Amazon sided with the buyer because you neglected to respond to Amazon's email. That's on you...not Amazon. To make the claim that you were "Scammed by Amazon's A-to-Z Guarantee" is a bit disingenuous to say the least.
A more apropos title may have been, "I didn't respond Amazon's first claim email and they sided with the buyer".
I think you can only file a claim for up to 90 days past the date of delivery.
(OP here) Yes, I definitely made a mistake--I saw the email and naively assumed that Amazon would deny the claim since the phone clearly was not stolen. I made an assumption that they had access to Verizon's stolen phone database, or that they would decline it since it had been nearly 4 months since the phone was sold. As well, this hit my inbox right around Techstars Demo Day, so I was in full presentation rehearsal mode and was sleep-deprived to boot, so I wasn't closely paying attention to my email inbox.
The point I'm making with this post is that Amazon needs to push harder to change its policies for individual sellers. It should not be acceptable for a buyer to claim a phone as stolen nearly 4 months after purchase, and for Amazon to accept that claim as true. Amazon has enough clout as a huge corporation to make this happen.
And my point is that I fail to see how you go from your own mistake (not responding to the claim) to you being scammed by Amazon. I take issue with your post mentioning scam at all. You dropped the ball from your own end and you came up on the short end of the stick. You weren't "scammed".
You get more attention using the word "scam" falsely then by using a watered down approach to writing a blog post headline.
I won't even mention the word that is used to describe this since it is so well known AND I'M GETTING TIRED OF IT.
Said OP of course knows this just look at the root website erica.biz.
Anyway forgetting for a second the OP's admission of "guilt" (by not responding) I will mention that the many times over the years that I have won something it's always been because the other side a) doesn't present their case well or b) is to lazy to even present their case. c) presents so much detail they confuse the decision makers. d) more things which I don't have time to get into right now so that's a short list.
Keep contemporaneous notes, facts, data so when the decision makers in a dispute need to make a decision they have what they need to decide in your favor. My experience with this dates back prior to the IBM PC btw. It has won me many "battles".
There are several ways Amazon could have prevented this. I wrote this post to bring attention to ways in which buyers can scam legitimate sellers using Amazon's "A-to-Z Guarantee."
1) Amazon can (and should!) require sellers to post the IMEI (unique identifier) of each cell phone to Amazon as part of the sale process.
2) Amazon can then easily verify whether an IMEI has been listed as stolen before allowing the item to be posted.
3) If the buyer claims a cell phone as stolen after purchase, Amazon will have the IMEI and can verify this with the carrier. In my case, it was definitely not stolen.
This still leaves a gap where the buyer could purchase the phone, tell the carrier it has been stolen, and then get a refund--but the buyer in this case would not be able to use the phone, since that Galaxy Nexus model only works on Verizon. Carriers are working on a database (that should be live this month according to news sources) that will enable carriers to report stolen phones to each other, so in that case the buyer would not end up with a workable phone.
Currently, Amazon doesn't do any of this, and their policies enable buyers to scam legitimate sellers. I'm asking Amazon to put tighter policies in place to prevent fraud.
I see that you not only didn't make my note on Medium public, but you actually fucking deleted it and I was no more or less critical of you there, than here.
So, since you seem to be in the business of speaking to other entrepreneurs, I can only surmise that by "speaking" you mean, in one direction and you aren't at all interested in "listening" if it's critical of your position...
Why should they not be able to claim it after 4 months? If it truly was a stolen phone I don't think that there should be a short time limit, they might not discover it right away.
Is it normal for people to realize that someone stole her phone only after it has been missing for 4 months? My naive assumption would be that people tend to report these kinds of things within a few days, or a week at most (if for no other reason than to prevent theft of service).
I think the idea is that Amazon would rather have actual businesses using their service instead of people getting rid of old stuff. Dealing with returns is the main reason why I've never attempted to sell anything on Amazon.
A more apropos title may have been, "I didn't respond Amazon's first claim email and they sided with the buyer".
I think you can only file a claim for up to 90 days past the date of delivery.