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Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback – Slashdot

六月 29, 2018 - MorningStar

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Amazon's Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback - Slashdot Amazon's Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback - Slashdot

Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback (nytimes.com) 116

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Many booksellers on Amazon strive to sell their wares as cheaply as possible. That, after all, is usually how you make a sale in a competitive marketplace. Other merchants favor a counterintuitive approach: Mark the price up to the moon. From a report: “Zowie,” the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, “One Snowy Knight,” being offered for four figures. One was going for “$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping,” she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed. “How many really sell at that price? Are they just hoping to snooker some poor soul?” Ms. Macgillivray wrote in an email. She noted that her blog had gotten an explosion in traffic from Russia. “Maybe Russian hackers do this in their spare time, making money on the side,” she said.

Amazon is by far the largest marketplace for both new and used books the world has ever seen, and is also one of the most inscrutable. The retailer directly sells some books, while others are sold by third parties. The wild pricing happens with the latter. […] Third-party sellers, Guru Hariharan, chief executive of Boomerang Commerce, said, come in all shapes and sizes — from well-respected national brands that are trying to maintain some independence from Amazon to entrepreneurial individuals who use Amazon’s marketplace as an arbitrage opportunity. These sellers list products they have access to, adjusting price and inventory to drive profits. Then there are the wild pricing specialists, who sell both new and secondhand copies.

“By making these books appear scarce, they are trying to justify the exorbitant price that they have set,” said Mr. Hariharan, who led a team responsible for 15,000 online sellers when he worked at Amazon a decade ago. […] A decade ago, Elisabeth Petry wrote a tribute to her mother, the renowned novelist Ann Petry. “At Home Inside,” published by the University of Mississippi Press, is now out of print, but late last week secondhand copies were for sale on Amazon. A discarded library copy was $1,900. One seller offered two copies, each for $1,967, although only one was described as “Nice!” All these were a bargain compared with the copy that cost $2,464.

Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback

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  • by mccrew ( 62494 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:01PM (#56959324)

    It’s money laundering.

    Pay lots of money for an item of very little value. Money becomes legit.

    • Also cocaine.

      Somebody once claimed that it was a way for booksellers to maintain a listing without needing to be able to find the book right now, but cocaine.

      • I remember many years ago reading about (probably on The Daily WTF forums) where certain out-of-print books were going for prices that were not only absurd, but kept climbing, to six figure prices and maybe even seven, then every now and then they would reset. It was thought that some sellers were using a “that other guy plus a few percent” algorithm, and so was “that other guy”.

        But this seems to be a different modus operandi, and that Krebs idea is much more likely here. It is possible that the constant r

      • That was very interesting.
        Thanks.

    • by swb ( 14022 ) writes:

      That’s great, but every time I try to buy stuff online by shoving bundles of cash into the monitor I just make a mess. They always want me to use electronic money.

      Isn’t the very big step 1 in money laundering actually converting cash into some kind of electronic asset (bank deposit, etc) FIRST? And its less easy than it sounds to deposit $9,999.99 into a bank account without some plausible and well-understood business behind the account.

      I think if you have a reliable way of turning cash into bank balances

      • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:20PM (#56959436)

        Could be that:
        (1) Buying the “book” actually gets you drugs or some other illegal item. It’s not money laundering in the sense of cash — it’s giving people the ability to pay for illegal items using electronic payments that appear legit.
        (2) The “book” is being bought with stolen credit card numbers and the seller is pocketing the money.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward writes:

            Depends. If you are stealing credit cards and identities you can open a bank account in someone else’s name.
            Withdraw cash as it comes in. When you get charge backs the account goes to negative balance and you create a new account in a different name. The identity theft victim is stuck with the debt.
            The scam company is not going to be using real identities and addresses with amazon in all likelihood, so they can easily create a new scam company when one is busted.
            I never set one of those up, but depending on

      • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:21PM (#56959446) Journal

        If you have stolen cash, laundering it starts with the cash.
        If you are in possession of a stolen bank account, or stolen credit card number, you want to turn that credit card number into money. You can’t necessarily go make a withdrawal from a bank account because they’ll want to see ID, but you can use a bank account to pay for something online without ID.

        • by houghi ( 78078 ) writes:

          You not only need an ID, you also need the card. After you have gotten a card number via a “Microsoft Anti Virus Call” you do not have the card.

      • by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:21PM (#56959448)

        The grocery store turns cash into Amazon gift cards pretty easily.

          • If you can pay addicts to buy Sudafed for you while showing their driver’s license, I’m sure they’ll buy gift cards for you, too.

        • So if the goods, in this case book, never actually change hands, then why not advertise it as something that could plausibly be worth that amount of money to reduce suspicion?

