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December 20, 2018 05:22 pm PST

How Amazon's crackdown on dirty sellers has made it easier for dirty sellers to kill good sellers' accounts

Josh Dzieza's deeply reported story on the dirty tricks used by Amazon's third-party sellers to beat their rivals is an outstanding read, and an important contribution to the debate about how automated systems that police user conduct fail at scale.

For many years, Amazon has balanced on a knife-edge between encouraging more third-party sellers (allowing sellers to fulfill direct from China, allowing sellers to send inventory to Amazon's warehouses for direct shipping, etc) and policing those sellers to weed out counterfeits and scams.

But every time Amazon creates a new zero-tolerance crime that can get sellers kicked off the platform, it also creates a weapon that other sellers can use to get rid of their rivals. Once, sellers rose in Amazon's search-ranking by paying people on Fiverr to write five-star reviews of their products. Today, sellers rise in the ranks by paying Fiverr jobbers to write five-star reviews of their rival's products, which gets the rivals booted off of Amazon.

There are so many shenanigans that Amazon sellers use to hurt their rivals. One interesting maneuver involves defrauding the US Patent and Trademark Office: if you show Amazon that you own a trademark, they'll give you an expedited process to boot people off the platform who violate that mark. But the US Patent and Trademark Office (incredibly) does not require any authentication to change the email address associated with a trademark, so scammers simply steal the trademark, get the real sellers kicked off of Amazon, and then market their counterfeits in place of the legitimate goods. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/1lYU1OSGW84/weaponizing-0-tolerance.html

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