It’s been a busy week at Amazon – sort of a “spring cleaning,” if you will. On Wednesday, the company started flagging products that had fake reviews and unsatisfied customer responses to cut back on returns and products that didn’t meet its customers’ standards.
Then, on Thursday, Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) filed three lawsuits against a litany of companies that Amazon has branded as "bad actors." This bunch, however, was playing a different game.
Amazon said that the defendants in the lawsuits registered with Brand Registry, then created fake, disposable websites using product images scraped from the Amazon store, which they used as false evidence to make thousands of claims that selling partners were violating their copyrights.
When Amazon detected this attempted abuse, it acted quickly to protect customers and selling partners while also shutting down the accounts of the alleged violators.
The Amazon Brand Registry, according to SellerLabs, is an “official Amazon program where approved brand owners (or their registered agents) are on file with Amazon as trademarked brands. Being on file unlocks a preferred tier of Amazon services (protections and benefits) not available to unregistered brands or resellers.”
Amazon is sending a strong signal
Amazon doesn’t take kindly to violations of its policies, but this is new ground the company is plowing, trying to weed out anyone who does anything harmful to customers, brands, or its selling partners.
For the moment, those sellers are off of Amazon’s platform and out of consumers’ lives, and the company vows that it will continue to hold any person or company accountable who tries something like this.
“We know how important it is to our selling partners to have a consistent Amazon store experience, and we will be unrelenting in our pursuit of bad actors who attempt to undermine that experience,” said Kebharu Smith, director of Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit.
“These lawsuits should serve as a warning to anyone that uses fraud in an attempt to harm any of the millions of selling partners that work with Amazon every day.”