Slashdot Mirror
Family Sues Amazon After Counterfeit Hoverboard Catches Fire, Destroys Home (wtsp.com)
Three weeks after unboxing a hoverboard, it burst into flames. But is Amazon partly to blame?
tripleevenfall quotes The Tennessean:
A Nashville family whose $1 million home was destroyed earlier this year in a fire caused by a hoverboard toy is suing Amazon saying the retail giant knowingly sold a dangerous product...
The lawsuit says the seller of the hoverboard listed online, "W-Deals," is a sham organization that is registered to an apartment in New York City that has not responded to requests from lawyers in the case. It alleges the family was sold a counterfeit product from China instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon . It says Tennessee product liability law holds a seller responsible if the manufacturer cannot be found.
I'm not sure that's really an improvement...??
Amazon wasn't the seller. Their opening of their platform to 3rd parties is what almost made me stop using them. If I want to buy from Joe Schmoe there is ebay. Amazon should not allow 3rd party sellers, plain and simple
Amazon is full of counterfeit Chinese goods with no validation of their fitness for purpose. They need to be held accountable to protect US consumers - otherwise they are enabling Chinese manufacturers to bypass US consumer law and safety regulations.
... at trial and all of the appeals, I wonder if they will just pull out of Tennessee entirely?
More likely, they will lobby either the Tennessee legislature to change the law or lobby Congress to make sure state laws like this don't apply to them unless they "have a physical presence" in that state, then they will make sure they don't have such a presence in Tennessee so the law won't apply to them in the future.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They likely have home insurance and will be reimbursed. If anyone has a right to sue Amazon it will be the insurance company, to reclaim the money they paid out to the homeowners.
I don't even think they'll stop letting people sell through them. They're in it for the long game, which is completely dominating all retail. This isn't even a bump in the road.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Insurance companies fight you tooth and nail, often for years. Especially on a big payout like a burnt down house. Every year they delay inflation bites into the payout and you get more desperate to take whatever they'll give.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
amzon may have to stop selling in Tennessee after they pay out for this.
China has a long history of selling dangerous products. From poisonous pet food to exploding electronics. When confronted, the Chinese government's response is "what a shame, we'll do something". The "something" is to rename the company and do it all over again.
Why the fuck does China have most favored nation trade status?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Nooo, instead of paying for home insurance, they instead go all sue happy.
The only person they need to sue is themselves for buying the stupid thing when it is WIDELY KNOWN they are not safe and there is a national ban on them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
THAT's why they're suing. PAY DAY!
The lawsuit says the seller of the hoverboard listed online, "W-Deals," is a sham organization that is registered to an apartment in New York City that has not responded to requests from lawyers in the case.
combines with this:
It says Tennessee product liability law holds a seller responsible if the manufacturer cannot be found.
to make liability for Amazon. They still wouldn't be the seller, just because the original seller can't be found. It sounds like they should still be trying to go after "W-Deals".
1) They sneak in 3rd party resellers. Lots of other sites allow 3rd party resellers - Newegg, Sears (almost entirely 3rd party), eBay, etc. For the most part, they make it damn obvious you're buying from a 3rd party, not from the site itself. Most of them even let you exclude 3rd party sellers with a single click. Amazon shows the seller name in easily-missed text in the middle of the product listing - very easy to miss. It's easier if you have Prime, as many 3rd parties don't support Prime. So you'll search for a product, click on one listed with Prime shipping, and when you go to put it in your cart you notice it doesn't have Prime shipping because Amazon has silently substituted a 3rd party seller. And I haven't been able to find an option on Amazon to exclude 3rd parties.
2) Contamination of their supply chain. This is based on hearsay, although my personal experience seems to support it. Have you noticed the "Sold by xxx and shipped by Amazon" tags on some products? The way that works is the 3rd party seller sends their inventory to Amazon. Amazon stores it in their warehouse, and when you buy from that seller, Amazon ships it for them. The problem is Amazon seems to co-mingle 3rd party inventory with their own. So if you order a SD card, Amazon's computers grab the nearest available SD card whether it be from Amazon's inventory or a 3rd party's inventory. Your go through the effort of making sure you're buying the SD card with Amazon as the seller to try to get a genuine one, and you still end up getting a fake sent to Amazon by ConterfeitsRUs. I've basically given up buying commonly counterfeited items like flash drives from Amazon. I pay the extra to get them from a local retailer whose supply chain hasn't been contaminated this way.
They paid over $1M for their home, and couldn't pay another $20K to retrofit sprinklers?
if you don't like it you need to bring back more manufacture (not the jobs, Americans make too much, it'll mostly be robots). And if you're gonna bring back manufacturing you're either going to have the kind of pollution that gives people cancer or a large and powerful gov't apparatus that monitors and punishes factories for polluting. Neither of which is palatable to Americans.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
i have seen some inferior imported products that are normally found on ebay creep their way in to amazon, what happened to the FTC making sure products are safe? when something like this family's house burning down goes ignored or thrown out of court it sets a bad precident that encourages more faulty products to be sold in the USA, and if you dont agree i bet you will when it is your property thats destroyed because of poor quality products self destructing and taking out your entire home
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
This is why we can't have nice things
we should be able to go after the companies that SELL CHinese products. Walmart, Sears, K-Mart, Target, etc should all be held responsible for selling garbage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
" ... It says Tennessee product liability law holds a seller responsible if the manufacturer cannot be found. ..."
