Amazon's internal corruption exposed! Paying sellers to attack rivals

Recently, foreign media broke the news that they had obtained anonymous testimony from a former Amazon employee, confirming that there were insiders in Amazon's mall business who accepted external bribes to improve the efficiency of specific sellers and even help them fight their competitors!

This former Amazon employee named Rohit Kadimisetty took the initiative to publicly state to the media and law enforcement agencies that after leaving Amazon in 2015, he founded a third-party business consulting company. On the surface, he provided business advice and assistance to various companies and helped them customize operation plans. In fact, Rohit secretly used his connections within Amazon to sell various services that violated Amazon's policies and were even illegal, such as helping third-party sellers unblock stores, selling confidential internal data, and charging sellers to strike against another designated seller (usually a competitor).

After Rohit sold these illegal services, he would bribe some of his connections within Amazon to disable or remove rival products, or direct platform shoppers to certain specific products. Rohit's consulting 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.

As for the bribery within Amazon, only Rohit himself and a few of his cronies were involved. This matter had not been discovered for a long time until Amazon launched an internal investigation last year, and several insiders were found out. However, this did not affect Rohit at all. He replaced a group of internal personnel to continue the bribery, and was only recently controlled and prosecuted by the police. During this time when it was not exposed, Rohit 's company helped many third-party sellers to unblock their accounts, including illegal products with fire hazards and illegal health products, allowing these accounts that should not have been selling to resume normal sales, causing huge losses to consumers and the Amazon platform.

According to the prosecutors’ estimate, the entire gang caused at least hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses last year, including losses from the attacked sellers, losses to Amazon, and profits from sellers who illegally used illegal means, etc. The indictment against Rohit also shows that over the years he bribed Amazon employees to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and his own profits were even more staggering.

In the past two years, the government and Amazon have been taking action against gray market service providers, and each time they have been more severe than the last . This time, they even dug out the source of the gray market . In the final analysis, Amazon has suffered a great loss from gray market service providers.

Because a large number of sellers flocked to Amazon last year due to the pandemic, Amazon China’s business development work was completed early and no longer posted links, so a number of service providers were selling so-called internal business development links (which were actually fake backlinks). Amazon had to force a second review and block a number of stores registered through these illegal links. The sellers lost money and thought that the official was playing tricks and refused to restore 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.