After getting hit with dozens of "delivered" but "never received" A to Z claims in favor of the customer I started to notice a pattern as the claims were rampant within the last 3 months. First piece of the puzzle was that all of the listings that were hit with this SCAM in particular all involved our cologne and aftershave items, particularly those sold in 3 bottle bundles. Purchases were always made by consumers that had never before purchased from us, and the orders were always shipping to a name other than the name of the person who made the purchase. The other pattern that quickly emerged, was unfortunately one that came too late as it was just as we were being hit with the A to Z claim. All messages from these bogus buyers were either identical or very similar, especially this message in particular:

what's wrong with my order? i checked everywhere it may have been delivered, but the result is nothing I found out. i don't want to wait anymore, Please refund. i will appreciate your service here!

The messages were all EXACTLY like this, with punctuation and grammatical issues, so it was hard to miss. However, I still couldn't figure out how the SCAM was working and unfortunately, I was not getting any help from Amazon Seller Central Support. After, hours and hours of frustration with Amazon associates who offered no help other than lip service and faked sympathy for how frustrating this must be, I started doing so of my own investigating. I was able to find many of the recipients' phone numbers through google and decided to give them a call about these orders. I contacted several of these recipients and let them know that I was calling them regarding their "missing package" of cologne/aftershave.

Much to my shock, each and every one of them emphatically denied making a claim that they never received the package and said they HAD indeed RECEIVED their package, and early or on time. More importantly, they all stated that they either did NOT even have Amazon accounts or that they had not purchased their cologne/aftershave on Amazon but elsewhere, such as Walmart.com.

So there you have it. In a nutshell, the SCAM buyer lists a popular Amazon item on Walmart, eBay, or some other online platform at a lower price than offered on Amazon to steal the business from Amazon. SCAM buyer creates these listings on other platforms although they do not have any inventory to sell. Innocent buyer shops on Walmart, eBay, etc as the scammer is offering the items at a lower price than on Amazon by the real vendor. Innocent buyer places their order on platform X, scammer takes that order from their bogus listing and purchases the items from us on Amazon. Amazon scammer has us ship the order directly to the honest customer who receives their platform X order as expected but fulfilled by an Amazon vendor. Scam buyer makes fake A to Z claiming they never got their order. They collect their money from their sale of our package, Amazon refunds the scammer their money from us and another organized crime scam has been revealed on Amazon.

Now we are left cancelling all orders of cologne and aftershave to first time buyers that meet this scammer criteria as we can no longer take the financial losses. Clearly Amazon is either oblivious or just doesn't care as I have spent countless hours and days since October telling them about this and here we are in January with it still going on. If I can dig through this and figure it out, why can't Amazon figure it out? Who is protecting vendors? As a vendor, I can't even sell with confidence anymore unless its a repeat customer with no previous issues. Shameful SCAmazon.