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Customers Creating Fake Amazon Pages To Get Cheap Electronics At Walmart
turkeydance writes People are reportedly creating fake Amazon pages to show fake prices on electronics and other items. In the most heavily publicized cases, Walmart was reportedly duped into selling $400 PlayStation 4 consoles for under $100. From the article: "The company announced on Nov. 13 that it would price-match select online retailers, including Amazon.com. However, any Amazon member with a registered selling account can create authentic looking pages and list items 'for sale' online. Consumers need only take a screen capture of the page and show it to a cashier at checkout in order to request the price match."
I used to work a second job at Walmart, in the electronics department. At least once a month I would get somebody trying to buy a game system with a bogus coupon. Most of them were $100 off of a Nintendo DS.
There was a story a few years ago about Best Buy rigging their in-store computers to show a higher price than their website to the public. It was a shadow system that looked like the external site, but gave different prices. Its purpose was to trick people who look something up online, see the price, go to the store, find it at a different price, and complain. The salesman would pull it up on their "website" like the customer says they did, show the customer that they were mistaken, the marked price is the price it shows, and the customer was faced with either walking out or accepting the higher price. Smartphones were the fall of this practice since customers no longer had to use the Best Buy systems to look things up. They could whip out their iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/(cringe)Windows and look it up for themselves. When some of these people questioned the sales person's answer and independently verified the info on the spot, which didn't match, all hell broke loose.
They took a $10 off coupon and added a zero?
(My understanding is that coupons have barcodes to actually check the validity of the offer in a database or something.)
Nope, manufactured their own coupon. It's not hard to do, it used to be a frequent thing on the various underbellies of the internet. And I'm not talking about chans, a bit deeper. The barcode scan is looking to see if it's valid, again--easy to make it work as well. One of the big ones back in '08/09 was for baby formula, people use it to cut other drugs--and would use mules to buy the stuff from walmart, costco, walgreens, etc usually at $200-800 at a time.
Om, nomnomnom...