I agree that third party purchases through the Amazon system are safe...I have made many.
It is the "Just Launched" vendors that ask you to circumvent amazon's payment system (e.g put in cart or one click orders), where they ask you to contact them on a separate web address and ask for an Amazon gift card as payment. Apparently Amazon scours its site for these, but cannot catch them instantly, so they are there for a time.
ALERT: Third party vendor scam on Amazon ("Scamazon?")
To further explore the above issue, I placed an order for a Lotoo PAW Gold digital audio player from the "Just Launched" seller "Z Market" that suddenly appeared on Amazon last night. The Lotoo player is usually $1,200 - $1,600 used; $2,200 - $3,300 new, and hard to find. This seller offered it new at $722 plus about $10 shipping, being sent from Texas and arriving in 3 to 6 days.
As you can see, the link on the first listing asks you to contact the seller before ordering through Amazon and gives a link to do so. In an earlier investigation of a different ad for a different seller and different item, when I contacted the seller directly, I got an email asking me to purchase an amazon gift card in the name of the seller and in the amount of the sale. That would then amount to instant, non refundable payment to the seller, so I did not purchase it and notified Amazon of the seller.
Instead, I just placed the item in my cart and ordered in the normal Amazon way.
The charge appeared instantly on my electronic credit card statement as a Pending Authorization.
Thirty minutes later, I received an email from Amazon stating that Amazon had cancelled my order due to "Technical Problems." When I looked for this seller again on the Amazon site, Amazon had removed the listing (I had gotten this screen capture prior to that).
I went to look for a reversal on my electronic statement and there was none... the pending authorization still appeared. It looked just like all the other pending authorizations for other charges that I had made that day, which as I understand it all mature into actual charges unless reversed by the merchant. I was worried that this would also automatically become a charge, so I called Amazon customer service.
Amazon assured me that before it would change to a real charge, Amazon would have to try to "collect" the sale, i.e., would have to do something else, which they do when they receive notification that the third party vendor had actually shipped.
The credit card company assured me that the charge would disappear from my "Pending Authorized" list if Amazon did not, within seven days, actually notify the credit card company to collect the charge.
The charge still remains as Pending Authorized, but I expect that it will disappear in seven days. If not, I can and will dispute it when it appears on my monthly credit card bill.
I just thought it would be worth warning us heavy-duty Amazon users of this trick. Amazon tries to scrub their site of such illegitimate new marketplace sellers that seek direct contact rather than payment through Amazon. However, there seems to be some way that such sellers can still insert their offerings, even though only temporarily.
If the deal seems to good to be true, it IS.
