
Amazon battles counterfeit masks, $400 hand sanitizer amid virus panic - juokaz
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-battles-counterfeit-masks-400-hand-sanitizer-amid-virus-panic-11583880384
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gentleman11
I hope they battle it harder than they “battle” counterfeits in general. It
seems like they generally like the money they make off of counterfeits and
just pay lip service to preventing it so they don’t get yelled at too much for
it

~~~
luckylion
Yeah, they don't seem to battle it too hard when you can just search your
local amazon for a relevant keyword, sort by price descending and find the
offers. Amazon has every incentive _not_ to battle this, the higher the price,
the higher their percentage.

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einpoklum
Well, cash is known to be very dirty:

[https://time.com/4918626/money-germs-microbes-
dirty/](https://time.com/4918626/money-germs-microbes-dirty/)

* Antibiotic-resistant bacteria

* Cocaine

* Heroin

* Pet DNA

etc. So, the way the $400 hand sanitizer works is by making you let go of all
your filthy, filthy money.

~~~
blackrock
Also, often contains bodily fluids, from a very voluptuous exotic dancer.

It’s best to launder the money prior to using it.

~~~
anticensor
[https://xkcd.com/1426/](https://xkcd.com/1426/)

~~~
einpoklum
Pun-tastic :-\

------
code4tee
I like Amazon, but at some level I find it hard to believe that a company that
can build a store that automatically tracks my purchases with ML and let’s me
walk out without a checkout can’t figure out how to flag some of the blatantly
fake stuff being sold on their site.

Sure given the scale there can always be a few bad apples but some of the
stuff is clearly fake and stays up for ages.

~~~
verst
In the Amazon Grocery Store in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood of Seattle it
takes them over an hour to charge you and send you a receipt.

Doesn't seem like they perfected automated tracking yet. This screams manual
human review of video footage -- seems like they are still collecting data for
a future ML model.

~~~
jlmorton
I doubt it. They send a push notification to your Amazon Go app immediately
upon exiting the store. They then later send an email receipt, as you said,
about an hour later.

Because of the novelty of the store, and because it's on my way to work, I
routinely go the store, and I've never noticed a discrepancy between the push
notification and the emailed receipt.

I have no specific knowledge why the receipt email is delayed, but I suspect a
more mundane reason, like they're batching payments, in case of multiple trips
in-and-out.

~~~
verst
Just to clarify again, this is at the Amazon Go Grocery store of which there
is only one location in Seattle.

I don't use the Amazon Go app. I use the Go option within the regular Amazon
app. I get no email and no status change within the app for over 1 hour.

Also, I'm really not that convinced that they have mastered picking up various
fruit and vegetables and the bakery items I chose. Those things don't use RFID
and from what I could tell their system must be vision-based online here.

Edit: My friend was with me and used the Amazon Go app and also didn't receive
any message or receipt until an hour later. This has been a frequent
occurrence at this store.

------
robocat
Make your own hand sanitiser (WHO recipe):
[https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf](https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf)

Buy 95% ethanol (from hardware/paint department, or maybe Everclear booze if
in US) or isopropyl alcohol (hardware/paint department).

Buy Glycerin (Chemist, or I found it cheap at Indian goods store, probably
other places).

IMHO the Hydrogen peroxide can be safely skipped if you can’t easily find it.

Maybe also get some hand cream (frequent use of hand sanitiser will screw your
skin).

~~~
forkexec
Oh thanks for the link. I was looking around to source food/cosmetics-grade
carbopol 941, Caprylyl Glycol, AMP or high-purity TEA, and Isopropyl Myristate
per a chemistry formulation forum. I was going to cost $500 or so to get
started making even small quantities, and then everclear and distilled water
for the balance.

Oh man... without very careful fractional distillation, random Home Depot
paint thinner, fireplace fuel isn't a good idea at all. For use on hands, it
must be food or cosmetics grade.

Maybe some aloe vera would be better than hand cream, which would leave less
of an unpleasant, oily residue? Also, random hand cream would likely interact
with the recipe because they usually include many components.

Please don't get too crazy if you're not a chemist.

~~~
namibj
If the stuff is clearly labelled ethanol, for cleaning/burning, made from
biological sources, you can be pretty sure it's just simple continuous
distilled sugar-based (likely via yeast) reasonably high-purity ethanol with
mandated-by-law denaturation additives (over here in Germany that'd be ~1%
methyl-ethyl-ketone and a hint of denatonium benzoate) to make it taste too
bad for people to get drunk from it.

This is far from random paint thinner or random mineral-oil-based lighter
fluid/accelerant.

For use on your hands the normal home and garden ethanol is sufficiently
harmless, and will itself do more damage than any residues. After all, it's
made for use in situations where most people don't wear gloves.

~~~
forkexec
Sorry, wrong... you're making a big leap of assumption rather than
understanding what grades mean. If it's not food / cosmetics grade, you have
no idea what toxic impurities are left in it... that's why the fuel-kind is
cheap and for burning, not placing on your hands. Unless you have a decent
mass spectrometer, you can feel free to gamble with your and your own family's
health and/or lives.

~~~
namibj
I might be have made wrong assumptions about consumer safety regulations where
you are. I'm pretty sure you can't sell anything in Germany to consumers
that's toxic on contact with hands if it's something people usually touch and
you don't warn about it.

The reason the fuel-type is this cheap is that it's taxed much less than the
drinking kind. For technical applications they have good reason to keep if
clean, safe for traces of impurities. The stuff they use for non-medical hand
sanitizer and such should come from the same factory. There isn't much you can
do wrong when producing industrial quantities of generic technical ethanol.

I'm sorry if I caused confusion though.

------
mNovak
I do hope this is an impetus for Amazon to finally address the huge
counterfeiting problem on their platform.

