Amazon hits the gray industry hard! Domestic service providers are bankrupt again

Recently, a piece of news broke out in the cross-border circle that before New Year’s Day, Amazon officially joined hands with domestic law enforcement agencies to carry out a major cleanup of gray industry service providers around Amazon!

Amazon recently released an official announcement stating that Amazon China, in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in Shanghai, Henan, Shanxi and other places, completed multiple investigations into cross-border e-commerce export gray and black industry organizations and illegal sellers on December 28.

The cases investigated this time include the illegal buying and selling of citizens' personal identity information and company business licenses, which are used to register sellers' stores on Amazon's overseas sites and resell them. At the same time, a number of service providers who registered a large number of buyer accounts to create malicious reviews and inflate orders and ratings were also investigated and dealt with.

According to the law enforcement agencies, these cases refer to the experience of another joint case handled by Amazon last year, in which a Chinese seller in the cross-border e-commerce business maliciously attacked other Chinese sellers. A seller hired relevant service providers to deliberately give bad reviews to the victim seller's store products, maliciously purchased a large number of products from the victim seller's store, and then returned them in batches, resulting in the victim seller's store being blocked. This seller and the service provider he hired were taken criminal compulsory measures by the local public security organs in October 2021, and have been formally transferred for prosecution! This is a big deal. Malicious attacks on others have led to serious consequences, and there are precedents of being held accountable in China! And it's not just the service providers involved who were arrested, the sellers who used the services are also responsible!

This series of operations is definitely related to the ACCU team established by Amazon in 2020.

Amazon's official introduction to ACCU is that it is a global anti-counterfeiting team. It is also the team that communicates and collaborates most with law enforcement agencies in various countries within Amazon. On the surface, it is about fighting counterfeiting, but in fact, as long as it involves illegal gray industries, ACCU will cooperate with local law enforcement agencies to enforce cross-border law.

A well-known incident was that in the middle of last year, ACCU and Henan police smashed an Amazon store number dealer’s den. They purchased a large amount of real-life identity information or business license information, then registered Amazon stores and sold them at high prices. In a short period of time, they made an illegal profit of more than 350,000 yuan!

This wave at the end of this year is targeting store account circulation, as well as service providers who systematically fake orders and reviews, and it is clear that they will fight fake orders to the end. In the last case, as the sales information and account information of the account dealers were obtained by the police, a large wave of store retrials was set off, and some sellers who bought accounts from account dealers died in this wave of retrials.

Based on last time’s experience, this year-end law enforcement will definitely involve a lot of information on review fraud and account buying. It is conceivable that there will be another wave of blood and rain. Everyone should be cautious in their operations recently, and try not to use gray industry services for the time being if possible.