Brand Protection Report: Amazon’s anti-counterfeit efforts
In May, 2021, we released our first Brand Protection Report, which outlines the work we’re doing to ensure that customers are able to shop from authentic products, and to protect you—the brands and millions of small and medium-sized businesses that offer authentic products for sale in our store.
In 2020, we invested more than $700 million and employed more than 10,000 people worldwide to help protect our store from fraud and abuse. Today, we use the following three strategies in our anti-counterfeiting efforts:
- Robust, proactive controls. We leverage advanced machine learning capabilities and expert human investigators to proactively protect our store from bad actors and bad products. In 2020, we prevented over six million attempts to create new selling accounts, stopping bad actors before they published a single product for sale.
- Powerful tools for brands. We empower brand owners to work with us through tools like Brand Registry, Transparency, and Project Zero. In 2020, we grew the number of brands that use our brand protection tools, and Amazon Transparency enabled the protection of more than 500 million product units.
- Holding counterfeiters accountable. The only way to permanently stop counterfeiters is to hold them accountable through criminal prosecution and litigation in the justice system. In 2020, we began reporting all confirmed counterfeiters to law enforcement agencies in Canada, China, the EU, UK, and US. This voluntary reporting helps law enforcement more effectively identify and target repeat counterfeiters across retail channels, and helps drive more successful prosecutions.
We are excited by what we were able to achieve together in 2020, but we will not rest until we get to zero counterfeits. We will continue to invest and innovate to help protect you and our customers, and to hold counterfeiters accountable.
To find out more, go to our Brand Protection Report.
Seller_fGluy2Rns9Cfx
16, 438 per day
Wow. I’m sure many were the same actor though.
Care to let us know what China did, about the counterfeiters you reported to them?
Seller_MfOP82egLoLG7
This in general is really good. We have had many counterfeiters on our brand. However, something that has happened as a negative result, Amazon has forbidden use of our own brand name in our listings we own a trademark as a slogan, as well as our brand name proper. (We are brand registered for both) but if we put the slogan now on our listing THE LISTING AUTOMATICALLY GETS DELETED (REMOVED ENTIRELY) we provided evidence of the trademark being ours, the certificate, and literally are brand registered, and we now cannot use our own trademarked slogan in the listing.
Can you please help fix this? I’m sure I’m not the only one. This shows up under “Suspected Intellectual Property Violations” which by your own admission is an Amazon bot that finds problems. No one is accusing us, we are the brand owners, yet dozens of our listings were deleted overnight and still some are yet to be recovered.
Yet at the same time, when a counterfeiter offers our brand to Vendor Central you guys accept it easily and get the sales from it, and we cannot protect our brand in this fashion. Some priorities need to be clarified.
Seller_aVmTdYD2j1uGo
Are these the same “advanced machine learning” tools that will flag a rare first edition book for a high price error because the seller has the nerve to list it for more than the original 1950’s $1.75 list price?
Seller_piL7iNoHXIzZw
That’s extremely ambitious but a very worthy and welcome goal!
Seller_0NCq3EF4apa9y
Hmm. There’s over 30,000 Amazon catalogue pages across various Marketplaces that we have reported as violating various Brands. Amazon’s reply? They have to be submitted one by one. Great. They’re all still active.
Seller_nwfBAjjFfyKge
Seller_LwUhSN3kUAXlg
Translation: we vigorously apply whatever half-arsed algorithms we can be bothered to, e.g. we make sure no one else uses whatever logo was on your USPTO application in their product images, and consider that co-equal to preventing fraud. We onboard so many sellers at such an overwhelming rate that millions of them are garbage, which means that even with an impressive 99.9% filtering rate (which I doubt they have), we’re only onboarding hundreds of fraudulent sellers per day. As with all programs, none of this applies to Amazon ipso, so if we can find a manufacturer willing to knock off your products (possibly even using 3PS data not available to the public, in violation of US law, as described in last year’s DOJ action), we’ll source from them and undercut you. Meanwhile, we’re doing everything we can to put small businesses out of business, so you can rest assured that your product will have some protections right up until you don’t have a business with which to argue with our intransigent and arbitrary brand police. We are claiming that we’re pursuing convictions of our very own sellers, which we willingly onboarded (hey, you may be next! we use AI rather than rational humans to reach a decision on “legitimate”), but like all our promises of do-gooding, we’ll provide no actual data to back any of that up.
By the way, we love our sellers! Thanks so much for being part of our community.
Seller_6sbP2UMK9rv90
Well it’s about time.
Your first mistake was flooding the site with thousands of sellers from China.
Then…
For TWO YEARS there was a MASSIVE thread over 100 pages long where we reported ‘Just launched’ sellers who were causing havock on the site… yet you sat back and did absolutely NOTHING!
Even limiting their ability to get the buy box (which I did suggest at the time) would have been a start, but it fell on deaf ears.
Your ‘advanced machine learning capabilities’ were so good that you weren’t able see that a lot of these ‘just launched’ sellers were in fact the same people who kept coming back again and again. Yet strangely, without access to all the data you have, I was able to spot them a mile off…
But of course when I reported them you did NOTHING!
Seller_T5Mv3ZCUSh7Zl
It is incumbent to note that this means every IP, authenticity, & counterfeit violation is being funneled to Federal Law Enforcement. This should sort of scare most Sellers who have had these violations in the last year (particularly if you had multiple), because it indicates that you might have a knock on the door by G-men wanting to ask you some questions and examine your records. If you weren’t keeping all of your invoices, customs documents, etc. well organized for the last five to seven years it could be at the least quite uncomfortable.
Seller_6wDXhD1w33Lp3
Nice in theory. Dreadful in execution. Legitimate brand owners are reporting their brands being hijacked, and instead of the bad actor receiving the violation, the brand owners are getting it instead with NO support.
This is not a safe place anymore for brands when we can have our IP stolen so easily and go no help from Amazon anymore.