~~~
quaquaqua1
Just like how my employer sent an email saying "you are allowed to work from
home" and then all the managers come and say "that doesn't apply to our team"
:)

~~~
lnsru
Looks like we are working in the same company :-)

------
mike_n
Perhaps Amazon should manufacture masks/sanitizer/etc via its house brand, and
churn them out by the billion.

~~~
Seenso
> Perhaps Amazon should manufacture masks/sanitizer/etc via its house brand,
> and churn them out by the billion.

Where would they do that? China is still pretty locked down, and I think
they're still struggling to supply domestic needs of those items.

~~~
azurezyq
It's recovering. In my hometown (Shandong province), no more restrictions on
manufacturing and transportation since yesterday, aside from body temp
checkpoints.

It is basically contained in China outside Wuhan already. Wuhan will join in a
few weeks.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/pRD7w](https://archive.md/pRD7w)

------
scrumbledober
Amazon has not done anything to combat counterfeit items on their website
before now, I don't expect much from them now.

~~~
jrockway
Do we know that for a fact? Maybe they actually block 99.9% of counterfeits,
but the volume is tremendous.

~~~
ADSSDA
Whatever they're doing it's not working. Nearly every "Amazon's Choice" that I
see in search results is some counterfeit Chinese garbage.

------
roenxi
It'd be nice if everything were labeled honestly; but people get riled up
around the wrong thing. High prices are necessary to get more production of
these things quickly; and honestly the public buying counterfeit masks to
leave real supplies for the hospitals is probably a win for us all.

The only issue here is deceptive advertising.

------
ezoe
Who trust Amazon and its marketplace on general goods nowaday? The only thing
I can trust from Amazon is used foreign books.

~~~
reaperducer
_Who trust Amazon and its marketplace on general goods nowaday?_

About 95% of the people in the world who are not on HN.

Average Joe Lunchbucket assumes that the products he buys through Amazon are
vetted by Amazon, like at his local store. He has no idea that the stuff he
buys are from a thousand different randos.

~~~
j88439h84
Your local store vets products?

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Wal-Mart is notorious for their knowledge of the supply chain for their
vendors, whether the vendor wanted to give up that information or not. On the
other side of things, I've seen some pretty questionable items in dollar
stores including food products that weren't labeled for the US market. The gas
station near my house buys some of their products from Costco and breaks the
packs into individual items, complete with "Not labeled for individual sale"
warnings. Hopefully Costco is like Wal-Mart when it comes to supply chain
knowledge.

~~~
angelbar
"Not labeled for individual sale" has any legality?

~~~
sethhochberg
Generally thats exactly what it means - the individual products don't have
nutrition info or something else which would be required for them to be sold
by themselves by law.

------
rad_gruchalski
Amazon Germany. Before the panic started, I was looking to buy sanitizers for
the office. 4x500ml was €120 at Amazon from third party seller, with delivery
time 2 to 3 weeks. The same seller, directly on their website, ... €50,
delivered 3 days later. Amazing.

~~~
parliament32
€50 for 2L is still absolutely insane for something that costs pennies per
liter to make.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
Considering the times we’re in.

------
Gustomaximus
Good to see Amazon doing this but ultimately this should be a government
driven initiative. E.g. Japan has put a fine and up to 1 year jail sentence
for profiteering on masks and similar.

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/10/national/japan-...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/10/national/japan-
punish-reselling-face-masks/)

------
oldgradstudent
They should try whatever methods were so effective in preventing Chromecast
from being sold of the platform.

------
calmworm
Thanks for reminding me to cancel Prime.

~~~
calmworm
Since this was downvoted, I'm sure because it didn't add to the conversation,
I'll add some more.

This has been happening for multiple years with Amazon seemingly doing little
about it. I've faced it from both sides, selling and buying.

Selling: Counterfeiters were selling our item. We knew this because we were
the manufacturer and only seller of the item. If we weren't selling it, it was
counterfeit. In order to prove this, Amazon made us buy the counterfeit item
from the other seller, and send in images to prove it. So when we did this,
the counterfeit sellers caught on at some point and started simply shipping us
random crap instead of the fake product. Then we had NO evidence they were
selling a counterfeit item - we didn't have the photos to prove it.

Buying: Recently in the market for a bike air pump, I search Amazon and see no
less than 50 listings, all having 4.5-5 star reviews, all the same bike pump,
all off-brand sounding names, but all identical. It made it impossible to find
what I need/want and also made it impossible to know whether or not these bike
pumps were really worth anything at all. I didn't buy anything from Amazon,
and that experience has made me question all my purchases from Amazon since.
So, as mentioned above, I had meant to cancel my Prime membership - this post
reminded me to do so.

------
semerda
Few days before the corona virus chaos started, we ordered a pack of PURELL
hand sanitizers from Amazon. Then the chaos started and we wondered what will
happen to our package. We tracked the package move around, then delays, then
messages about possible delays, then it just never arrived.

I hit up Amazon.com and saw all these crazy markups on hand sanitizer. Eeek!
But, I found 1 that was $10. Also from PURELL. Looked like the ones used at
gyms. So I added it to my cart. Continued browsing and at checkout it got
automatically removed. Subsequent searches revealed just the over priced hand
sanitizers. Arrr!

Thanks Amazon!

~~~
enra
I ordered a pack of the amazon bran hand sanitizer on Feb 26, and was
wondering if this will happen. Luckily I didn't the order arrived 2 days
later. During that week time amazon algo had already increased the price from
$12 to $20 per pack and next week when I checked everything was sold out.

