The internal channel of the service provider was pulled up! Amazon employees face 10 months in prison

Amazon sued internal employees for collaborating with third parties to abuse their employee privileges, access internal information, systems and tools and sell these services to third-party sellers. One of the employees has been sentenced to 10 months in prison and a fine of $50,000!

The 28-year-old Indian employee named Rohit Kadimisetty and six other current or former Amazon employees were arrested and formally charged by the police in September last year. After a long process of interrogation and evidence presentation, the employee admitted his crimes at the beginning of the year and was eventually convicted of participating in an international bribery scheme to steal confidential information.

This employee used the information and connections he had learned while working at Amazon to work with other members to provide a variety of services to third-party sellers, such as internally unblocking stores and selling competitors' confidential sales data. For this purpose, he also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe more Amazon employees to join this illegal activity.

After law enforcement officers checked the information, they found that there were many third-party sellers operated by Kadimisetty, including many top sellers in categories such as household goods, consumer electronics and dietary supplements. After receiving commissions from these sellers, they would bribe some of their connections within Amazon to disable or remove rival products, or guide platform shoppers to certain specific products. Kadimisetty's company acted as an intermediary in this. The team once grew to dozens of people, who were basically responsible for contacting third-party sellers to sell illegal services.

According to the prosecutors' estimate, the entire gang caused at least hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses last year, including losses from sellers who were attacked, losses from Amazon, and profits from sellers who illegally used illegal means, etc. The indictment against Kadimisetty also shows that he bribed Amazon employees for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, and his own profits were even more astonishing. With the sentencing of the main culprit Kadimisetty, the remaining arrested persons will also be tried before October.

In the past two years, the government and Amazon have been taking action against gray industry service providers, and each time they have been more severe than the last. This time, they even directly dug out the source of the gray industry. In the final analysis, Amazon has suffered a great loss from gray industry service providers. Because a large number of sellers flocked to Amazon last year due to the epidemic, Amazon China’s investment promotion work was completed early and no longer released links. As a result, a number of service providers sold so-called internal investment promotion links (actually forged backlinks) on a large scale. Amazon had to force a second review to block a wave of stores registered through these illegal links. The sellers lost money and thought that the official was playing tricks and refused to give up their accounts, so they continued to complain to Amazon.

In this incident, Amazon and the sellers are definitely losers, and only the service providers make money and run away. If Amazon can really crack down on these gray industry service providers who cheat on both ends, it will be more beneficial than harmful to us sellers.

Several people at the source of this incident were also involved in malicious attacks, posting bad reviews, closing stores, and other businesses. Catching this group of internal gray market sources is also an explanation to a large number of white hat sellers. After all, everyone has been attacked by malicious attacks to some extent. This action can effectively purify the business environment on Amazon.

In fact, if we expand on these two aspects, both are beneficial to white hat players. There will be less malicious competition and less unfair competition on Amazon. As long as sellers are not highly dependent on gray industry services, they will definitely benefit more from it.

If you are a seller who frequently uses these illegal operations, you have to re-plan your operation route. Under the current situation, even if some service providers can still engage in gray production, it is only a matter of time before they are investigated. In the future, Amazon will gradually become fully compliant, and only refined white hat methods can last for a long time.

Amazon has not yet announced its response to this situation. If Amazon really wants to engage in a wave of illegal gray industries, it will definitely respond positively at this time and launch a large-scale and strict internal anti-corruption work to uncover more sources of black technology services. There may be some shocks in the service sector in the future, so please operate with caution.