
Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merchant Funds - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-08/amazon-hit-by-extensive-fraud-as-hackers-siphoned-merchant-funds
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skellera
The interesting part to me is that amazon gives out loans to small businesses.
I never knew that. I’m curious how amazon will handle the situation. Will the
merchant be required to pay back the stolen loan funds?

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bdibs
Amazon's in the perfect position to give loans to their sellers. They have all
the data in the world about how a seller is doing on the platform, so why not
make some (relatively) safe money off interest and boosted sales?

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mcpherrinm
Loaning money to their merchants allows their merchants to buy more inventory
to ship to Amazon to sell. Thus Amazon benefits by making more sales, too.

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pbhjpbhj
It's crazy really, they loan the money they would in the past have to use to
buy stock, but they also don't have to pay for warehousing (straight away).

Presumably it helps with inventory management too - like the loanee indicates
the inventory they're buying which means Amazon can factor that in.

Then they charge interest ...

However, whilst this sounds good for Amazon, is it more efficient - in
economic terms - or does it just reduce Amazon's risks and costs.

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jdavis703
My partner recently had her Amazon account comprised. The scammers ordered a
“random” pair of white socks for $20 that showed up at _our_ door.

Since the fraudsters never received the package I don’t think they gained
anything directly by stealing from my partner’s debit card. So that made me
think, how could they be gaining from this? I’m assuming some unscrupulous
merchants or “marketing consultants” are using this kind of fraud to boost
sales for themselves or their clients.

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colanderman
Or the merchants are the scammers. That's $20 for probably $5 of raw product.
Even if the merchants are paying the scammers a portion, that's a good profit.

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stef25
You'd need high volume to make it worthwhile and the amount of chargebacks
leading to one merchant would make them look pretty suspicious.

