Amazon failed to adequately alert more than 300,000 customers to serious risks—including death and electrocution—that US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testing found with more than 400,000 products that third parties sold on its platform.
The CPSC unanimously voted to hold Amazon legally responsible for third-party sellers’ defective products. Now, Amazon must make a CPSC-approved plan to properly recall the dangerous products—including highly flammable children’s pajamas, faulty carbon monoxide detectors, and unsafe hair dryers that could cause electrocution—which the CPSC fears may still be widely used in homes across America.
While Amazon scrambles to devise a plan, the CPSC summarized the ongoing risks to consumers:
If the [products] remain in consumers’ possession, children will continue to wear sleepwear garments that could ignite and result in injury or death; consumers will unwittingly rely on defective [carbon monoxide] detectors that will never alert them to the presence of deadly carbon monoxide in their homes; and consumers will use the hair dryers they purchased, which lack immersion protection, in the bathroom near water, leaving them vulnerable to electrocution.
Instead of recalling the products, which were sold between 2018 and 2021, Amazon sent messages to customers that the CPSC said “downplayed the severity” of hazards.
In these messages—“despite conclusive testing that the products were hazardous” by the CPSC—Amazon only warned customers that the products “may fail” to meet federal safety standards and only “potentially” posed risks of “burn injuries to children,” “electric shock,” or “exposure to potentially dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.”
Typically, a distributor would be required to specifically use the word “recall” in the subject line of these kinds of messages, but Amazon dodged using that language entirely. Instead, Amazon opted to use much less alarming subject lines that said, “Attention: Important safety notice about your past Amazon order” or “Important safety notice about your past Amazon order.”
Amazon then left it up to customers to destroy products and explicitly discouraged them from making returns. The e-commerce giant also gave every affected customer a gift card without requiring proof of destruction or adequately providing public notice or informing customers of actual hazards, as can be required by law to ensure public safety.
Further, Amazon’s messages did not include photos of the defective products, as required by law, and provided no way for customers to respond. The commission found that Amazon “made no effort” to track how many items were destroyed or even do the minimum of monitoring the “number of messages that were opened.”
Rossmann did a review a few months ago of electrical fuses on Amazon. Very few of these electrical safety devices worked as advertised.
Yup and the all negative reviews are inexplicably removed.
If any physical store got a dangerous product, was made undeniably aware of the danger and continued to sell the product - they’d be in a lot of trouble.
Just do not buy random non brand stuff? A Fluke multimeter will work the same regardless where you buy it.
Counterfeits apply to all stores. The local store in no way has the capability or knowledge to identify them. On Amazon I could at least get reviews to tell me about it.
In any case, testing is better than believing, regardless of anything else.
we went from the amazon is burning to i am burning because of amazon
The e-commerce giant also gave every affected customer a gift card without requiring proof of destruction or adequately providing public notice or informing customers of actual hazards, as can be required by law to ensure public safety.
I was supposed to get a gift card?? I didn’t get a freakin gift card, I have to destroy it and submit a bunch of evidence to the manufacturer to get a refund.
I know cheep electronics are fun but please buy UL Listed stuff
Given that there appear to be plenty of overseas sellers that will happily counterfeit a UL stamp, or copy an entire product - including UL stamp - but with different innards, how would we even know at this point?
Nitpick: Electrocution is killing, by definition. (Perhaps they meant shock?)
Edit for those who don’t know: It’s a contraction of electric and execution.
It’s not a nitpick to know the meaning of the words we use, and how to use them. ashley.belanger@arstechnica.com and the arstechnica editors should know better.
It annoyed me too for a while but it’s changing. I can’t find a definitive source, but I’ve seen a quote from MW from 2015 which had the original meaning. Now it includes “severely injure”.