 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here in Jerusalem. So I started a thread on Reddit a couple of days ago on the AliExpress subreddit and the title of my post, I have it open, I'm gonna put it up on the screen in a second, is can we talk about Ali vendors trying to bribe users with gifts? So this is something I've just been noticing for the past, it's like at least a year now. I've been buying from AliExpress from about as long as I've been living in Israel. And the reason AliExpress is crazy popular in Israel and it's actually quite funny, if you look for products on AliExpress, you'll often see they've got Hebrew products that they've customized for Israeli customers. The reason we in Israel tend to buy disproportionately from AliExpress is because the e-commerce options in Israel are not brilliant. I mean, there are locally e-commerce stores. Amazon delivers some of their inventory here, but it tends to be very expensive in shipping. And we also have to pay more than $75, that VAT on orders that are more than 75 bucks. And stuff can get held up in customs. Israeli customs is super strict. So for a combination of reasons, the fact that Ali, Amazon hasn't really serviced Israel properly, they did do this free shipping trial, but it was discontinued when the pandemic started and no one really knows if it was intended as a one, I suspect it was a once-off thing. It doesn't really make sense for Amazon to indefinitely subsidize shipping stuff from fulfillment centers in the US over to Israel. In any event, that's why we're AliExpress, Fiends in Israel. So I've been using Ali for seven years by a bunch of electronic stuff from it and I've been getting a bunch of business cards over the course of this time. Now AliExpress vendors are quite funny. They use the word deer a lot. So when you get private messages in AliExpress from vendors, they will typically address you as deer. There's a lot of funny things about AliExpress. The fact that it doesn't really have a proper customer support mechanism is funny. If you find that kind of stuff funny, you have to dispute things with vendors and then they beg you to, it's a weird place, but that's Ali. So I've been getting business cards and the business cards typically are like, hi, deer, loved your purchase. Please follow our store at this, and they love QR codes. So they always put a QR code there and you go on. Now over the last year or so, it's changed. The formula's changed. I'm getting bribes, real bribes, serious bribes from AliExpress people. And it's the same thing. You get, you open up your order and you pick out your, I don't know, measuring tape, whatever else you buy from AliExpress. And you see there's a business card. So you say, oh, maybe this is something related to my order and you see it's actually a bribe offer. Now I started this reddit thread because I thought it was strange. Two things, I thought it was strange that I hadn't seen other people talking about it. The second thing that was strange is that I've just come back from the U.S. for a few weeks and I did a bit of purchasing over there for mostly camera related, video related accessories. And I didn't notice compared to other areas. Now I'm not in the U.S. that often, but compared to two years ago when I was last there and also ordered a few bits and pieces on Amazon, I thought there was a lot of AliExpress-like merchandise. Now what I mean by that is merchandise that's coming from Chinese vendors doesn't have a name to it, a manufacturer to it. There's no English, there's often no English user documentation or if there is, it's machine translated from Chinese and it's very, very poor quality. So that's kind of par for the course from AliExpress. It is a Chinese marketplace. For Amazon, I was kind of disappointed. And I got my first, I actually got my first bribe card from Amazon. This is my word. I don't know what else you could call these things but that's what they are there, right? It's a business card with an offer of bribe. So that's what I posted on Reddit. I was like, what's going on? Is this just me or is this happening to everybody and does AliExpress care? They're like being tempted one or two times to be like, look, if you guys actually had a customer service functionality, you might want to know that companies are, it's not, it's just like an icky feeling to buy something you paid money for. And all you really want is the product but then you pull up this business card and it's like they're trying to offer you this kind of a sketchy deal. So that was it and it's on happening on Amazon. So people said some interesting things over on the, I was going to say the big R. Has anyone ever called Reddit the big R? I don't know. Let's go on to the screen. So this is my thread here and I just started this thread a couple, ah, it's only one day go in fact, how time is flying. So I just described the typical experience of a bribe card and I explained that I got a bribe on Amazon. Now I'm actually going to reach out to Amazon customer support when I finish this video or perhaps during it because I do think they should know and I was astounded to get a bribe card from an Amazon vendor. So people, an atin, atinneko says that claims that this was a strategy first started by Taobao sellers. Now Taobao is another big Chinese marketplace and he or she says that eventually spread to wherever Chinese sellers are doing business. Their gifts are dirt cheap and the positive reviews help drive sales by lot. So that is, you know, that's kind of typically what it is. It's like, give us a five star review and we'll send you half of a selfie stick. And you're like, man, I just don't have time for this. Now I personally, and I mean this actually quite seriously I wouldn't take a bribe. I have an ethical problem with this system. So irrespective of what the quid pro quo being offered was I wouldn't do it. But yeah, it's typically for some kind of garbage or what looks very much like garbage merchandise. I'm just going to put myself down here a little bit. Now someone says to install fake spot to get more accurate reviews on Amazon. That's actually a pretty cool Chrome extension. And Grain81 says this is a tactic that has been going on for a while now. However, Amazon is aware and they are cracking down on this behavior. Amazon recently suspended two of the largest Chinese sellers on Amazon for using bribery to solicit fake reviews. These are companies that do around $1 billion in sales on Amazon alone. So this is actually pretty big stuff. So I thought this was worth making a YouTube video about because we're not talking about peanuts here. When you look at some of the volumes that the major sellers are doing on a marketplace like Amazon actually pretty substantial amounts of business. So let's just see. Because this is why as I've written about, I do have a love hate relationship with Reddit. I've had some terrible experiences there but it also has a ton of niche communities like this with very interesting people that are very engaged around certain subjects. This person claims and these are just claims in China this is considered acceptable business practice. And oftentimes a business practice that's recommended to increase reviews which in turn increases sales. They consider it a win-win for customer in the business although the value proposition is unbalanced. It is simply just a