          • Because then someone else might buy it, and now you have to deliver whatever it is you “sold”.

            • If the buyer is the wrong person you can just email them and tell them the item was already sold in some other way and you were mistaken. Many items being listed on eBay are also listed on other sites or exist in a physical store (like antiques). So it’s plausible bad inventory control could cause something to be sold twice.

              • by another_twilight ( 585366 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @09:07PM (#56960440)

                That raises your profile.

                eBay has policies about refunds and the fees associated with them as do other sites. Do it too often and your account is flagged for investigation and/or cancelled.
                Having a history of ‘no item / bad inventory’ interactions with legit buyers makes plausible deniability harder to maintain.

                With all that said, the ridiculously overpriced items are easy to spot and may be amateurs or people going for a short run of ‘sales’. It would be harder to spot those who do as you suggest – pricing items at the top of the price envelope to reduce real buyers, but not so much as to attract attention like these do. Maybe you’d have the odd legit sale you’d have to decline, but on the whole, I imaging that this would prove more stable in the long run.

                • Why decline a legit sale? If you don’t have enough inventory, you can just buy one of the reasonably priced ones and ship it. Extra profit.

        • Then the other person is stuck with laundering the cash

          I like the idea of fly-by-night operations of stolen CCs instead.

          Or it could be a way to bribe officials, who are the fly-by-night operators. Legit money buys a legit, if way overpriced book, and seller government official gets paid.

          There was a scandal in the US some time back where the Speaker of the House Jim Wright “wrote a book”, as pols often do. Then a company got caught buying 20,000 copies and shoving them in a warehouse.

          Anyway it’s money laun

          • If the amount is small enough it’s easy to launder. 3000 dollars in cash? Buy all your groceries with cash for the next year. Who will be the wiser?

          • “The other person” is the same person. You buy your own book with the credit card you stole (or borrowed).

            You don’t even have to understand fly fishing to write the (e)book.

            • No.. You aren’t gonna get to keep the cash. Fraudulent credit card transactions are reversed. The bank doesn’t just walk away from them…

      • You are under the assumption that it’s those with “dirty” cash buying the “special” book. It isn’t.

        Think about the crime movies you’ve seen. We can use Scarface (the early 80’s version; there are earlier Scarface movies). Tony Montana’s henchmen are dragging hockey bags full of cash into the crooked bank, and the crooked banker is buying it at a discount and mixing it with legitimate deposits. Classic currency source deception. But the banker isn’t the guy who needs the money “laundered”.

        I’ll give you anoth

    • by mykepredko ( 40154 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:16PM (#56959414) Homepage

      Chances are the person that bought the book is the same person that sold it.

      Disappointing that the NYTimes writer – @DavidStreitfeld. – (wouldn’t call him a “journalist”) didn’t think of that or research other reasons for the high price of the book before writing the article.

    • by avandesande ( 143899 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:17PM (#56959422) Journal

      Either that or it’s made of Monster Cables

    • “We see here you have a gross income of $88,704” ….
      “Yea I sold 36 books on amazon…”

      • Uh.. You think IRS auditors dig that deeply? There are rare-book merchants… There are expensive books… The IRS doesn’t give a crap what you are doing as long as you pay your taxes.. Hell, here in California, you can buy tax coupons for Schedule 1 narcotics.. So when you get busted dealing, you don’t also get hit with a charge of Tax Evasion..

        • by swb ( 14022 ) writes:

          They started selling tax stamps here for illegal drugs maybe 20-some years ago. I remember the tax department making a big deal about preserving the anonymity of the stamp buyers because they couldn’t enforce the tax penalties against dealers if there was some belief that tax stamp sales were used as a ruse to arrest the buyers for drug crimes.

          I think it even made the news when a couple of people actually came in and bought some tax stamps. It was all kind of obfuscated, but I kind of believe it was prob

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward writes:

      Another thing at least on Ebay is apparently avoiding relisting fees (and losing potential buyers having earmarked an article number) when you temporarily have just few items in stock: you just mark them up from $2 to $102 and will be able to still deliver on the few accidental orders that still get through (like by people who had earmarked an item and at some point of time order without checking for price changes).

    • This.

      Also, charge lots of money for an item of very little value and use a stolen/fraudulent CC to purchase = (nearly) instant cash.

      Yes, chargebacks can happen, but the savvy are long gone by then. Also, charge 10K on a legit card, make a payment or two for “looks”, then default.

      -SM

    • article reading too much into intensions. two common reasons:
      a) Money laundering as OP points out.
      b) placeholder for out of stock. many vendors on ebay and amazon put stupid prices as a placeholder while they have no stock.

      • Why wouldn’t they just mark the item out of stock? I am not being provocative, JC as to why the high price would be a better option.

