Amazon invested more than $700 million in brand protection in 2020
Amazon is using artificial and human intelligence to spot and prevent product counterfeiting.
Amazon invested more than $700 million and employed more than 10,000 people during 2020 to protect its online stores from fraud and abuse, according to its just-released 2020 Brand Protection report. The company leveraged a combination of machine learning capabilities and human investigators to protect its e-commerce site proactively from fraudulent sellers and products.
In addition, Amazon offers third-party sellers a variety of tools and services to help detect and prevent fraud. These include Amazon Transparency, a serialization service that protects individual product units, which the company says enabled the protection of more than 500 million product units. Other solutions include Project Zero, which provides automated protections that continuously scan Amazon’s online stores using ML; and Brand Registry, a free service that provides third-party sellers with tools that manage and protect their brand and IP rights in Amazon stores.
Amazon cited a number of other brand protection highlights from 2020 in the report, including:
• Amazon’s verification processes prevented over 6 million attempts to create selling accounts.
• Only 6% of attempted account registrations passed Amazon’s verification processes and listed products for sale.
• Amazon seized more than 2 million products that were sent to its fulfillment centers and that it detected as counterfeit before being sent to a customer. Amazon destroyed those products to prevent them from being resold elsewhere in the supply chain.
• Amazon blocked more than 10 billion suspected bad listings before they were published in its stores.
• Fewer than 0.01% of all products sold on Amazon received a counterfeit complaint from customers. Those complaints were then investigated for accuracy.
• More than 7,000 small and medium-sized businesses were connected to trusted law firms in the U.S. and Europe through IP Accelerator.
• Amazon established a Counterfeit Crimes Unit to build and refer cases to law enforcement, undertake independent investigations or joint investigations with brands, and pursue civil litigation against counterfeiters.
• Amazon continues to attempt hold counterfeiters accountable through the court system and criminal prosecution.
“Amazon was an important partner for the 1.9 million small and medium businesses that sell in our store during the pandemic. We’ve helped our selling partners keep their virtual doors open, and despite increased attempts by bad actors, continued to ensure that the vast majority of customers shop with confidence from our broad selection of authentic products,” said Dharmesh Mehta, VP, customer trust and partner support, Amazon. “Our team's relentless innovation has helped us stop 6 million attempts to create a selling account and more than 10 billion suspect listings as we continue to drive counterfeits to zero.”