That's why Fry's Electronics--a bay area retailer--scans the serial numbers of hard drives, DIMM memory and other electronic stuff. During the return process, Fry's employees check the serial number of the returned item against what's there in the receipt. This strategy was born precisely because of the scam that Amazon is seeing now.
At least Fry's electronics used to TEST memory sticks, motherboards, CPUs in front of customers during the return process. I knew cases where customers tried to return CPUs with bent pins, and their returns were denied.
IIRC, Fry's did not test hard disks, except to match the serial numbers. So, now this scam requires testing of hard drives of their capacity during the return process. And this is a cat-and-mouse game.
I feel like the testing was more of a way to 1. try to avoid the return by proving it worked and 2. put it right back out on the shelf for sell. Actually picked up some good deals in the good days of Frys from returns. It's a shame they're nothing more than an as seen on tv store these days.
First, they used to put these reshrink-wrapped items back on the shelves without any labels. Few years later, they started to put the label "Returned item".
Fry's is dead, as their HQ on Brokaw Road is being converted to an office complex. They missed the dot com gravy train; had they gone to IPO around 1999, they would have made a killing. However, Fry's brothers and their management are weird.
oh is it? last i knew there were 3 bids over the last year or os, all unable to get through re-zoning. The last news I heard was april 2020 and it is still stuck.
do you know something very recent, or are you going on vaporware press releases.
Nothing new, just that April 2020 news. Fry's done for now thanks to Covid. It was slowly dying before that.
Here are some facts: (a) most of the shelves are empty; (b) shelves between two shelves are removed, to make it appear business as usual; (c) vendors were not getting paid by Frys; (d) therefore, any decent vendor doesn't want to send them items on credit; (e) so, Fry's is left with the junk we see on TVs.
In some aspects, I miss Fry's. Fry's used to hire all kinds of people, gave jobs to new immigrants without English skills. Now we such people driving Uber, Lyft.
On the WD external drives, the serial number on the case matches the serial number on the drive inside. Once you get a couple complaints from either WD corporate returns or customers you sold the returned product to, I'd expect returns to be checked for this --- especially if there looked opened, but it takes a minute to power on and ask the disk for its serial number. You can check the smart pre-failure indicators too and maybe decide not to ship hard drives in a big empty box with three air pillows. (I dunno, I'm never buying a hard drive from amazon until they learn how to ship them)
Amazon does this for Apple products. My recent Apple Watch purchase had its serial number on the invoice, which I managed to use to look up its date of manufacture. (I needed one that works with a jailbreakable iPhone.)
Amazon was motivated to include the serial number presumably because Apple stuff either had a lot of return fraud, or Apple themselves requested for the supply chain to be tightened up.
Some manufacturers also opt in to similar SN tracking on Amazon. This is a smart way to handle it. Amazon is not nearly proactive enough in dealing with return fraud in part because it tends to externalize those costs to their vendors (the brand) and to third party sellers, who also absorb the cost of returns.
