Making tens of millions a year by "intercepting and selling" Amazon's hot products? A TRO gray industry chain has emerged!

Prime Day After a brief surge in orders, many sellers' stores entered a "sales cooling-off period", with a sharp drop in conversions and sluggish demand becoming common pain points.

However, there is never an off-season for various challenges on the cross-border road. Just as sellers are working hard to adjust their operating strategies to adapt to market changes, new platform policies and audits have been issued frequently recently.

In addition to the regulatory pressure from the platform, many lawless elements take advantage of the situation and maliciously attack sellers' listings.

If you are in the Amazon, you will inevitably be hit by TRO.

For Amazon sellers, it is not uncommon for popular products to be sued by various rogue law firms and receive temporary injunctions. Incidents emerge one after another, whether it is malicious prosecution by rogue law firms or accidentally touching the minefield of infringement, many sellers are really miserable.

What is even more eye-opening for sellers is that TRO can even develop into an industrial chain, with some criminals making tens of millions of dollars a year from it. What is the trick behind this?

It is learned that some sellers have revealed in the forum recently that a special TRO gang has developed a set of "interception and operation strategies" , that is, targeting hot-selling listings, applying for patents for the products sold and making malicious TRO claims.

"This kind of behavior has happened before but not on such a large scale this time. I don't know how many groups like this there are, but any one of them has thousands of people. If this continues, more sellers will go bankrupt in the near future." A seller said angrily.

It is reported that these TRO gangs have created a large number of interception groups and created a complete interception process to teach each other. From the leaked strategy map, after these gangs screen industries and categories and determine the intercepted products, they complete the interception through a series of professional operations such as patent registration, targeted initial screening, and effectiveness reinforcement, so as to maliciously claim compensation from sellers and realize profit.

▲ The picture comes from the seller’s disclosure

Judging from the conversations within the group, these gangs mainly target products with high sales and good market prospects, and with the help of patent agencies, they lock down the number and sales of infringing businesses. Some even successfully claimed more than 4 million yuan from a domestic business.

Many sellers are also complaining about this rampant phenomenon:

"The US website keeps TROing. It turns out that the "special task force" is scared."

"The sellers are suffering. They are being hunted down like sheep, and the government has no protection mechanism at all."

"It turns out that the headquarters is in the aircraft/telegraph area. It has evolved into a black and gray industry chain. No wonder there are more and more TROs emerging."

"When you encounter a TRO, the best way is to sue the other party. The validity of most so-called patents is questionable. Just find a good intellectual property lawyer to sue the other party."

For a long time, malicious prosecutions by various rogue black law firms have made many sellers defenseless. The TRO gray industry chain that has emerged now is a combination of standardization and specialization, attacking Amazon's hot-selling listings through group crimes and making illegal profits from them.

It is learned that the number of TRO incidents this year has increased significantly compared to previous years. Many sellers have worked hard for half their lives to push their products to the best-selling list, but they are back to the old days after being maliciously sued.

According to a seller’s feedback, he was TRO’d by GBC in March and Keith again in early May. To make matters worse, Amazon deducted more than 50,000 USD from his account, causing him to suffer heavy losses in a short period of time.

Not only that, even if a settlement is successfully reached with the claimant, a store that has been frozen due to infringement may not be successfully unblocked. One seller revealed that after his account was TROed, he forgot to delete the TROed trademark, and the account was directly deactivated after the Amazon system detected keyword infringement.

"Originally, there were about 200 items in the account, and I could get 2,000 US dollars back after selling them. I was going to use this money to settle the dispute. Now the settlement money is not enough. There is no point in appealing because the account will not be restored after the settlement." The seller said helplessly.

We have previously reported on many TRO incidents in the [Infringement Warning] column , such as the recent incident in which a popular Amazon product went bankrupt and more than 500 sellers were sued in court.

Once receiving a TRO, sellers are likely to face difficulties such as having their stores and funds frozen, which will seriously affect their normal sales behavior. The hot-selling listings that are sued are also likely to plummet. In addition, they face legal risks. If not handled in a timely manner, they may be permanently banned from trading by the platform.

For this reason, sellers need to strengthen infringement detection during the sales process, carefully check keywords, descriptions, patents, etc. before selecting products and putting them on sale, and avoid using unauthorized brand trademarks or patents; secondly, remember to regularly check for infringement risks to ensure the safety of store operations.

More importantly, you should always abide by the platform's compliance operating rules to avoid illegal operations so as not to give criminals any opportunity to take advantage.

If you encounter a TRO, the first reaction of sellers is to immediately suspend all links to the sales store and set the product inventory to 0. At the same time, they should promptly remove and delete the infringing links to avoid further losses.

According to the summary of sellers, there are three main ways to deal with it:

1. Actively respond to the lawsuit: If the store, account funds, and goods are of high value, you can choose to respond to the lawsuit and make it clear that the product does not involve infringement. The disadvantage is that it is expensive and time-consuming, and it is suitable for sellers with sufficient capital chain or lawyer resources.

2. Reach a settlement: Contact the claimant to reach a negotiated settlement agreement and pay a certain amount of settlement money. The agreement should include the terms and conditions agreed by both parties to resolve the dispute.

3. Abandoning the store: If you cannot afford the high compensation or litigation costs, you can only choose to give up accepting the store, account funds, and goods payment. You must ensure that the account collection information is not repeated with other stores to avoid freezing the funds in other accounts.

Infringement has always been a minefield that Amazon sellers try to avoid. Once it is seriously violated, it is very likely that both the goods and the store will be lost. However, although many sellers are subjectively unwilling to infringe, there are still many rogue black law firms that maliciously sue, and now even a special TRO gang has developed, which can be said to be hard to guard against and hard to avoid.

What do you want to say about this? Welcome to leave a message in the comment area~ For more information on infringement, you can pay attention to the [Infringement Warning] column to avoid stepping on the red line of hot product infringement in time.