EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Here’s how Amazon prevents online holiday fraud
Amazon is taking action in several key areas of its e-commerce business to help ensure holiday shoppers don’t fall victim to cybercriminals.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Amazon executives Scott Knapp, VP of worldwide buyer risk prevention, Kebharu Smith, associate general counsel and director of the Counterfeit Crimes Unit, and Claire O’Donnell, VP of selling partner trust & store integrity, about specific steps the online giant is following to guard against holiday fraud. Knapp also looked ahead to some of the biggest e-commerce security issues for 2026.
How does Amazon prevent impersonation scams during the holidays?
Scott Knapp: When busy shopping activity surges, it’s likely that attempts to commit impersonation scams will too. During the holiday season and throughout the year, we work to help educate consumers on how to avoid scams, ensure they know it’s us, and take action against bad actors.
In 2024 alone, we initiated takedowns of more than 55,000 phishing websites and 12,000 phone numbers being used as part of impersonation schemes. We also partner with law enforcement across the globe to ensure scammers are held accountable.
How are you cracking down on counterfeit products?
Kebharu Smith: We have a zero-tolerance policy for counterfeit or intellectual property-infringing products and proactively combat fraud. This starts with a robust seller verification process and listing restrictions, followed by additional proactive controls.
Amazon’s systems consistently monitor selling accounts to identify anomalies or changes in account information, behaviors, and other risk signals. We couple this with automated technology that continuously scans billions of products, and attempted changes to products, daily in our store, leveraging advanced machine learning and expert human investigators to proactively identify risks, including the creation of new listings and changes to existing listings. In 2024, Amazon's proactive controls blocked more than 99% of suspected infringing listings before a brand ever had to find and report them.
[Read more: Amazon launches industry effort to stop online counterfeiting]
In the instance counterfeits make it into our store, Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) partners with internal teams, brands, and global law enforcement partners to aggressively pursue these fraudsters.
The CCU shares data in real-time with law enforcement, which helps law enforcement take quick action against these bad actors and uses civil suits to pursue illicit proceeds and bar tbad actors from Amazon’s stores.
Since 2020, CCU has pursued over 24,000 bad actors globally using civil and criminal actions, secured over $180 million in court-ordered restitution and judgments for brands and victims, initiated over 200 civil actions, and their partnerships have resulted in prison sentences for over 65 individuals.
We have also identified, seized, and appropriately disposed of more than 15 million counterfeit products worldwide, preventing them from harming customers or being resold elsewhere in the retail supply chain in 2024.
How are you ensuring the accuracy and legitimacy of product reviews?
Claire O’Donnell: Product reviews are core to the Amazon shopping experience, providing customers with invaluable insights and honest opinions from fellow shoppers. We invest significant resources including machine learning models that analyze thousands of data points to detect risk, and expert investigators that use sophisticated fraud-detection tools to analyze and prevent fake reviews from ever appearing in our store. Amazon proactively blocked more than 275 million suspected fake reviews from our store in 2024.
We have a zero-tolerance approach to fake reviews, and suspend, ban, or take legal action against those who violate our policies. In addition to the action we take to proactively monitor and protect our store, we go upstream to prevent fake reviews at the source and pursue those who attempt to profit off fake reviews. Taking legal action against fake review brokers ensures that we hold these bad actors accountable, stop their illicit schemes at the source, and prevent them from harming customers in Amazon’s store and beyond.
As a result of our legal actions in 2024, over 40 fake review brokers and related websites have ceased their illicit activity attempting to abuse Amazon’s store. In the last two years, Amazon has taken legal action against 115 fake review brokers. example, in October, Amazon and the Better Business Bureau joined forces in our second joint lawsuit against fake review brokers, demonstrating our continued commitment to protecting customers from deceptive practices.
What does Amazon see as the biggest e-commerce security threats for 2026?
Scott Knapp: Impersonation scams and account security are among the biggest e-commerce threats and are an industry-wide issue. We work hard to stop scams at the source and consumers can help themselves by adopting good security practices – don’t share passwords or SMS one-time passcodes or adopt passkeys across online accounts.
We know bad actors will continue to evolve their tactics, and that is why Amazon is consistently working to combat all forms of fraud to keep our customers safe.
