As far as I can tell, a common way that Amazon Customer Service responds to inquiring from buyers is to start (or add to) a message thread between the buyer and the seller. While these messages start with a reasonable, canned intro like, "Dear Amazon Seller, This is Amazon Customer Service. A customer contacted us..."
Here seems to be the problem: There is no non-text indication that this is a message from ACS. Any buyer who sees ACS's message in the thread can simply copy that canned intro, change the order number, and change the enveloped message that claims to be from ACS, then send that modified block of text to a seller in an attempt to convince the seller that the message is really coming from ACS, because the seller cannot tell the difference.
There are probably several ways that Amazon could fix this problem. One is to make a message that is actually from ACS a different color background or different color text in the message thread. Another is just a colored ribbon at the top or colored outline of the text sent by Amazon Customer service that cannot be replicated by the buyer.
We currently have a buyer trying to defraud us with fake images, and I'm pretty confident that after we rejected him the first time, he began impersonating ACS because the wording of the complaint is odd compared to previous ACS messages, and the typical resolved/unresolved battle isn't happening. However, I can't seem to find a way to get anyone with any power to take this problem seriously.
So there are two problems here:
1. ACS messages need some indicator of authenticity that cannot be replicated by a buyer.
2. For this current customer trying to defraud us, we need ACS to either confirm or disconfirm that they are sending the messages in question, because we think that ACS isn't sending them but are (allegedly) in jeopardy of being penalized if we're wrong.