Assuming that's true and complete, Amazon, who handles the cash for the transaction, is on the hook.
Regardless, when you sue someone, you sue everybody who even looked like they were near the situation in question, to get at the deep pockets when the losers are found to be jointly and severally liable. It's up to each of them to convince the courts they should be dropped from the suit. So, regardless of what happens next, Amazon is going to be chased in this case.
Coverage vs payout are very different things. I've used car insurance twice and tried to use home once. The two car companies cost me several grand for two cases where I was rear ended and for the home owners it was made clear to me I wouldn't get close to my deductible.
I know one guy who made out OK within insurance, but for the stupidest reason imaginable. He's a dummy and bought one of those $3000 rent-to-own laptops (e.g. a $600 laptop that they mark up to $3k because if they can't legally charge that much interest). It got stolen and the insurance company called the rent to own place to get the 'value' of the laptop, which of course was $3k. He used the money to buy a decent laptop for real.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I had to look up what they were talking about in the article. It's not a hoverboard (obviously). It's one of those sideways-scooter balancey-board thingies that kids have these days.
Not sure why they are talking about a hoverboard.
Amazon = eBay, only sometimes even worse.
This is what I say to everyone. I don't even bother trying to explain anymore, for most people it's just better to understand Amazon that way. Specially for people who never bought there and still have this image that everything sold at Amazon comes directly from Amazon and are all guaranteed by the company.
Of course, if Amazon wanted to stay away from all these shitty products, they would've created the Marketplace as a separate thing. But it's obvious that they wanted people not to notice the difference. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see the results of this lawsuit. The difference between Amazon and eBay is that Amazon used to be it's own store, and it still sells their own products. eBay always was about providing a venue for people to make business. It's well understood that you are not buying anything directly from eBay.
And Amazon also does a shit job of letting costumers know about the reputation and quality of products sold by their shitty selected vendors. Selected as in who pays a bigger part of their scam, I imagine.
Here's the funny thing: in the past 4 years or so that I've been shopping on eBay, I've never had a single problem with the products, including external batteries, lots of electronics with LiPo batteries in them, and whatnot. And just in case it happens, I also got a fireproof pouch from eBay to keep stuff in it. xD
Amazon, on the other hand, I had problems with fake SD cards, they now have implemented some weird system of pre-charging import taxes that are often waaay above the actual value. Sometimes they return a small percentage of it (like 3 months after the fact), often times they simply don't. And most of the products still cannot be sent to my country anyways, so there's that.
The only advantage Amazon offers to people living in my country is that their products arrive generally faster than stuff bought from chinese stores on eBay... but that's only because they use companies like Fedex, UPS, DHL and the like that are all basically running a scam here in Brazil. They will rip you off here when it comes to charging tax, extra costs, and storage fees you never asked for. They basically hold your products hostage. On average, I'll pay 1.5x to 2x the tax costs, which usually sums up to 110%+ the product value plus shipping, when a product comes from Amazon. It arrives in a week or so. From eBay, it comes via regular mail, so I pay whatever the government actually charges, which ranges from 60% to 100%. It can take anywhere from a month to 6 months because it depends on the goodwill of governmental agencies, but it gets here, and there's no extra bullshit charges.
And this is why I haven't been buying anything from Amazon. The last thing they had going for them was reliability for countries like mine.
Of course, Amazon couldn't care less about the little money coming from countries like Brazil... it's cheap change for them and they have demonstrated it well enough with their horrible policies regarding overseas shipping. But yeah, the way Amazon incorporated marketplace into their main store and started selling all these products that seem to have an even worse quality control than eBay, it's quite telling.
We keep requiring more and more fire-protection gadgetry, but fail to address the issue: we're using flammable materials.
Fix that, and the sprinklers become pointless. It's time to stop being stupid.
Commercial construction normally uses metal studs. Do that. Metal roofs are commonly available; the better residential construction already uses them. Exterior walls can be concrete block (standard in Florida) or poured concrete (common for McMansions in Florida). Tile floors don't burn. Traditional cabinets were steel; do that or maybe glass. Metal doors are widely available.
The end result: no part of the house can sustain fire, and almost none can even melt in a normal flame.
They are not hoverboards they do not hover what so ever that ride on wheels firmly planted on the ground. Call them motorized skateboards, that more closer to what they actually are.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Didn't Amazon offer to refund all Hoverboard purchases? If this customer didn't take advantage of it. It's their own damn fault. People knew the risk these Hoverboards pose.
A 115 comments and no one has yet mentioned that the device plugged into the AC outlet and it did not have a UL listing.
