Seems legit.
It seemed like a great victory for consumers when Walmart announced that it would price-match select online retailers, including Amazon.com. However, because we’re not evil, we didn’t foresee how some people would misuse the price-matching privilege to scam Wally World into selling them video game consoles at cut-rate prices.
Kotaku reported this evil scheme that will ruin price-matching for everyone earlier today. It appears to have started when Sears accidentally listed some Nintendo bundles featuring the handheld 3DS and the Wii U console for only $60.
Instead of ordering the $60 bundles online and waiting to find out whether Sears would cancel the orders, people simply went to stores with the console in stock and asked for a price match. This worked for some Reddit posters at retailers like Toys ‘R’ Us and Walmart. It didn’t work at the brick-and-mortar Sears store where one Kotaku reader works, since a manager refused to make the sale.
This evil grew into an even greater evil as someone figured out that the meaning of “for sale on Amazon.com” can be very flexible, since anyone with a registered selling account can list an item for sale. Sure, Amazon will take the listing down if you try to list a PlayStation 4, which normally sells for $400, for less than a quarter of that amount.
Yet just putting it online will create a 100% authentic-looking Amazon page, which you can then take a screen cap of or show to a store employee on your phone. Instant price-match…if the store employee is not very savvy.
Apparently, there are a lot of Walmart managers out there who are not Amazon-savvy, or Walmart didn’t figure out what was going on and stop this nonsense. That’s how some people managed to get $90 PS4s.
There’s taking advantage of deals, and there’s scamming. Using a false Amazon listing to get a price match under false pretenses is a scam, no matter how proudly you post to Twitter about it.
People Are Scamming Walmart With Bogus Cheap PS4 Listings [Kotaku]
Temporary Sears Glitch Let Some People Buy $60 3DS And Wii U Bundles [Kotaku]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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