Reading the news on the train today I found an interesting article with data aspects – and I decided to share it with you in a short post.
A recurring topic in many discussions around data management is the current quality of the data and where peer companies stand.
Maybe it is easier to give an answer if you read this article on engadget. Summary: a couple living in Indiana ordered ca. 2’700 items from Amazon, of a value USD 1.2 Mio. They reported Amazon that they want to return the products and got their money back. In fact they never returned anything and re-sold the items, making USD 750k over 2 years.
How did they do this? According to engadget:
The Finans created hundreds of false identities and fake accounts in order to pull off their scheme.
We know how great job Amazon is doing in terms of data quality and data management. And even then this fraud was possible by temporarily tricking out Amazon’s customer deduplication algorithms (a somewhat older article but still a good summary).
Reaching good data quality is a continuous work and not a one-time effort, not just for your company but also for key players like Amazon.
