It certainly sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but without knowing the level of this fraud it's difficult to actually judge.
If these are two of a tiny handful of instances where this has ever happened, and there's many thousands of people who have had replacements shipped to alternate addresses (e.g. work, or a holiday location) then the cost of implementing additional checks for this - even if that's just the man-hour cost of asking additional questions - could be far more than the size of the loss.
And that's ignoring any less tangible customer experience angles - there's several people in this thread alone who have said they are more likely to buy from Amazon again as a result of this kind of customer service. I had to chase a missing order up last week, and the simplicity of the interaction was amazing compared to the hours (or even days) of battling I've had with some other internet businesses when things have gone wrong, and that definitely has at least some impact on my future decisions to use the respective companies.
If these are two of a tiny handful of instances where this has ever happened, and there's many thousands of people who have had replacements shipped to alternate addresses (e.g. work, or a holiday location) then the cost of implementing additional checks for this - even if that's just the man-hour cost of asking additional questions - could be far more than the size of the loss.
And that's ignoring any less tangible customer experience angles - there's several people in this thread alone who have said they are more likely to buy from Amazon again as a result of this kind of customer service. I had to chase a missing order up last week, and the simplicity of the interaction was amazing compared to the hours (or even days) of battling I've had with some other internet businesses when things have gone wrong, and that definitely has at least some impact on my future decisions to use the respective companies.