Amazon recently banned some sellers of large Chinese electronics brands like Aukey and Mpow that reportedly do hundreds of millions in sales on the sh

Amazon internal messages show the FTC is prodding the tech giant to punish fake-review schemers

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2021-05-22 03:00:05

Amazon recently banned some sellers of large Chinese electronics brands like Aukey and Mpow that reportedly do hundreds of millions in sales on the shopping site each year. The bans followed a database leak that appeared to tie some of the brands to paid-review schemes, which Amazon prohibits and says it strictly polices.

But while some press coverage implied that Amazon took these actions in response to the database leak, internal employee messages viewed by Recode show that pressure from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) led to at least one of the notable bans. Communications between Amazon employees viewed by Recode also appear to expose an inconsistent punishment system in which employees need special approval for suspending certain sellers because of their sales numbers, while some merchants are able to keep selling products to Amazon customers despite multiple policy violations and warnings.

The leaked internal messages also revealed several other instances in recent months of FTC inquiries pressuring Amazon to take action against merchants engaging in fake-review schemes. Amazon has long said that it aggressively polices fake reviews, but the frequency with which the FTC has pressured the company to police merchants that run paid-review programs has not been previously known.

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