The Australian Fair Trading Commissioner will investigate whether or not shops on a large scale second-hand goods as new sales. The investigation follows reports that a shop hdd’s with movies, and malware like new sold.
Thursday, reported The Sydney Morning Herald about a customer of the retail chain Dick Smith, which is a portable Seagate hard drive 1.5 TB had bought. However, there was only 30GB to be recognized; there were nine movie downloads on the hard drive and hardware problems, or malware was found by his own content on the disk is corrupt.
Dick Smith gave to reluctantly admit that the drive was previously returned by a customer. However, it would be an exception, but at the same time let the shop know: “We have procedures to all returned items thoroughly to check and reset to factory defaults, but in this case, that didn’t happen.”
The Sydney Morning Herald was more and more signals that the selling of returned products is common in various shops. According to a former employee of Dick Smith, it would also happen frequently that a second-hand-usb-drives, memory sticks, hard drives and other storage, to be sold, without the required identification are not new products.
The Fair Trading Commissioner is now a formal investigation, with the aim to determine whether abuse is systematic and widespread. The fine for corporations may be up to 1.1 million dollars per violation, with additional compensation for consumers.