A 22-year-old Spaniard tricked Amazon out of $370,000 with a single move

Before this young man was scammed
When this young man was being scammed
Amazon only looked at one thing when processing returns
The box’s weight
If the weight matched, the system automatically issued a refund
No one unpacked the item
In 2018, James Gilbert Kwarteng understood this loophole
The operation was unbelievably simple
First, he bought high-priced items on Amazon
Phones, computers, and all kinds of electronics
After receiving them, he weighed them precisely
Then he repacked the mud with the same weight and sent it back in the original packaging
In the warehouse, they only recorded whether the weights matched
He got a return approved and a full refund straight through
He sold the genuine goods off afterward
He profited from both sides: the refund and the item payment
It went so smoothly that he even registered a company
The company was called Kwartech
His last name plus technology spelled together
The company was set up in an apartment on the island of Mallorca
This whole setup ran for more than a year
He earned about 300,000 euros, which was $370,000 at the time
In Amazon warehouses across Europe
Box after box of dirt was piled up
No one opened them to check
The reason his scheme finally fell apart was simple
Amazon changed the rules
It started random inspections
A worker in Barcelona randomly opened a box
Seeing a box of dirt, he reported it right away
The case was handed to the technical crime unit of the Balearic Islands
They traced it all the way through
They zeroed in on Kwartech
He was arrested in August 2019
At the time, it was called Europe’s largest Amazon scam
He appeared in court
He paid a €3,000 bail deposit
And he walked out and left right away that same day
Later, someone copied this same playbook
And made it even more meticulous
In North Carolina, there was a person named Hudson Hamrick
Over four years, he managed to take $290,000 from Amazon
The scheme was
Buy the expensive ones
Return the cheap defective goods
Using the same original packaging
There was also a cross-border criminal group called REKK
They advertised directly on Reddit and Discord
They charged you to help you get fake refunds
They even bribed Amazon employees
To have refunds manually approved to go through earlier
Over a few years, they scooped up several million
In 2022, Amazon spent $1.2 billion to crack down on this kind of fraud
They hired 15,000 people specifically to do this
The quick route to making money
Written into criminal law
Because of the random inspections
Until today
For all e-commerce platforms
The practice of turning returns into trash still exists