Seller sentenced to 20 years in prison for using Amazon VC account to make money

This case started with the arrest of a man involved in the case. This seller applied for multiple supplier accounts to deliver goods to Amazon, then claimed that they were lost during transportation and forged evidence to defraud Amazon of compensation. Over the years, he made a total profit of more than US$740,000.

Then, by digging deeper into this person's relationships and confessions, he revealed that he and another small team of accomplices, about 4 or 5 people, also used the same method to defraud Amazon of more than one million US dollars.

I talked about supplier accounts before, and everyone generally didn’t have a good impression of them. All kinds of means of mutual attack in the category used to come from VC accounts, including but not limited to changing the other party’s product main picture, changing the category, giving bad reviews, and liking bad reviews. In short, the purpose is to make the other party have no orders. For example, the following picture change can be said to be a typical example of VC changing the listing maliciously.

The first point is to trick the sellers, saying that there are 10,000 earrings in the package without asking the buyers to report it. Then from the second to the fourth point, various sensitive words are put, such as the package is toxic, low quality, built-in lithium battery, and brand words of various big-name jewelry, for fear that the algorithm will not be able to find this product. The last point is to curse the buyers viciously, so that any consumer who sees this page will report it.

Such malicious page modification is rare. When VC was at its most rampant, it only changed the page to adult category, changed sensitive words to make you take it off the shelves, etc. In comparison, there was no personal attack. Even in the "VC Python Incident" that year, a pet seller lost the main link that the store relied on for survival due to the crazy attack of VC and eventually went bankrupt. At that time, the "Python" did not use such despicable means, and even offended the majority of consumers.

However, this VC account has been used in many ways by American sellers, who have even developed a way to take advantage of Amazon. Amazon will soon plug this loophole, and Amazon is now working with domestic law enforcement to catch illegal sellers and service providers. In the past two days, more than 200,000 counterfeit goods were seized in Guangdong, Jiangxi and other places, and all the suspects have been detained.

Those who try to take advantage of the official resources will definitely be targeted, so it’s better for everyone not to have any crooked ideas.

However, there is one good thing about this news. Amazon will definitely further control the permissions of supplier accounts such as VC and VE to prevent such loopholes from occurring in the future. Malicious attacks using VC accounts will become less and less common in the future.