Six percent of buyers reported injuries or property damage from unsafe online purchases
In the sprawling bazaar of the modern internet, where goods from every corner of the world arrive at doorsteps with a single click, Australian consumer group Choice has found something troubling beneath the convenience: dangerous products moving freely through major online marketplaces, reaching real people and causing real harm. By lodging a formal super complaint with the ACCC, Choice is asking a foundational question about who bears responsibility when the marketplace is borderless but the injury is not. The regulator now has 90 days to answer.
- Novelty lighters disguised as dolls, tongue studs capable of causing internal injuries, and fire-risk sky lanterns were found openly listed on Amazon, Aliexpress, eBay, and Temu — platforms used by millions of Australians.
- A survey of 359 online shoppers revealed the harm is not hypothetical: roughly one in seventeen had suffered an actual injury or property damage from an unsafe purchase.
- Choice escalated the crisis by lodging a super complaint with the ACCC, a formal mechanism that compels the regulator to respond within 90 days and signals that voluntary platform action is no longer considered sufficient.
- Amazon and Temu removed flagged items only after being contacted — a reactive pattern that Choice argues exposes the absence of meaningful preventive screening.
- The ACCC is already suing Amazon over button battery safety failures in a children's backpack, lending the super complaint a sharper edge and raising the stakes for how regulators define platform accountability.
Beneath the optimism of record-breaking Wall Street sessions and surging AI stocks, a quieter crisis was taking shape in Australia's digital shopping landscape. Consumer advocacy group Choice had been documenting something unsettling: hazardous products moving freely through some of the world's most visited online marketplaces — Amazon, Aliexpress, eBay, and Temu — with little apparent oversight standing between a dangerous item and the person who bought it.
The products Choice identified were not obscure. Among them was a novelty doll concealing a cigarette lighter in its body, designed in a form that would appeal to children. There were also detachable tongue studs capable of causing internal injuries, and sky lanterns that posed genuine fire risks. To measure the real-world impact, Choice surveyed 359 people who had made online purchases and found that six percent had experienced actual injury or property damage — roughly 21 individuals harmed by products that should never have reached them.
The findings were serious enough to prompt a super complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, a formal escalation that obligates the regulator to respond within 90 days. Choice's director of campaigns, Andy Kelly, called on both the federal government to strengthen product safety laws and the ACCC to examine whether these platforms were doing enough to screen what they sold.
The timing carried weight. The ACCC had already announced it was taking Amazon to court over a children's backpack containing button batteries — a case that illustrated how thin the line of protection could be. When Choice approached Amazon and Temu directly, both removed the flagged items. Temu added the novelty lighter to a blocklist; Amazon pointed to its AI monitoring systems and dedicated safety teams. But these were responses that came only after harm had been identified and publicised — reactive rather than preventive, and for Choice, that distinction was precisely the problem.
Oil prices climbed to their highest level in a week as the United States and Iran offered competing accounts of their ongoing peace negotiations, leaving markets uncertain about whether a resolution to their three-month conflict was imminent. Meanwhile, Australian investors were bracing for a stronger opening on the share market, buoyed by an overnight surge in artificial intelligence stocks on Wall Street that had pushed major American indices to fresh record highs.
But beneath the market optimism lay a quieter crisis unfolding in the digital marketplace. A consumer advocacy group called Choice had uncovered a disturbing pattern: dangerous products were being sold openly on some of the world's largest online platforms—Amazon, Aliexpress, eBay, and Temu—with little apparent oversight. Among the hazards Choice documented was a novelty doll fitted with a cigarette lighter inside its body, designed to appeal to children. There were also detachable tongue studs capable of causing internal injuries, and sky lanterns that posed serious fire risks. These were not isolated oddities. Choice had surveyed 359 people who had purchased items online and found that six percent of them—roughly 21 people—had suffered actual injury or property damage as a result of buying unsafe products through these platforms.
