Sweep@0xSweep
A 22 year old in Spain scammed Amazon out of $370,000 by returning boxes full of dirt
Amazon refunds returns based on one thing which is the weight of the box when it comes back
If the weight matches the original item, the refund goes through automatically and nobody opens the box
James Gilbert Kwarteng figured this out in 2018
The way it worked was almost stupidly easy
He would order an expensive item on Amazon, a phone, a laptop, a piece of electronics, anything over a few hundred dollars
When it arrived he would weigh it to the gram, fill the original box with the exact same weight in dirt and ship it back as a return
Amazon's warehouse would log the box at the correct weight, process the return and refund him in full
He would then sell the real item online and pocket both the refund and the resale price
He did it so many times that he eventually registered a limited company for the operation and called it "Kwartech."
A portmanteau of his surname and the word technology, run out of his apartment in Palma de Mallorca
The scheme ran for over a year and pulled in roughly €300,000, about $370,000 at the time
Returned boxes full of dirt were piling up in Amazon warehouses across Europe because nobody was opening them
He only got caught because Amazon changed their return policy and started spot checking packages
An employee in Barcelona opened one of his boxes at random, found it full of soil and flagged it to the Technological Crimes Unit of the Balearic Islands
Police traced the returns back to Kwartech and arrested him in August 2019
The case was called the biggest Amazon scam ever recorded in Europe at the time
He showed up to court, posted €3,000 bail and walked out the same day
Others took the same playbook and got more sophisticated with it
A guy in North Carolina named Hudson Hamrick pulled $290,000 out of Amazon over four years by ordering expensive electronics, guitars and tools and returning cheaper broken versions of the same items in the original boxes
An international ring called REKK openly advertised their services on Reddit and Discord, charging a fee to get fake refunds approved on anything you ordered
They pulled in millions by bribing Amazon employees to push the refunds through manually before anyone could inspect the package
Amazon spent $1.2 billion in 2022 alone trying to fight return fraud and hired 15,000 people to work on it full time
The craziest part is that the original scam still works today
Weigh the item, match the weight, ship back something worthless, collect the refund
Amazon processes millions of returns a week and the machine checking the box at the warehouse only knows one thing about what's inside it
