from Hacker News

Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021)

by sebg on 6/22/25, 7:18 PM with 285 comments

  • by sytelus on 6/22/25, 11:54 PM

    Amazon remains totally complacent of these issues which are now professionally hacked by China based providers day in and out. Tons of vitamins are now fake and downright harmful. A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.

    I tried to move my purchases to Walmart and surprisingly, even after 25 years, they haven’t got act together. Walmart even haven’t recognized that they should jump on this problem by prominently showing authentic brand logo or something.

    I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!

    Amazon is definitely riding on this utterly deficient competitors and that’s why they get to be so complacent.

  • by alister on 6/23/25, 1:33 AM

    In case there are readers who don't know who Clifford Stoll is, he's the author of The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, that was practically required reading if you were a programmer or hacker in the early 1990s.

    I didn't understand how hijacking worked on Amazon until I read this lucid explanation. Clearly he's still a great writer.

    He's on Hacker News as CliffStoll. This makes me wonder how Hacker News deals with someone registering a famous person's name if they are not that person? I'm guessing that it's not a big problem here on HN because there's nothing being sold.

  • by CliffStoll on 6/23/25, 6:01 PM

    Cliff Stoll here. The brand hijacking on Amazon USA was fixed.

    But Amazon Canada listing is still held by Amvoom. I'm unable to sell Klein bottles in Canada. sigh

    If anyone knows how to fix this, please send email to me!

    Many thanks, -Cliff

  • by BrenBarn on 6/23/25, 4:07 AM

    The cause is the same, the solution is the same: when companies become so big and capture so much market share that they no longer are responsive to the needs of their customers, it's time for them to be destroyed. Amazon should be dismantled into dozens or even hundreds of small companies and all its assets distributed among them.

  • by ColinWright on 6/23/25, 3:49 PM

    There may be some youngsters who don't know who Cliff Stoll is.

    He wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg" which is a riveting tale, capable of entertaining nerds and non-nerds alike.

    He sells glass Klein Bottles, huge, medium, tiny, earrings, and more.

    He's given a TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj8IA6xOpSk

    He's brilliant, bonkers, and wonderful company. I spent a fantastic morning with him early last year (2024) and it was brilliant fun. I will for many, many years treasure my signed Klein Bottle and my signed copy of "The Cuckoo's Egg".

    Thanks Cliff

  • by ggm on 6/23/25, 4:13 AM

    It's for reasons like this people ask "what happened to regulatory oversight" because at this point, entities who occupy this much of the space appear to be essentially unregulated.

    It's trading under false premises. It's misleading conduct. It's oligopoly. The sherman laws were designed for this surely?

    I could say the same about appeals to google, apple, anyone for account recovery too.

  • by fermigier on 6/23/25, 7:21 AM

    The "Acme Klein Bottle Wine Bottle" is incredible. It strongly reminds me of Jacques Carelman's "Catalogue d'objets introuvables" (1969) [translated as "Catalog of fantastic things", 1971 by Ballantine Books in New York].

    As wikipedia states:

    > Carelman is best known for his Catalog of fantastic things (Catalogue d'objets introuvables) also known as Catalogue of Unfindable Objects, made in 1969 as a parody of the catalog of the French mail order company Manufrance. This work has been translated into 19 languages (including Korean, Hebrew and Finnish). Among these imaginary objects are, for instance, a "Kangaroo gun" whose "barrel is extensively studied ... to give the bullet a sinusoidal trajectory which follows the animal in its leaps", or a disposable "Plaster anvil ... (sold by the dozen) to be discarded after use, allowing you to make substantial savings." The most famous item in this catalog was Carelman's "Coffeepot for Masochists", a coffeepot with a backwards facing spout that would scald the user. This design became a symbol for the critique of everyday things and was featured on the cover of Don Norman's book on the topic, The Design of Everyday Things.

    (I didn't make the connection with Don Norman's book, another, more serious, classic).

