A mother grieving the tragic death of her son has slammed Amazon after being caught short by a “known scam” on an £800 laptop delivery.
Clare Buchanan is thought to have ordered the MacBook Air just a day after her 11-year-old son, Oliver, died from a brain tumour.
She had planned to use the Apple laptop to write her son’s funeral service, but when it arrived, Amazon’s courier refused to hand it over to the bereaved family.
The courier claimed there was a problem with the order’s one-time password (OTP), a temporary code system used by Amazon to verify customers are who they say they are at their front door.
She said: "It appears that this is a known scam but Amazon do not seem to be doing anything at all to protect their customers"
Wikimedia CommonsShe told The Guardian: “I’d ordered it to be delivered to my parents’ address where we’d been staying at the end of Oliver’s life.
“I have a large funeral to plan and a eulogy to write so I wanted a lightweight laptop that I could use while sitting with him in the children’s hospice where he is staying prior to burial.
“I gave the OTP to my father while I spent the afternoon at the hospice and I duly received a text stating [the laptop] had been delivered.”
Buchanan’s father, who was at home to receive her laptop, was the first-hand victim of the scam and was left feeling “dreadful” and “distraught”.LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
Amazon said they “work hard to earn and maintain customer trust”
gbnewsIt was only when she arrived home from the hospice that she found out about the delivery con.
She said: “My father had handed over the OTP, at which point the driver said his handheld scanner wasn’t working and he would have to take the parcel back.
“It seems the driver then used the OTP to trigger the ‘delivered’ notification. My poor father is already distraught and this has just made him feel even more dreadful.”
Buchanan said Amazon simply refused to look into the issue, despite her complaints.
She said: “I called customer services, tweeted them and messaged them via chatbot.
“The general response is that it’s been delivered and there’s nothing they can do about it. It appears that this is a known scam but Amazon do not seem to be doing anything at all to protect their customers or to amend what is obviously a highly flawed procedure.”
Buchanan isn’t the only Amazon customer to be caught short by a delivery driver – Derrick Naisbitt, 52, from Derby, had a £300 present for his wife swiped from his doorstep on Christmas Eve.
Amazon said they invested $1.2 billion “to protect our store and our customers” in 2022, and they “work hard to earn and maintain customer trust”.
But consumer watchdog Which? has investigated “issues with Amazon’s OTP system” before, including delivery drivers disappearing and expensive parcels being swapped out for other items.
Their guide details five steps for how affected customers can complain about OTP scams and claim money back from the online retail giant, and they say they have helped secure refunds for those affected.