The findings prompted Choice to lodge what's known as a super complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, a formal escalation that requires the regulator to respond within 90 days. Andy Kelly, the group's director of campaigns, told the ABC that the scale of the problem demanded action. Choice was calling on the federal government to strengthen product safety laws and on the ACCC to investigate whether online marketplaces and their suppliers were adequately screening what they sold. The timing was pointed: the ACCC had already announced it was suing Amazon over safety failures related to a children's backpack containing button batteries—a case that underscored how little protection existed between a child and a hazardous product.
When contacted by Choice, both Amazon and Temu had removed items from their platforms. Temu added the novelty lighter to a blocklist. Amazon said it deployed artificial intelligence and dedicated safety teams to monitor products. But these responses came only after the problems had been identified and publicized—a reactive posture rather than a preventive one. The other marketplaces contacted for comment had not yet responded.
On Wall Street, investors had largely shrugged off the geopolitical uncertainty to chase gains in technology. The Dow Jones rose 0.5 percent to 51,308 points, while the S&P 500 climbed 0.1 percent to 7,610 points, both hitting new records. The Nasdaq remained flat at 27,094. The real action was in individual stocks. Apple, Broadcom, Tesla, Micron Technology, and AMD each jumped between two and five percent. Hewlett Packard surged 19.5 percent after accelerating its long-term financial targets by two years. Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced plans to raise eighty billion dollars through equity offerings—including investment from Berkshire Hathaway—to fund an expansion of its artificial intelligence infrastructure. But the most dramatic move came in Marvell Technology, which soared 32.5 percent after Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, called the chipmaker the next trillion-dollar company during a speech at Computex in Taipei. Marvell designs the semiconductors and integrated circuits that power artificial intelligence data centres, and Huang's endorsement carried weight—Nvidia had invested two billion dollars in the company just three months earlier.
Meanwhile, the Middle East remained a source of friction. Tehran said it was reviewing a US proposal to end hostilities but had not communicated with Washington for several days, according to Iranian media reports. President Donald Trump countered that negotiations were ongoing. Israel continued launching strikes against Lebanon, prompting Iranian warnings that the attacks threatened to derail the talks. Against this backdrop of conflicting signals and continued military action, oil futures rebounded. Brent crude jumped 0.9 percent to 95.87 dollars a barrel, reflecting investor anxiety about a prolonged conflict that could disrupt energy supplies.
Citações Notáveis
We found that 6 per cent of people who had purchased those products online had suffered an injury or property damage or a combination of the two from purchasing an unsafe product— Andy Kelly, Choice Director of Campaigns
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does a doll with a lighter inside matter enough to be part of a formal complaint to a regulator?
Because it's not an anomaly—it's a symptom. Choice found 359 people who'd been harmed by unsafe products bought online. Six percent of them suffered actual injury or property damage. That's real people, real harm, happening at scale on platforms most of us use regularly.
But Amazon and Temu removed the items once they were told about them. Isn't that the system working?
It's the system working after the fact. They only removed things after Choice identified them and went public. That's not prevention—that's damage control. And it only happened because a consumer group did the work the platforms should have been doing all along.
What makes this a super complaint rather than just a regular complaint?
A super complaint forces the regulator to respond within 90 days and demands systemic change, not just individual fixes. Choice is saying this isn't about one bad product—it's about whether these entire marketplaces are fit for purpose.
Do we know if the ACCC will actually investigate?
They have to respond within 90 days, but responding and investigating are different things. What's clear is that the ACCC is already in court with Amazon over button batteries in a backpack. This complaint gives them more ammunition to argue the problem is widespread.
Why would a company like Temu or Amazon allow a lighter disguised as a toy to be sold in the first place?
Scale and profit. These platforms host millions of products from thousands of sellers. Monitoring everything perfectly is expensive. AI helps, but it's not foolproof. And if a product sells, there's financial incentive to let it stay until someone complains loudly enough.