Helping sellers restore their accounts, key figures in Amazon bribery case arrested

An Amazon consultant was sentenced to prison last Friday for a bribery scheme that was key to helping his clients gain advantages that other third-party sellers might not have .

In the plea agreement, the employee admitted that he had bribed an Amazon insider with $100,000 during his time at Amazon . However, the employee who received the bribe was later discovered and fired.

In addition to this employee, five defendants were indicted in the case in September 2020 , four of whom will stand trial in October 2022.

At a sentencing hearing on Friday, U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said the consultant used his knowledge and connections from his time at Amazon to position himself by manipulating listings on the Amazon marketplace.

The person is accused of being a key link in the bribery ring. The consultant paid contacts in India to restore frozen accounts, steal confidential information, and attack competitors who hindered their bribery. A seller had previously paid the defendant $200,000 to successfully restore an account.

The alleged illegal services also include stealing confidential business information about Amazon's algorithms, restoring suspended accounts and products, circumventing Amazon warehouse inventory fees, falsely reporting inventory losses, and increasing attacks on competing sellers and product listings.

The content of the previous indictment was roughly that these people increased the storage limits of third-party sellers in Amazon warehouses, provided third-party sellers with requests for sales of restricted products that were originally worthless, and provided these sellers with inside information about advertising campaigns and product listings.

Bribery gangs "help" sellers through unreasonable and illegal channels, which affects fair competition in the market and is unfair to other sellers. However, as Amazon's supervision is also strengthened, such cases can be discovered in a timely manner, which to a certain extent protects more sellers from being harmed.

It is understood that Amazon has fired several employees who helped the consultant commit the crime.

Amazon

Bribery Case

Former Employee