difference in business culture versus what's acceptable in American culture. By the way, I don't know why everybody on Reddit always assumes everybody else on Reddit is in America. Slight pet peeve. If they plan on selling an Amazon which is based in the US and I agree they need to be compliant with American culture and business standards and ethics. Now that's actually, that is my point actually about Amazon. So on AliExpress, okay, this kind of nonsense goes on and we sort of expected to. I do think that if a Chinese vendor is going to be selling an Amazon and I'm going to be buying as a consumer from Amazon then I expect to be getting something a little bit better than nameless merchandise which comes with these bribe cards in it. Oh yeah, so then I said I was going to post my bribe card. So I'm going to take a risk here guys because I don't know, this might really annoy them but I'm going to show you a real bribe card. So I actually got this bribe card. This is my word again. I got this bribe card just before I left for the US and I decided to keep it. I was like, you know what? I'm going to photograph this thing because it's ludicrous and perhaps I'll send it to AliExpress. Perhaps I'll just post it on Twitter but I just want to show you guys what we're talking about now. Disclaimer is that I have written on the front of the bribe card when I came back from the US. I did my video shoot at sunrise in the Tayyalet in Jerusalem and I didn't have any paper handy. I do try to go paperless and sometimes I actually do kind of need paper. So I wrote, I just scribbled down the time of sunrise on the front of the bribe card but it doesn't really affect it. So it's from Hawaii and Hawaii makes Bluetooth headphones basically and that's, I bought a couple of their products over the years. This is their website, their air. They are a Hong Kong based company and they sell all this kind of stuff, you know, Bluetooth speakers and headphones and whatnot with Hawaii.hk and they sell a lot of stuff on AliExpress and I found their Bluetooth headphones to be reasonably decent. So I've ordered and reordered a couple of times. So that's what this company is and this is real. This is not something I printed. This actually came in an AliExpress container. Here we go. You know what, I'll read first and then I'm going to show you guys. So it says Hawaii. This is the front side of the business cards or the bribe card. Get a guess and it's all written in this kind of like messed up English. Get VIP promo code here. Email service at Hawaii.hk just to show that the domain is indeed the domain. Get scan QR code, get latest promo code, contact us for help, scan me. So there's two QR codes. So okay, fine. Backside of the business card is where the bribe is offered. So it says leave us five star guess gift and then it has instructions for how to get your gift in exchange for the five star review. One, send us five star screenshot. Two, if you have a new order in Hawaii, so I presume this means that you need to give a five star review on your previous purchase and buy something else. Three, send order to us, get free gift. So I think the system, I think what they mean is that you should order something from them on AliExpress, send them your order number, tell them you left a review and then you'll get your nice bribe reward. If you have any problem about product one, oh yeah, this is the other thing they do on AliExpress that if AliExpress had any integrity and I'm not sure they do, I think they probably don't, they would crack down on this. So on AliExpress when something goes wrong with something you buy, like you buy, actually I bought a accessory for the Ronin SC on AliExpress and it just doesn't work, it doesn't fit on the gimbal. So I said what you do is open a dispute. It's the stupidest way for resolving, for providing basic customer service you could possibly think of. There's no, hi, this doesn't work, contacting the marketplace, you have to dispute it and no one really knows why the renders hate it probably because they risk getting kicked off but many times they will message you saying don't dispute, please close the dispute. So they're basically trying to get you to not go through the correct channel for getting a refund on AliExpress. So you can see why I say AliExpress is a terrible marketplace because, and this is it in black and white, this is basically a major seller on AliExpress telling you not to use the normative mechanism for resolving issues on AliExpress if your headphones come not working they're saying don't do a dispute, contact us and that's just really not okay either if I were a marketplace you can't have that kind of stuff going on. So the second paragraph is if you have any problem by product, one, don't leave feedback or disputes with saying even if your stuff is terrible please don't leave us a bad review. Two, contact us should you get solutions. So I'm not claiming that this is what Hawaii does. I'm not leveling that direct claim but what I am saying is what is going on and what makes these websites so dangerous for consumers and unreliable is that if you have customers doing this stuff they're telling people basically if you buy a measuring tape and it's crap don't leave a bad review, contact us and we'll send you a little bribe and if the measuring tape comes and it doesn't pull out any measuring tape well don't contact Amazon or don't contact the marketplace let us deal with it and again it's a very deliberate calculated ploys on the one side to prevent any negative reviews don't discourage people from leaving reviews discourage people from going through the normal complained channels on the marketplace and on the other hand it's an enticement for people to leave artificially good reviews by giving them worthless enticements, bribes essentially so that's what is going on and now here we have the big reveal, the bribe card so this is a front side, a why this is literally what came from the envelope front side says a why get VIP promo code here and then this is the scroll I just told you about just to be transparent and on the back side is the bribe offer here it says a why leave us five star, get gifts send us five star screenshot just gonna make sure this guy gets in focus if you have a new order in Hawaii, that's step two step three is send order to get free gift if you have any problems about product don't leave feedback or dispute contact us, you could get solution okay now finally it's in focus I'm just gonna let you guys read that for a second or two so there you go guys, bribe cards have become a thing I think it's really crappy and I did get one from Amazon and I'm definitely not like I don't I haven't contacted their customer service enough times unfortunately some of the stuff I bought this stuff from dubious merchandise didn't work but I'm gonna let them know because I do think that marketplaces that want to sell to Western consumers and operating the West need to operate by Western general Western business standards and in normal Western business standards transparent black and white bribery and request to circumvent customer service channels is not acceptable so thank you guys for watching I'd like to get more videos from me please feel free to hit the subscribe button and if you're on Reddit do feel free to follow me or drop me a message or be in touch and thank you guys for watching