An Amazon employee was arrested by the FBI for refunding 660,000 yuan in violation of regulations! Prime Day was boycotted!

This year's Prime Day is about to come, but something unexpected happened recently.

Amazon said recently that a former employee was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of using its systems to defraud online sellers .

Amazon said it had reported the employee to the FBI in July and that the employee used his access privileges to mistakenly issue more than 300 unauthorized refunds to himself and his colleagues while working at Amazon .

In the criminal complaint, the employee was accused of using his employee authority to improperly issue refunds of $96,508.13 (approximately RMB 660,000) to himself and others between November 2019 and February 2020 .

The case involved approximately 318 unauthorized refunds for orders purchased through the employee and eight other Amazon accounts. The refunds included refunds for high-value items such as computers and electronics that were not returned to Amazon.

Additionally, the employee operated two third-party seller accounts, Bullsy and ItemsQuest , and refunded orders he shipped to his own home or to other people he had access to.

This is not the first time that Amazon employees have been corrupt. In September, the U.S. Department of Justice charged six people with bribing Amazon employees to obtain benefits that violated Amazon's own rules, such as restoring suspended third-party seller accounts and product listings, approving sellers' appeals, providing Amazon's internal algorithms, and increasing sellers' storage limits.

The DOJ said these individuals obtained unfair competitive benefits for third-party sellers with a total value of more than $100 million.

The peak season is about to begin, and my brother-in-law will strictly investigate all kinds of illegal operations. Sellers should be more honest recently.

In addition to the endless corruption problems within Amazon, there are also constant external protests.

According to foreign media reports, nearly 100 protesters gathered outside my brother-in-law's Beverly Hills mansion recently, calling on consumers to boycott Prime Day and demanding higher wages for Amazon warehouse employees. It is reported that most of these protesters are Amazon warehouse workers .

Protesters have made a series of demands, including calls for higher taxes on wealthy Americans, improved personal protective equipment for employees, a $2 hourly wage increase for workers, an overhaul of the way the company does business, and a boycott of Prime Day .

It is worth noting that last Thursday, Amazon released data on the infection of its warehouse and store employees with the new coronavirus, saying that nearly 20,000 employees were infected with the new coronavirus from March 1 to mid- September .

In fact, as early as this spring, employees at several Amazon factories went on strike, demanding that Amazon close factories with positive cases.

In August, more than 100 demonstrators gathered outside CEO Jeff Bezos' Washington, D.C., mansion and built a guillotine outside his front door to protest Amazon workers' wages.

Among them, a man named Small was the organizer of several strikes. He called for higher safety standards during the epidemic and was subsequently fired by Amazon's Staten Island warehouse.

In addition, with Prime Day approaching, both American buyers and Chinese sellers are looking forward to the implementation of a new round of US stimulus packages, but this time it was rejected by Trump . On October 6 , Trump posted on social media that he had instructed White House negotiators to stop negotiations with congressional Democrats on a new round of fiscal stimulus plans until the November election.

Trump's suspension of money distribution is not good news for sellers. Many sellers have said that their October orders will probably be cold.

(Source: Cross-border Sellers Teahouse)