An employee was caught reselling company goods!

A group of people took risks and cross-border e-commerce fraud was rampant.

As a place where interests gather, cross-border circles are full of various ways to make money. Of course, most practitioners follow white hat methods, but black hat methods and even yellow hat methods are also common. In order to gain more profits, some people do not hesitate to steal the company's goods for sale. Whether it is the boss of a company on Amazon, Walmart platform, or the boss of a company on Temu platform, they have all encountered this situation.

Industry insiders commented that this is like "starting a business at zero cost" with huge profits. Observations found that some fraud gangs continued with a similar strategy and even took advantage of the relatively relaxed return policies of e-commerce platforms to specialize in the business of "refunding but not returning goods, and reselling goods purchased for zero yuan", causing heavy losses to both sellers and platforms.

An employee was caught reselling company goods

In today's cross-border e-commerce circle, the phenomenon of "employees running their own stores part-time while at work" is no longer a new thing. Many employees have stated that they have always adhered to the moral bottom line and do not sell the same products as the company, nor do they secretly operate their own stores during working hours. Some employees, on the contrary, use company resources to seek personal gain for their own stores. In addition to the previously exposed phenomena of "secretly selling company products at night" and "selling products exactly the same as the company's", there are actually many cases of reselling company goods.

An insider said that an Amazon colleague had encountered this phenomenon. An employee took advantage of his position and sent the company's goods directly to his own store, and then told his boss that the goods were lost ...

Coincidentally, another cross-border person also said that this phenomenon existed in the Amazon company where he worked before. Employees resold the company's goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars before they were discovered by their boss.

In addition to the Amazon platform, this chaos also occurs in some companies that mainly operate e-commerce platforms such as Walmart and Temu.

The seller Xiao Zhang (pseudonym) said that he was working on the Temu platform and had personally experienced the incident of "employees sending the company's goods to their own stores". Until one time the warehouse discovered that the label of the returned goods was different from the name of their own company's store. After becoming suspicious and conducting a detailed investigation, the employee's actions were exposed. In the end, the employee paid the price for his actions and was arrested.

" Cross-border e-commerce business involves numerous links, and every tiny detail may be manipulated by others . It is difficult to guard against human nature , and the boss as the helmsman also needs to establish a sound system to minimize potential operational risks as much as possible. " said an industry insider.

Fraud rings exploit return policy loopholes, costing retailers billions

Some cross-border e-commerce companies have their goods "stolen" by employees with ulterior motives, and are also "harmed" by other people.

I believe that many bosses have been "cheated" by unscrupulous consumers. As we all know, the platform's return policy is often biased towards buyers. According to the policy, consumers can sometimes return products for free without restrictions, and sometimes they can get products without spending a penny. Some consumers saw this loophole and after purchasing the goods, they applied for return or exchange for products on the grounds of "product quality problems" even though the products had obviously been used for a long time. Most of the outrageous applications were eventually approved.

Some fraud gangs saw the "business opportunity" and used it to make long-term profits.

According to insiders, fraud gangs took advantage of the platform's refund service "loopholes" and pretended to be consumers to buy sellers' products. They then applied for a refund but did not return the products. After the application was approved, they either used the free products themselves or resold them on major sales channels such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and independent websites. They made a lot of money without any effort! The victimized merchants became their channels for purchasing free products...

A Walmart seller said that after being targeted by a fraud team, the return rate of many products in the store soared, and some products even reached 50%. Only two of its brands were resold by more than 100 eBay stores, and the final loss was roughly estimated to be tens of millions...

As a result, not only merchants are suffering, but related e-commerce platforms are also facing certain losses. CNBC reported that refund fraud groups are estimated to have caused billions of dollars in losses to retailers such as Amazon.

Noah Page is a warehouse worker in Amazon FBA. He took advantage of his position to mark a consumer's order as returned in Amazon's internal system, but in fact the product was not actually returned to the FBA warehouse. Noah Page's "casual" move earned him a considerable amount of money.

It is understood that Noah Page did not know the consumer, but knew that the consumer was a member of the Rekk organization. Rekk is a large refund fraud organization that targets major online retailers such as Amazon, Apple, Nike, and eBay. By bribing employees inside platforms such as Amazon, they can buy various products for free, such as laptops, iPhones, clothes, shoes, etc. Data shows that they pay thousands of dollars in bribes to Amazon employees every day.

In December 2023, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Noah Page and 47 other people allegedly associated with Rekk, accusing them of stealing millions of dollars worth of products in a refund fraud operation.

According to another lawsuit filed by Amazon in the same year, a 10-person fraud gang caused Amazon to suffer losses of more than $700,000.

There are many refund fraud organizations, which usually have the following operation process: shoppers buy products online and send order information to groups such as Rekk, which then pretends to be consumers and requests refunds. Amazon refunds the money to consumers, and consumers usually pay 15% to 30% of the refund amount to the refund fraud organization. In the end, consumers buy products at a very large discount. In order to facilitate their "actions", refund fraud organizations pay a certain amount of money to colluding employees in retailers such as Amazon.

In order to avoid platform review, refund fraud organizations often use methods such as "lying that the package has never been received", "mailing empty packages or packages full of garbage", and "bribing postal and other logistics staff to manipulate package information to make retailers think that the goods cannot be delivered or the delivery address is wrong".

They operate like a business, cataloging orders, creating false shipping labels, developing operating guidelines for reselling goods, and even providing related refund fraud services. On a certain encrypted messaging social media, searching for keywords reveals that each related topic has thousands of followers.

As this phenomenon becomes more and more common, major retailers have begun to take action to rectify it, such as using professional teams and machine detection to prevent refund fraud, requiring delivery personnel to take photos after the package arrives at the destination, or monitoring the number of returns from consumers. If the returns are too frequent, the platform will blacklist them.

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