[icedchai]

A shrink wrap machine is relatively cheap and does wonders for people running these operations. Nobody is going to check inside a "factory sealed" box.

Folks were running scams like this in the 90's. I remember a friend of mine bought a hard drive from CompUSA. Turned out it was actually a brick sealed in a box.

[dnadler]

I don't suppose it was a MiniScribe Disk?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe

> In July 1987, Jesse Parker, director of far east operations, told Wiles that something was amiss. In August, Wiles travelled to Hong Kong and Singapore where he found a complete loss of control. The inventory count from that fall showed that the numbers had grown to $15 million, mostly in Colorado. A report was prepared to consider various solutions, but Wiles suggested that they continue hiding the problem, ordering all copies of the report be destroyed. This led to the company's most infamous cover-up; the managers rented a second warehouse in Colorado, where they personally packed 26,000 bricks into hard drive boxes and shipped them to Singapore in order to shore up the inventory count. After the count was complete, they recalled those serial numbers as defective units, but instead of writing them off, they checked them into inventory, along with other failed drives that had been returned.[6]

Maybe one of the bricks made its way to a store :P

[icedchai]

Hah. This was in the mid to late 90's (possibly '96 or '97), so not one of those. I'm pretty sure it was a Western Digital drive. It had large "retail" packaging that included foam padding and extra hardware, like mounting rails for a 5.25 bay, etc.

[nightfly]

Was it a 5.25" brick or a 3.5" brick?

[icedchai]

Hah. It was supposed to be a 3.5" hard drive. The box was big enough to be able to contain a regular sized brick and some padding.

[Spooky23]

Lol. I worked there in college and someone had the great idea to put things like hard disks and video cards on the shelf instead of behind the counter to reduce labor costs.

People ran all sorts of scams, most commonly putting a $500 video card in a $20 box. I’d catch them all of the time, but if you reported it you had a chance of losing commissions when loss prevention people interviewed you.

Solution: avoid the aisle.

The other crazy one was what we called the crime bus. A charter bus of Asian people, usually Chinese, would pull up and flood the store with like 30 people on a weekday, pinning down every employee with stupid questions. Another group would loot the aisles of hard disks, various video/other cards and certain inks. I was there for one — it was absolutely insane.

They put that stuff back behind the counter a few months later.

[icedchai]

They'd also accept returns of software if you gave a plausible excuse. My friend would usually say one of the floppies had a read/write error, and he changed his mind.

Too bad they went broke! In the 90's, CompUSA was one of the only local places that had a large selection of computer parts.

[reilly3000]

This is why we can't have nice things like local computer stores :/

[mjayhn]

Losing the ability to rent PC games when I was about 8 rocked my world. I'll never forget the last game I ever rented, SimTown. Going to that rental store was almost as exciting as walking through a computer expo.

[pkaye]

Years back a coworker was telling me his scheme for buying a video card and returning it with an older model in the box. Only thing was when he opened up the box his card was already swapped with an older one by a previous customer. So he had to go back to the store and plead that he was the victim. They eventually accepted the return if he testified to the police officer (probably for an insurance claim.)

[icedchai]

It's sad how many stories of these sorts of scams there are, even in this one thread. Retailers really get screwed, and we all pay for it.

Also, I wonder how many customers even failed to notice they wound up with an older card. Probably not all of them!

[Spooky23]

It happens in enterprise space too. Over the years my team or I have caught all sorts of shady shit from resellers.

[geofft]

> People ran all sorts of scams, most commonly putting a $500 video card in a $20 box. I’d catch them all of the time, but if you reported it you had a chance of losing commissions when loss prevention people interviewed you.

Wait, what? The loss prevention people wanted you to not prevent loss?

[Spooky23]

No, they would basically interrogate you.

Sitting in some windowless office at $5.75 an hour for two hours basically cost me $100-300 in commissions from lost sales.

Those jobs were great in the 90s. One year I paid for my College tuition in the week before Christmas.

[S_A_P]

ahh the good old days when college tuition was actually reasonably affordable. My tuition at Texas A&M was IIRC between 1 and 3 grand a semester...

[danielfoster]

I guess they would take away the commission for this sale and maybe question past sales?

[nkrisc]

Their job isn't to prevent loss, it's to catch people.

[bluedino]

I worked at Best Buy and Sears in the late 90’s. People tried to scam us every day.

Sears didn’t do any checks if anything. You just took your boxed up computer to the back of the store and you got your money back. It was common to pull the RAM and HD from a computer, return it for another, and then you had double the memory and drive space for free.

You couldn’t do that at Best Buy, the Tech bench (before they had the Geek Squad) would inspect your returns. If you wanted to fool us, you’d have to make it look like you never opened the boxes, and put the correct amount of patio bricks in it.

You couldn’t swap video cards or RAM, we checked the model numbers. So you’d have to take the video card over to the appliance department, slice the side of the box with a knife, remove the video card and throw the empty box in a washer or microwave. When the Voodoo 5 came out we found every single one was stolen and the boxes in a freezer that was on display.

We even had a RAM tester that would tell you the speed and size of the chips. We never got one that would do DIMMs, just SIMMs, so as the Pentium II became popular it was less useful.

Now, if you knew someone who worked at the tech bench, you could bring your home PC in for a bullshit service like a $29.99 disk defrag, and you could get it loaded up with memory, disk drives, or hell, you could just stick as many audio CD’s as you could in your tower. Just make sure the case screws are on tight when you leave, or the panel falls off along with whatever you were smuggling out, right in front of the whole store.

Lastly, there was a DEVO area towards the back of the store, basically a dumpster full of returns. I heard they got sold to the lowest bidder, stuff we couldn’t return to the manufacturer for some reason. Memory, hard drives, all kinds of random stuff would end up back there because the computer said so. Anything that could fit in a pocket, people helped themselves to.

[derefr]

> Nobody is going to check inside a "factory sealed" box.

I'm surprised Amazon doesn't X-ray incoming merchandise and then use Computer Vision (i.e. face tagging but for objects) to say whether what's inside the box matches what "should" be in there according to a database of SKU X-ray "fingerprints."

[ganoushoreilly]

It's probably not worth the cost. Even though the numbers would seem large to us, at their scale it's probably not.

[chrischen]

If theY ignore fraud the fraudsters will naturally increase their activity.

[londons_explore]

A percentage is a percentage...

[james-skemp]

A penny is a percentage of a dollar, a hundred dollars, and a thousand dollars.

That percentage matters less the smaller it gets.

[dillonmckay]

So, that is why I thought they put in a security blanket inside the SSD box.

Maybe some rudimentary thermal imagery, and that is the method?

[icedchai]

It's probably more about weight, size, and convenience. SSDs don't weigh much. Neither do blankets and that one probably fits in the SSD box without any hassle.