PS4 Fraud Leads Walmart To Change its Price-Matching Policies

In wake of customers duping company for cheap PlayStation 4s, megaretailer amending its price-matching policies.

Walmart has changed its price-matchmaking policies to curb fraud after the retailer got scammed into selling PlayStation 4s well below their true cost recently. Several users were able to buy PS4s for as cheap as $50 at Walmart by setting up fake Amazon seller accounts, and then requesting a price-match at Walmart. As expected, the company has now wised up, and changed its policies.

"We launched online price matching because it's the right thing for our customers," a Walmart representative said. "It's making a meaningful difference for people who want to feel confident they're getting the best price, and we're committed to matching online prices going forward."

"At the same time, we can't tolerate fraud or attempts to trick our cashiers. This kind of activity is unfair to the millions of customers who count on us every day for honest value," the spokesperson added. "With this in mind, we've updated our policy to clarify that we will match prices from Walmart.com and 30 major online retailers, but we won't honor prices from marketplace vendors, third-party sellers, auction sites, or sites requiring memberships."

You can see a full breakdown of Walmart's new price-matching policy at its website.

Walmart's Black Friday deals were recently revealed, and they include deep discounts on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 bundles, among other things. You can see a full roundup of Walmart's deals here. We'll have more Black Friday coverage for you in the days ahead.

source: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps4-fraud-leads-walmart-to-change-its-price-matchi/1100-6423716/

bravo guys.  bravo.

That still doesn't solve the $60 Wii U scandal that happened the day before.

The only surprising thing is that they had such a tolerant policy before.

You have to wonder how many less high profile products than PS4 have been sold at below market prices in the past before they realized this.

Welp, we all knew it was going to happen

My thoughts exactly. Amazon's been around for a while, Wal-Mart has had plenty of time to adapt their policies to prepare for something like this.

They could easily change the policy by making it so that the website/online vendor has to have that offer currently on the website. Surely all these stores have computers hooked up to the interwebs they can check so a quick amazon search and job done, they verify it is legit and honour it.

John Lewis has a price matching thing that also does online for high priced electronics however it checks it for you over a day or so then once it confirms it, asks you to come in whenever you want to redeem their matched price.

John Lewis only price matches anything as long as: they have it in stock, it's not an online retailer like Amazon ie they need to have an actual store, and has to be within a certain radius of any john lewis store.

it does.   new policy is the item has to be in stock at the time of purchase.

It's sad to see a few cheaters ruin a very pro-consumer policy through abuse. At the same time, it had to be done. Wal-Mart's policy was just too good.

I don't think anything has been ruined for anyone. They will still price match. They are just now smarter about it and only matching "official" vendors and not third party vendors. Sounds good to me.