Q&A: Stealing from AliExpress
Stealing from AliExpress
Question
When you join AliExpress, you get a discount on your first purchase on the site. Is it permitted to open a new user account each time you buy something in order to get the discount? If I already did this, am I obligated to return the money? How?
Answer
I’m not sufficiently familiar with this, but I’m surprised they don’t identify your IP address and prevent it. If they do identify it, then it seems to me you can try until they stop allowing it. If they don’t identify it, then in my opinion it’s forbidden, although one could argue the point.
Discussion on Answer
This is about making the purchase through an Android app.
What is the basic principle? If they have a potential way to block it and choose not to, does that mean it’s permitted?
I think that even so, at the very least it isn’t proper. I find it hard to determine that there is a prohibition here.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but to me it sounds forbidden. They offer a huge one-time discount to a new user, with the clear purpose of bringing people into their “customer club.”
You are not a new user. And morally speaking, it didn’t help them at all that you added another email to the site; you only imposed a negligible extra load on their servers.
This doesn’t seem to me any different from any sale that is limited to one unit per customer—where it’s always possible to game the responsible system, and it’s always theft.
Where am I wrong?
In my opinion, they can key in on checking past purchases made with the same card, and if so, cancel the discount.
A home IP address is dynamic in most cases, meaning it changes after some period of disconnection from the network (for example, turning off the router). In principle, when מדובר in a standard website, the site has no way to identify a user who deletes cookies and the like or makes sure to change their IP address. There is a method called fingerprinting that comes close, by saving a combination of details that are hard for the user to change (for example, browser, operating system, etc.), but as far as I know they usually don’t use that.