish is 100% scam preying on those without the skills to use Aliexpress. Wish translates the UI for multiple languages along with the product names/descriptions and provides direct payment without credit cards (Klarna).
It depends heavily on what you're buying; Parts for projects, or cables - mostly great. Pet toys - usually fine. Small household tools and other utilitarian bits - good as long as it can't get bent or dented en route. (Western) Name-brand products - don't go there, they're more expensive or fake.
I've bought around 400 things on AliExpress, with an average value of, guessing, about A$7.50. I'd say just under 10% had a problem that needed a full refund -- mostly just not arriving or arriving beaten up. I only had to complain bitterly when a surface-mount component fell off a PCIe card and I refused to accept their recommendation to fix it myself. Fewer than 2% of goods had a disappointingly short life span.
Meanwhile, the price is at most a third of what I'd pay to get the same (or seriously similar) product locally. Doing the math very roughly, I've probably paid about A$3k for stuff that would have cost A$10k. And all I had to do was wait 1-3 months for everything.
Serious question: Why do you feel the need to pay a few bucks less for an item and wait 1-3 months for an unreliable vendor and questionable quality vs buying from a local and reliable maker or merchant?
The AliExpress listings could very well be for the scammers themselves. One company makes the similar-looking bag that's intended to be used in the scams. Another company actually dropships said bags for orders from their scam websites.
I fell for this scam...
I've been even dealing with their customer support and they've been answering all my emails. They know exactly what kind of game they were playing. They were polite and were answering the right thing and were never really lying.
> We can flag the ad on Facebook, but they’re not technically violating any Facebook rules – there’s nothing in Facebook that says you can’t advertise something that’s not yours.
Surprise surprise, when something nefarious happens online, Zuckerberg is never too far away.
Facebook seems to be yet again profiting off fraud & scams in total impunity.
I’m currently going through the same issue as their end users.
Bought something based on an Instagram ad. It never arrived after 3 months. I contact PayPal for a dispute after finding the sellers Shopify site offline. The seller gave PayPal a tracking number of a package that arrived at my house in early January. Oddly, that was the first time I was provided a tracking number. I did in fact get a package with a cheat plastic wallet around the same time, which I figured was some sort of brushing scam. So seller currently has $35 of mine, and they sent me <$1 item instead of what I ordered.
I guess we shall see how PayPal decides. If all else fails, I’ll call MasterCard. I kinda thought PayPal and Shopify were trustworthy and keeping the trash off their systems.
When they say “computer”, they don’t mean a laptop. They mean a cycling computer, a little gizmo that tracks your speed, distance, pedaling cadence, grade, climbing distance, and maybe heart rate. In the cycling world these days, if you didn’t log the ride, you didn’t do the ride :)
I'm not all that deep into the bikepacking/touring world (just some weekend rides) but it's not something I see referenced, however they have some pretty amazing storage and packing options that remind me of it:
Pannier bags are the go-to design for both bicycles and motorcycles, for good reason.
They keep weight off your back and the center of gravity as low as possible. They also don't interfere with swinging your leg over the bike, unlike rear baskets or top boxes.
When properly attached, you don't really notice them at all, other than making your bike a bit heavier up hills.
I DIYed my own pannier bags from military surplus shoulder bags. They're not pretty, but then again neither is my bike.
Handlebar bags are more of a bonus item, you use it for things you need to grab while riding, small snacks and that sort of thing.
Perhaps putting their brand name on thier bag in prominently visible location could have helped? Right now their bag have no visible branding and that allows scammers easily replace it with inferior product.
Real world products have anti-forgery mechanisms -- holograms, serial numbers you can check, etc. How about a 'spot the fake' section on the kickstarter site to identify the countermeasures?
The problem for the original brand is that some people are going to receive the fake bags, believe that they are the real thing, and then leave negative online reviews saying that the product is low-quality. Even if you had a hologram or serial number on the real thing, you can’t expect people receiving the fake to be aware of that or care.
Then you just reply to the review, notifying the customer that they have received a counterfeit, and then report the review as fraudulent, and move on.
This is what a lot of businesses do. It's the only way to fight back without spending a lot of money to stop Chinese organized crime.
Some places like Amazon and Newegg are moving to models that require you to have purchased the item through them to review it, which addresses your issue.
However, as long as reviews are accepted without proof of purchase, what else can companies do? Sue for slander? That's also endless whackamole.
"Chinese Organized Crime" is a bit much. Its most likely some small time guy in China that is just doing this stuff for a quick buck. They would probably not even see anything wrong with it morally or legally, as its the fault of the person for falling for such an obvious scam. And they still get a product.
But here the product isn't forged at all. Only the website assets are misappropriated. For a shop that claims to sell you a Macbook but then only sends you a book about Macs.
I just wanted to say, that bag looks like a great handlebar bag, I love how it's acting like a base for other accessories so you don't have to overload your handlebar and you can switch everything between bikes with one move. I hope they manage to squash the fakes.
Yes. The most successful crowdfunding scams deliver something to avoid retribution from the planforms, payment processors, and legal authorities. My advice is the same regardless.
What the bloody hell are you on about? The company highlighted in this article has a legit product. They are being copied by scammers selling half-assed fakes on Facebook, Etsy, etc.
Apparently I misread the article. I thought the scammers were behind the crowdfunding campaign and the legitimate company was selling the product traditionally. I still stand by my advice, but it seems it isn't relevant to the article. My bad.
Violence is not the answer and it’s also not even feasible to”send the boys around”. Send them where? You’d have to hire a team of investigators just to have the possibility of finding the location of the perpetrators. And then when you did they’re likely going to be on another continent. It’s not a brick and mortar store or flea market stall or guys on street corners selling the fakes.
You’d be surprised. Often times it’s usually one guy. There’s tons of these scams. Often they’re selling stolen merchandise, or found some super cheap inventory left over somewhere... which is why they can make money. They’re not manufacturing this stuff.
But... they’re also usually engaged in other criminal activity. So while “sending the boys around” might not be the best idea, actually uncovering the identity and sending law enforcement for a check could bring dividends. Companies and people treat them like other companies that care about letters from lawyers. Those just go in their shredder. But police and fed calls usually get them spooked.
If enough of these con men had some heat they may stop, but the problem is most companies just don’t follow through on that level and accept it as business as usual as in the article.
I really struggle to see how the bag they show as a copy is anything remotely like a scam copy, now the duper duper bag I could easily see as a copy of numerous other handlebar bags though. Sorry , can’t see their problem here re scam copies at least. Scam advertising may be a better headline.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Are you saying this isn't really a scam? It obviously is, because what the scammers are advertising isn't what they're actually shipping.
Or are you saying that Route Werks has nothing to complain about because the scammers are shipping bags that obviously do not resemble the Route Werks bag? Because there's still the problem that the scammers are using the Route Werks product images to advertise.
Now it goes beyond physical products to media too; another example is blogs these days. Someone finds a successful blog, pays some developing-world person on a freelancer platform to rewrite every post just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown, and then puts the counterfeit site up with a heavy load of SEO and advertising. This started with recipe blogs – that cajun cooking site that claims to be by a born and bred Louisianan has grammatical mistakes suggesting an Eastern European or Southeast Asian author – but is now spreading through all kinds of other hobbies and interests. With recipe blogs, this phenomenon is now so mature that counterfeiters are copying from previous counterfeits.