  • by AnotherGoodName on 6/23/25, 12:12 AM

    I honestly think sites like stockx where they open the package and verify before shipping it forward will overtake amazon despite the increased costs. Absolutely not invested in stockx in any way, just an opinion that was formed as follows;

    Amazon was built on trust. I bought a book from them in the early days. It didn’t arrive after 2 weeks and they said ‘we believe you’ and they shipped me the book again at no charge. A week later i got 2 books, the first was lost in transit. Contacted amazon and they and no problem keep both and give one to a friend. I and many others were loyal to amazon after these experiences, paying more due to the lack of hassle and high trust. They became the default online bookstore thanks to this trust. It wasn’t even worth price comparisons, you looked on amazon and bought it there knowing you’d get the product you paid for.

    That’s now gone. They have fallen to ebay levels of trust at this point. You’re likely to be shipped a box of rocks rather than what you wanted at this point.

    People are willing to pay more for trust and the lack of hassle it represents. I want to buy a hard cover book that’s well printed. If i keep getting poor photocopies on tissue paper the trust is gone. I'll happy pay more to buy from a site where that never happens. I won’t even bother with price shopping when one site is a good chance of a scam and the other isn’t. In fact i’m pretty sure that’s where amazons dominance as the default online store came from and i’m shocked at how little care they have for this fact.

  • by godelski on 6/22/25, 11:39 PM

    This stuff seems to keep happening and the problem seems to be that it is ungovernable. How is someone supposed to fight this if they are not half as famous as Cliff?

  • by b00ty4breakfast on 6/23/25, 4:38 AM

    if these comments are any indication, our inability to handle mild inconvenience and a lifetime of consumerist conditioning are the real reasons amazon can continue to get away with being cartoonishly awful.

    I get it, there's a lot of crap in life and sometimes it seems like it's just not worth the hassle to make something a bit unpleasant for the sake of your principles when there's crap at work and the mortgage is due and timmy is failing english class again but they will not stop unless being shitty starts hurting their business and we cannot count on the captured regulators to do that on our behalf.

  • by iaw on 6/23/25, 2:51 PM

    If you haven't bought a Klein Bottle from Cliff I strongly encourage you to do so. He is a treasure.

  • by burnt-resistor on 6/23/25, 1:12 AM

    Cliff is awesome. The care and effort he shows rivals most Etsy sellers. (I have a Klein mug and gifted several more.)

  • by neuroelectron on 6/23/25, 12:28 PM

    I opened up a ticket to get it resolved and after 6 months it was closed because there's no logs available to confirm the issue.

  • by pinewurst on 6/22/25, 7:31 PM

    (2021)

  • by ilamont on 6/23/25, 2:16 PM

    Brand hijacking got to be so bad with so many sellers complaining that Amazon finally did something about it ... kind of. Quoting an Amazon employee in the Seller Central forum:

    If you have experienced an incorrect change in the brand name of an ASIN, please exhaust these self-service options below first:

    - Create a case to Seller Support

    - Public Notice Form if you are not registered in Brand Registry

    - Report Abuse

    - Report a Violation (if you are registered in Brand Registry)

    For a normal company, one would expect that a single report using any of these methods would be enough to launch an investigation and right the wrong. Nope.

    I don't know if it's Amazon's poorly designed automated seller support, or overwhelmed support staff unable to deal with the problem, but regardless the burden is on sellers to "exhaust" all of these options before posting a semi-public plea for help on the Seller Central forums. This apparently will trigger an actual investigation (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...).

  • by smarklefunf on 6/23/25, 2:32 PM

    whoever would do this to cliff stoll is the actual devil

  • by dudeinjapan on 6/23/25, 9:41 AM

    Looks like those Chinese scammers turned that Klein Bottle store…

    …inside out.

    wail sound, puts on sunglasses

  • by hilsdev on 6/23/25, 10:11 PM

    Another idiotic policy by Amazon to motivate me to use small sellers even when available on the Amazon storefront

  • by ugh123 on 6/23/25, 3:03 AM

    If some dev from Amazon reading this on HN doesn't raise this to a high level asap, you're all useless /s

    No but seriously, that's Cliff Stoll they're messin with.