Amazon Responds After Third-Party Sellers Put Bootleg Games on Its Store (venturebeat.com)

Jeff Grubb, reporting for VentureBeat: Over the weekend, some thrifty gamers spotted a deal on Amazon. A downloadable version of the tough strategy survival sim Frostpunk was available on the Amazon Marketplace from a third-party seller for $3, which is a 90 percent discount from the standard $30 price. But after looking into the game, some customers who dropped the three bucks had some questions. For example, why does the metadata for this version of Frostpunk refer to the DRM-free version that people can buy from GOG. [...] So I reached out to Amazon, and it provided the following statement from a company spokesperson: "Our customers trust that when they make a purchase through Amazon's store --either directly from Amazon or from its third-party sellers -- they will receive authentic products, and we take any claims that endanger that trust seriously. We strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit products, and these games have been removed." That's all it would say on this.

Comments

The games have been removed.

[olsmeister]

And the sellers have been removed as well?

Re:Amazon doesn't do quality control

[lgw]

Target doesn't allow third party sellers. You don't have these problems if you stick to stuff "sold by Amazon", but everything else is sort of a flea market. IMO, fraudulent sellers in general are a big problem. If the Chinese seller ships you anything you're better than average.

Amazon needs to get on top of obvious patterns of fraud. If I can recognize that a seller is likely fraudulent, so can an algorithm. Some of the problems are more subtle and require a specialist to spot bad products (e.g., hard drives or camera lenses), but Amazon can hire those.