        • They would have to remove the listing. And then when they get more stock in, they have to list it again, which means paying listing fees again. It’s free to just jack the prices up of the current listings when those items are out of stock, and lower the price back once you have stock in again so they’ll sell, thereby avoiding relisting fees for all of those items.

          • If you are right then this bad state of affairs rest squarely on the shoulders of Amazon. They shouldn’t punish vendors for accurately conveying inventory to customers. Maybe amazon could require some kind of when available date to keep items from getting orphaned.

    • Or perhaps they’re transferring money between non faction alts?
      I used to do that all the time in WoW.

      • I used to do similar stuff when I played eve. I’d put up buy orders for stuff in dead market regions but drop a zero or two off the back. My best one was someone drunk selling me 2 hulks (mining ship worth a bit under ~200,000,000.00) for 200,000.00 each.

        He actually sent me a message thinking it was a genuine mistake and that I’d give him his remaining 199,800,000

    • It’s money laundering.

      Pay lots of money for an item of very little value. Money becomes legit.

      No, $2,630.52 is the Kindle price. $0.99 is the paperback price. It costs money to haul bits around and store them on servers, after all.

    • Unlikely, since it’s prevalent all over the place. I see absolutely legit sellers selling Item X for $99 on one listing, and the exact same item for $499 on another listing (same condition; brand new).

      I figured they were trying to catch the odd “accidental” purchase.. Or the moron who thinks he’s getting a better product because it’s the “expensive” one.

  • Exactly how many Amazon stories are going to get posted to Slashdot today?

  • by Lynal ( 976271 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:09PM (#56959376)

    This looks like a creative re-telling of a story [businessinsider.com] from ~6 years ago, which pleasantly linked to a good explanation [michaeleisen.org] of how algorithmic pricing leads to these oddities.

    • by Anonymous Coward writes:

      And still nobody has thought of putting limits into these algorithms??? Or alerts when thresholds are crossed?

  • Feedback loops (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward writes:

    Seller 1 with a good quality book sets his algorithm to “15% more than lower quality used book”

    Seller 2 with a average quality book sets his algorithm to “undercut better quality used book by 5%”

    Then the price is updated every day for months …. been posed here before.

  • by Anonymous Coward writes:

    I buy a lot of stuff that is found out in the “long tail”, obscure CDs or books that (a) not a lot of people might be interested in and (b) not a lot of copies were made in the first place. What I find is that sometimes these items go for very cheap (because not a lot of people are interested in it) or a whole lot (because there aren’t a lot of copies in existence). So a copy of a Mickey Jupp CD, or an out of print 60’s novel might go for 99 cents, or 50.00 dollars. I usually wait around, and the low pri

  • All depends on the contents of the book; what is the insert and how many grams does it weight. In plain terms money transfers for selling illegal stuff.

  • I remember a few years back seeing an insane price and reporting it as an issue with the listing once.
    Turns out, the seller claimed I shouldn’t have seen it, and they set the price to $9999 to prevent sale while they are out of stock and the item is on the slow boat from china, or so they say.

  • by reboot246 ( 623534 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:25PM (#56959486) Homepage

    At least once a week I’ll find an item that has a price way beyond any reasonable price. The last one was a pair of wire strippers listed for nearly $2000. I can’t imagine that anybody ever buys those items for those prices, but ya never know!

    It could be a strange money-laundering scheme or could be just greedy third party sellers. It’s definitely something that Amazon needs to investigate.

  • When we sold books (we stopped 10 years ago, lots of reasons but mainly Amazon), we’d see prices on used books on sites such as the late Half.com and Amazon marketplace that would go from a $10 reasonable to $40-60 silly. What we were finding is that it was often the same book getting marked up by a couple bucks by each merchant who thought they could sell it, and still make money buying it off the other guy. We could trace one book through a half-dozen sellers by the text they’d add onto the descriptions

    • It’s not just Amazon. At used bookseller network abebooks.com, “At Home Inside” is listed for $1971.20 (free shipping in USA) and up.

    • When we sold books (we stopped 10 years ago, lots of reasons but mainly Amazon), we’d see prices on used books on sites such as the late Half.com and Amazon marketplace that would go from a $10 reasonable to $40-60 silly. What we were finding is that it was often the same book getting marked up by a couple bucks by each merchant who thought they could sell it, and still make money buying it off the other guy. We could trace one book through a half-dozen sellers by the text they’d add onto the descriptions

      Ye

    • I ran across this purchasing old computer books. Often its even the same seller with multiple accounts with different prices. I remember finally finding an out of print technical manual for $10. When I purchased it, the higher priced listings quickly vanished off half.com and abbooks (they all list on multiple sites).

    • Curious. I miss half.com; absorbing it into eBay just isn’t the same – did they keep a way to combine shipping?

