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Customers Creating Fake Amazon Pages To Get Cheap Electronics At Walmart

Posted by samzenpus on from the match-this-price dept.

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."

4 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Scam's Already Been Stopped by jratcliffe · · Score: 5, Informative

    WalMart's already wised up, and changed the rules. Now it only applies to items on Amazon SOLD BY Amazon. No more marketplace sellers.

    http://consumerist.com/2014/11...

  2. Re:Genius. by vakuona · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is fraud if you create a web page purely to deceive Walmart into giving you a discount on a product you had no intention of selling for the price.

    It is deeply dishonest, and there is no other excuse for that behaviour.

  3. Dumb-asses! (Fry's is not so dumb...) by jtara · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fry's has a simple system for this.

    1. You tell the sales associate (it's not done at the checkout counter) what site you want them to match.

    2. They check it against the list of sites that they are willing to match.

    3. They go to the site on their computer, and look it up.

    4. They print an invoice that you take to the counter with your purchase.

    5. BTW, they have incentive to do this, because they get something any time they print an invoice. I don't know the details, but it would be dumb for Fry's to withhold whatever the reward is just because it was a price match. So, anytime somebody at Fry's is actually helpful (rare, I know, but sometimes happens...) don't balk when they want to print an invoice!

    You don't get away with just showing them your screen.

    You can show them a screen, from the web or some price-search app, and then they will go to their own browser to look it up.

    1. Re:Dumb-asses! (Fry's is not so dumb...) by dunkindave · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.