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Alibaba Face Off With Chinese Regulator Over Fake Products
hackingbear writes China's State Administration of Industry and Commerce on Wednesday issued a scathing report against one of the country's biggest stars, accusing e-commerce giant Alibaba of failing to do enough to prevent fake goods from being sold on its websites. SAIC said Alibaba allowed "illegal advertising" that misled consumers with false claims about low prices and other details. It claims some Alibaba employees took bribes and the company failed to deal effectively with fraud. Alibaba fired back with charges of bias and misconduct by accusing the SAIC official in charge of Internet monitoring, Liu Hongliang, of unspecified "procedural misconduct" and warned it will file a formal complaint. Such public defiance is almost unheard of in China. Apparently, Alibaba has long attained the too big to fail status.
I bought a 32GB USB 3.0 stick from Aliexpress. It said "Toshiba" on it, even though linux would show the vendor as generic. The drive showed 32GB free space. However, it only had 6GB of actual space on it (there are utilities out there that will actually test this). I gave the item 1 star, the lowest possible rating. For the next few days, the vendor was calling my house (yes, I was stupid to put my real phone number on my order - silly me, thinking that I was dealing with professionals, not thugs) at 3am, threatening to continue calling at that time until I changed my review to 5 stars. Only 5 stars would be "a fair review", as they were so keen to say.
So I just unplugged my phone at night for the next month and deleted my Aliexpress account. I had provided Aliexpress' abuse department with emailed threats that I received and voice calls, but they never even replied. Screw them. I'll stick with Ebay, which has a functioning feedback system, or something else that is legit.