      One thing I’ve occasionally seen in the past is that sometimes an item will be highly priced because it is out of print, or had had an updated release. Eg. I sold my LD of Silent Running for a healthy profit just after the movie was released on DVD; the market yet not yet caught up with the new release.

  • You’ll also see this at mostly cash businesses, where they don’t seem to actually have a lot of customers, but are just conduits for the drug trade and other ill gotten gains.

  • by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:33PM (#56959516)

    If only there were some kind of numerical indicator on this kind of thing that could be used to alert an amazon staffer to check it out.

  • Say, does anyone know if Jeff Bezos committed treason in the past few hours? Because if so, you’d think there would be a story about it.

  • Steganography (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hallux-F-Sinister ( 5127197 ) writes: on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:45PM (#56959580)

    They are using Amazon to communicate clandestinely, obviously. The prices are code. Without the code book to decipher it, you have no hope of knowing what they are saying to each other, or to know who the sender or recipient are. Also, looking for used books on Amazon looks perfectly innocent.

    An example message could be that there is a used copy of Wuthering Heights for 2901.08, meaning this: meet at the park and bring the diamonds, while a price of 2901.78 means: the director wants you to deposit the carcass with the bacterium from lab D into the reservoir on the 13th, after 8 pm. Or whatever. You get the idea.

    Used to be they put cryptic ads in newspaper classifieds, now they can do this worldwide, not limited by newspaper circulation, and oh did I mention that doing it this way is free?

    • by houghi ( 78078 ) writes:

      A great thing would be selling the code book for 2903.78. When they look up the code after paying for it, they will read that that code (and every other code) means “You have been had!”

      Ici Londres ! Les FranÃais parlent aux FranÃais…
      Les sanglots longs
      Des violons
      De lâ(TM)automne
      Blessent mon cŔur
      Dâ(TM)une langueur
      Monotone.

  • Free shipping!

  • by Anonymous Coward writes:

    Having written integrations to Amazon to post items on behalf of 3rd parties, at the end of the day, you have to verify that everything is working in Production. To do that, you have to post a real item but you don’t want anyone to accidentally buy it. A way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to set the price to something absurd.

    As someone else noted above, an algorithmic re-pricer could also be to blame in some cases.

  • by Anonymous Coward writes:

    So it’s money laundering, eh ?

    I’m going to have a little fun with these guys, and buy all their books MYSELF !

    That’ll show em !

  • by Anonymous Coward writes:

    There are numerous non-illegal reasons for the large price. Perhaps you have a new helper/employee who lists things and you want to review what they did before the item becomes active. One way to do that is to set a crazy high price so it’s easy to tell which items you need to review. If the item gets by you and becomes active, the high price will prevent anyone from buying it in case part of the description or shipping policy is wrong. Though I think this applies more to places like eBay than Amazon, b

  • This pricing thing stinks to high heavens as money laundering schema, especially considering mentioning of Russian inflow to the author’s website.

  • Okay, next item? Next item we’re gonna do is uh, 5 5 2 1 6 uh 7, 7 5, 5 [actually 55-26177] This is-oh my God, look at this you guys. This is 200 carat Brazilian emerald and plasticine ring. I’m gonna start bidding for this ring at, um, let’s see, eight billion dollars. Eight billion dollars, opening bid. We’ve gotta sell this ring today. Tell you what, I’m gonna take it down a little. We’re gonna drop that price down to… $75.95. At this price it’s not gonna last for lo-oh, we got a caller…

    • It seems there may be multiple explanations. A price that temporarily goes to a high number and back down seems likely as “out of stock but we don’t want to re-list”. Other fishy prices could be money laundering. Most of the bogus book pricing seems to be of (usually obscure) out-of-print titles. But it’s all fun and games until an author gets a real 1099 form for someone else selling bogus books under his/her name, as in the Krebs link posted above.

  • … same way as in big MMO’s.

    Here is how it works:
    – offer worthless items for ludirous prices, normal customers will not buy
    – transfer currency (bt pref) to a only one time to use account and pay the ludicrous price, delete or abandon this account directly to minimize tracks
    – withdraw the laundered money from your account

    So you turn your blackmarket money into ligit cash.

    How I know this: i play a variety of MMO’s, and wondered why just like the author in the article, it just didn’t add up so I had to look i

  • Dirty money on one side of the world, clean money on the other side. I assume the people “buying” the books are trying to get cash into the US by selling obscure items.

    Of course it would be relatively easy for Amazon to crack down on this if they cared, but then they’d deprive themselves the revenues from these activities. I wouldn’t be surprised that if like all things Amazon they’d devised a system which minimized the security required to meet their legal obligations and a fraudulent activity model desi

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