Amazon launches industry effort to stop online counterfeiting
Amazon is enabling online retailers to cooperatively combat the sale of counterfeit goods on their platforms.
The e-tail giant is introducing the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX), an industry collaboration that allows participating e-commerce retailers to share information about confirmed counterfeiters who attempted to use their online stores to try to sell counterfeit products.
As soon as one of the participating retailers catches a counterfeiter and shares the account information through the exchange, all the other stores participating in ACX can know about that counterfeiter. Each participant makes its own independent decisions about whether and how to use the information in ACX.
An independent third party provides anonymized access for participants to share and receive information. Through ACX, Amazon says it has already detected hundreds of matching accounts where the same counterfeiter tried to create selling accounts on Amazon and at least one other online store.
“We want our customers to have confidence in their shopping experience and for brands to know they are protected from counterfeits," said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon VP of Selling Partner Services. “As we laid out in our blueprint for private and public sector partnership to stop counterfeiters, we think it is critical to share information about confirmed counterfeiters to help the entire industry stop these criminals earlier. By leading the way in creating an industry-wide solution to share information about known counterfeiters, we are excited to have helped improve the industry’s collective ability to fight counterfeit crime, providing consumers and rights owners with greater peace of mind.”
Amazon has been working with other members of ACX to pilot the exchange, and says other retailers and marketplace service providers are welcome to join.
Amazon aggressively targets counterfeiting
The ACX is the latest in a long series of steps Amazon has taken to deter and detect counterfeiters attempting to sell fraudulent goods on its platform. In 2022, Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit sued or referred for investigation over 1,300 criminals in the U.S., U.K., E.U., and China.
The company continued to partner with brands and law enforcement to stop bad actors, and also worked to identify, seize, and dispose of over 6 million counterfeit products. According to Amazon, this effort prevented the disposed counterfeit goods from being resold anywhere in the supply chain.
Amazon says it stopped over 800,000 attempts to create new selling accounts in 2022, preventing those bad actors from publishing any products for sale. During that year, the company also reported that adoption of its brand protection programs continued to grow as the absolute number of valid notices of infringement filed by brands in Amazon Brand Registry decreased by over 35%.