“Anyone in violation of our Code faces discipline,” says Amazon. Image: Aytug Can Sencar/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images By Shannon Connellan2018-09-17 07:52:51 UTC Amazon is investigating whether employees are being bribed to leak company data to sellers, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. Employees have been allegedly handing over confidential information like search optimisation data […]
Image: Aytug Can Sencar/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Employees have been allegedly handing over confidential information like search optimisation data to independent sellers, mostly via middlemen, to give them a leg up in the $1 trillion dollar company’s marketplace, reads the report.
Plus, they’re allegedly offering sellers a way to delete negative products reviews, in return for a fee.
This comes according to both merchants who bought said information, and brokers who sold it, both of whom talked to the publisher, along with “people familiar with internal investigations.”
Amazon reportedly launched an investigation into the practice, which is apparently prevalent in China, back in May. Middlemen were said to be using the messaging service WeChat in China to make contact with Amazon employees.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed its investigation in a statement to the Journal:
“We hold our employees to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our Code faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties,” the statement reads.
“We have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them, including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews, withholding funds, and taking legal action.”
Mashable has reached out to Amazon for further comment.
Attempting to compete with the likes of Alibaba, Amazon permitted a host of foreign third-party sellers to list directly on its site. This saw a flooding of the retailer with inferior products, with some of these sellers paying for positive reviews.
Even though Amazon has revamped its system to amplify reviews from customers who genuinely bought the product, sellers using paid reviewers have found ways around this — the podcast talks to a reviewer at a company using the strategy of tying fake accounts to random addresses all over the U. S. and shipping actual products to them.
So, there are loopholes for paid positive reviews. If, wielding a few tips and tricks straight from Amazon employees, you can also delete negative reviews from your products, this would mean a seriously warped marketplace for consumers.
Amazon could have quite the task on its hands.