The problem here is that UL listings (or equivalent) are voluntary and there is no legal requirement for a product to carry one. But there is a common sense requirement. Where were the parents when it came to looking at the product for safety approvals? It was free to ship it back to Amazon if they didn't like what they saw.
And I really believe this "It alleges the family was sold a counterfeit product from China instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon" So they were sophisticated enough to have researched that Samsung Lion batteries were better, but they were not sophisticated enough to notice the lack of a UL listing.
And who was being counterfeited?
Sadly, all products using the name "Hoverboard" are counterfeit at this point in time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
$1 million home was destroyed
You'd think someone with so much money could have afforded a fire alarm. Then again I guess their house was probably so disproportionately big or underutilised that no one was there to hear it.
On July 20, 2015, eBay spun off PayPal.
This looks like a case trying to milk Amazon, for $30m, when the home itself was valued at $1m. The cost to rebuild the home, and some of its belongings may not cross $5m.
Still, to try running a counterfeit product knowing it was counterfeit was just dangerous.
"The lawsuit seeks $30 million in damages and asks a jury to weigh additional financial penalties against the retailer. Nashville Fire Department officials said a hoverboard caught fire on Jan. 9, destroying a 4,000-square-foot $1 million home on Radcliff Drive, near Edwin Warner Park."
... a $900,000 1,100sq.ft. townhouse burned down with all our crap in it, we'd live in a hotel or rent something while it was rebuilt, make a bunch of trips to Ikea and other places and use this as the excuse we've wanted for a while to remodel the kitchen.
Hmm... ok... from the pictures... I'm curious what justified a house with such a miserable kitchen to be worth a million bucks, but let's assume that a 4000ft.sq. house is worth something. It's Tennessee so the people there are part of the weird bible belt. There's probably a window with an impression of Jesus on it that got destroyed in the fire or something like that.
I'll assume that the $1,000,000 home already has fire insurance on it. I'll also assume that if you can afford to live in that house, then you've paid the deductible and the house as well as the sparkly Chinese crap like hoverboards filling the garage and everything else was paid for. This is why you have fire insurance to begin with. Even if Amazon pays the $30 million, the rest of the stuff is already covered by insurance either way. I'm sure if you have an insured million dollar home, you also have health insurance with a low deductible that covered medical and psychiatric treatment. Altogether, the cost of this to the family is likely in the ballpark of $20-$30,000 spread over a period of 5 years. That's peanuts.
So, now they want to sue Amazon for $30 million because of a fire they caused by buying a plastic piece of crap meant to move chubby children around those few times their chubby little asses may actually otherwise be used to peddle a bicycle or make scissor actions with their legs while standing causing them to move towards their destination.
"In addition to costly losses of all of the family's possessions, the lawsuit says the family should be compensated for physical injuries and emotional distress."
Their physical injuries are covered.
Emotional distress.... holy what the fucking fuck. Emotional distress. If my house
If you're the kind of person that can actually afford to live in a house that costs $1,000,000 you're someone who should know how to adapt and see challenges not problems... and your family should be too.
So... what in the name of hell justifies paying $30,000,000 for this? Did they try to bring a case against the company who sold it and when they couldn't find that company, they immediately said "JACKPOT!!!!". There are probably 10,000 lawyers all over America screaming "I'll take the case... If it takes 10 years and 12 appeals, I'll take the case... 50%!!!!"
More and more there are dishonest sales through Amazon, in my experience.
That damages Amazon's reputation.
First Amazon is not the seller. A strong analogy would be a flea market in which a seller rents a booth and sells what he has. The flea market does not have access to the product or any need to see, know about, or understand anything about the product. The flea market only profits form renting the booth or maybe also operating a hot dog stand, but makes no money from the seller, selling the product. Imagine the issues if a flea market had to evaluate every item sold by the vendors. How could Amazon exist if they had to evaluate every new or used product sold on Amazon? I think some lawyer is simply taking these peoples money.
Whatever happened to taking personal responsibility for the consequences of your own stupid choices? People buy the cheapest junk they can find so they can save a few bucks. Then they act surprised when they find it's made from cheap parts and shitty overseas workmanship. I bet the same people complain when the government intervenes by banning these shitty products for peoples own safety.
Is it the factories fault for undercutting their competition to manufacture the cheapest product? Is it the workers faults for lack of skill, or not caring because they are overworked and underpaid? Is it the merchants fault for selling the cheapest product people are actually willing to buy? Is it Amazons fault for letting merchants sell low quality products? Or is it the consumers fault for buying the cheapest crap possible? They are all at fault, but the manufacturer wouldn't make, the merchants wouldn't trade, and Amazon wouldn't sell the product if consumers didn't ultimately buy it.
Or just sue the company with the most money.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
It isn't a hoverboard!!!! Get it right in the reporting! It's probably also not Amazon's fault, it's probably the seller's. Amazon provides a marketplace for a lot of sellers that aren't Amazon, and certainly cannot vet every offering of every merchant any more than eBay could. and..IT'S NOT A HOVERBOARD!
It alleges the family was sold a counterfeit product from China instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon.
The smoldering remains of their million-dollar home seem to indicate otherwise...