Hello everyone. This is Fred Ruckel, the Ripple Rug inventor. I am so pleased this story has sparked a conversation amongst some of the tech elite so to speak. The article only lightly touches on all I uncovered, there is much more to come. I have a long evidence trail that shows Amazon employees are behind the vast majority of arbitraging. That's right, the people we trust with our product are the ones actually stealing it.
The plain box shipping issue provided us a direct evidence trail proving it is happening internally at Amazon. I have tracked it down the the Hebron Kentucky warehouse. Together with Entrepreneur Magazines editor we conducted a test buy/sting op. He ordered it; I tracked it on the back side of my Amazon seller account. I watched as the person used their prime account to ship it from my own inventory to the magazine editor. We have all the tracking data, blank boxes, even their real names on their Amazon account. I ran this operation a handful of times, always with the same results. This is an internal operation at Amazon.
When I informed Amazon about the issues at Hebron, and offered my evidence, everything went haywire. Within few hours of reporting it, my entire inventory was placed in reserve (over $10,000 worth) and locked down for all of June. I was completely locked out of my own inventory. Amazon was also the multi-channel fulfillment center for my website. In a blink, both of my sales channels were shut down entirely. The arbitragers flexed their muscle to show me who' the boss' in the situation was. Both my website and Amazon were now out of stock in retaliation to my reporting it to Amazon. Ironically, all my inventory was sidelined at that very same Hebron fulfillment center. This was no coincidence. Hebron center is the root of the arbitrage ring in my situation, but other warehouses participate as well. I found 3 other centers also have arbitrage rings, or they work together, but I have data for all of it.
I proved conclusively, and repetitively that there is corruption within Amazon. I ran the same operation over and over yielding the same results. It may not be Amazon itself, however Amazons employees are running the show when it comes to the high level arbitraging. I recorded phone calls, have screen shots of everything. I sent Amazon lengthy message detailing everything. Amazon has turned a blind eye. These Amazon employees have the ability to manipulate the package details, inventory status, boxing preference, pretty much free run of the Amazon computer systems to do as they wish. they actually 'ghost' information so it looks as if nothing was manipulated (lucky i screen shot everything).
Lastly, when i tracked the real names of these people involved, they all live within a few miles of an Amazon fulfillment center and the all have computer science background. this is not a small isolated incident. I can prove millions in losses to this scheme, and with some digging, it might be billions.
HN'ers might appreciate learning the FAA has a developer-friendly program called SWIM [0] to help facilitate getting realtime FAA data (flight plans, weather data, etc) in to the hands of coders. I recently attended the SWIM Developer Workshop at the Volpe Center (near MIT) and really enjoyed it.
There's quite a bit to the SWIM program. The onboarding can be a bit tricky though and you have to know your way around site-to-site VPNs. I recently completed the onboarding process and am receiving live flight plan data -- proposed flights, en route, completed etc.
Would be curious to know if there are others on HN that are working with SWIM data or if there are companies that are hiring in this space.
The plain box shipping issue provided us a direct evidence trail proving it is happening internally at Amazon. I have tracked it down the the Hebron Kentucky warehouse. Together with Entrepreneur Magazines editor we conducted a test buy/sting op. He ordered it; I tracked it on the back side of my Amazon seller account. I watched as the person used their prime account to ship it from my own inventory to the magazine editor. We have all the tracking data, blank boxes, even their real names on their Amazon account. I ran this operation a handful of times, always with the same results. This is an internal operation at Amazon.
When I informed Amazon about the issues at Hebron, and offered my evidence, everything went haywire. Within few hours of reporting it, my entire inventory was placed in reserve (over $10,000 worth) and locked down for all of June. I was completely locked out of my own inventory. Amazon was also the multi-channel fulfillment center for my website. In a blink, both of my sales channels were shut down entirely. The arbitragers flexed their muscle to show me who' the boss' in the situation was. Both my website and Amazon were now out of stock in retaliation to my reporting it to Amazon. Ironically, all my inventory was sidelined at that very same Hebron fulfillment center. This was no coincidence. Hebron center is the root of the arbitrage ring in my situation, but other warehouses participate as well. I found 3 other centers also have arbitrage rings, or they work together, but I have data for all of it.
I proved conclusively, and repetitively that there is corruption within Amazon. I ran the same operation over and over yielding the same results. It may not be Amazon itself, however Amazons employees are running the show when it comes to the high level arbitraging. I recorded phone calls, have screen shots of everything. I sent Amazon lengthy message detailing everything. Amazon has turned a blind eye. These Amazon employees have the ability to manipulate the package details, inventory status, boxing preference, pretty much free run of the Amazon computer systems to do as they wish. they actually 'ghost' information so it looks as if nothing was manipulated (lucky i screen shot everything).
Lastly, when i tracked the real names of these people involved, they all live within a few miles of an Amazon fulfillment center and the all have computer science background. this is not a small isolated incident. I can prove millions in losses to this scheme, and with some digging, it might be billions.
crazy days ahead
thanks for any insight you can provide
Fred