First of all, we know that Amazon’s free and no-questions-asked policy of returning its products is and will always be the best when it comes to e-commerce because it paved the way for everyone to replicate the same and while many have stopped this policy, the company is still doing it and they know that their customer base love it. However, we know that there are groups that have exploited and will exploit the free returns and refund policy from Amazon. For the first time ever, Amazon has sued a group named REKK for allegedly hacking its system to create fake return and then get refund for the same without actually returning the product.
We know that you must be wondering how this is even possible because the delivery partners take returns and then only Amazon approves the refund. But the scam here is that this group bribed delivery partners from Amazon to create fake returns and approve them so that the refund can be processed. Bloomberg reports that “Amazon’s lawsuit accuses REKK of using social engineering and phishing attacks on Amazon fulfillment employees or bribes to get millions of dollars in refunds without actually sending the items back”.
“REKK advertised its services to shoppers in a Telegram channel with 30,000 followers, taking payment as a part of the item’s original price and then manipulating the system to log a return, which never happened. One example from the lawsuit shows how the scheme worked: one defendant, Andrew Ling, ordered five iPads and then worked with REKK to get a refund. In this case, REKK allegedly used a phishing attack against a fulfillment center employee to mark the iPad returns as received in Amazon’s systems”, The Verge reports.
Amazon does not hide the fact that their own employees were also involved in this as it is reported that “one Amazon employee bribed by REKK approved 76 product returns worth over $100,000 in return for $3,500, while another was paid $5,000 to approve 56 fake returns worth over $75,000”. Amazon filed the case on Thursday in US District Court and “it names more than two dozen people from the US, the UK, Canada, Greece, Lithuania, and the Netherlands”.
