Amazon Fires Employees Over Data Leak As It Fights Seller Scams, Report Says

After investigating claims that its employees are taking bribes to sell internal data to merchants to help them increase their sales on the site, Amazon has reportedly fired several employees involved in the scams. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon let go of several workers in the U.S. and India who allegedly inappropriately accessed company data that disreputable merchants had misused. The Hill reports: Amazon is focusing its internal bribery investigation on India, a person familiar with the effort told the paper. Some employees in India and China working as customer support have said that their access to an internal database that allows them to find data about specific product performance or trending keywords has been dramatically limited. Amazon has also deleted thousand of suspect reviews, restricted sellers' access to customer data on its platform, and quashed some methods to force the site to bring up certain products higher in search results, the people told the Journal. "We have strict policies and a Code of Business Conduct & Ethics in place for our employees. We implement sophisticated systems to restrict and audit access to information," the company wrote. "We hold our employees to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our Code faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties."

"In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them, including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews, withholding funds, and taking legal action," Amazon added.

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[Anonymous Coward]

more like Amazon fires four people for leveraging IT access to information to profit off customer data. Pretty sure that qualifies as IT news for nerds.

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[jellomizer]

This seems like a clear ground to fire someone.
It isn't like they just fired someone for some mistake, or oversight. Like how Apple fired an Engineer because his daughter made a video showing the iPhone X before it was released.
These guys were given access to the data to do their work. A company like Amazon needs some degree of trust that such data isn't mishandled. These people deliberately missused it. I am more surprised that these people are not in Jail.

Good luck with that

[Snotnose]

You're trying to inject American values into Indian and Chinese cultures, both of which are wildly different from ours. I don't know about you, but when I get a code of conduct, mission statement, etc etc etc I pretty much MEGO and sign/initial at the x's. I can't imagine my Indian counterpart, living in a 3 wall house with 8 other people and a milk bottle as a toilet, is going to do anything different.

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[Anonymous Coward]

And so they get fired which is as it should be.

Which is not enough. When people systematically take bribes (part of their culture, or the data they handle for low wages is worth lots), then you loose much more than the guy who got fired after three months. Especially if the next guy takes bribes in the same fashion.

There are limits to how cheap wages can be, compared to the value of what they handle. You cannot really underpay a goldsmith - he will arrange his own pay then. If the response is a security guard, then you're suddenly paying for a guard too

Re:Good luck with that

[haruchai]

Amazon doesn't hesitate to steal the ideas of its customers and undercut them

Re:Good luck with that

[cheesybagel]

Exactly. The problem is those guys were caught selling the data Amazon uses to cut these online retailers who operate on their site off in the first place.

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[drinkypoo]

Amazon doesn't hesitate to steal the ideas of its customers and undercut them

You can't steal an idea any more than you can steal an mp3. If I copy your idea, we both have an idea, you don't lose yours.

It must be nice to never have had anything actually stolen from you. That's the only possible way you could possibly misunderstand theft so completely.

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[forkfail]

It must be strange to never have come up with an idea worth stealing. That's the only possible way you could possibly misunderstand theft so completely.

FTFY

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[drinkypoo]

You fixed nothing, kid. You don't even understand what these words mean, and as such, you can add nothing to this conversation.

Copying an idea without permission ain't stealing it. It might be unscrupulous, but it still isn't theft. And trying to claim otherwise only makes you wrong, it doesn't change anything.

When even the law is ahead of you, you know that your ideas are outdated.

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[forkfail]

Let's parse your argument. This should be fun!

You fixed nothing, kid. You don't even understand what these words mean, and as such, you can add nothing to this conversation.

We open with an ad hominem.

Copying an idea without permission ain't stealing it. It might be unscrupulous, but it still isn't theft.

We now move on to restating the original claim, adding nothing to support that claim.

And trying to claim otherwise only makes you wrong, it doesn't change anything.

And now we add to this an unsupported claim of correctness, without supporting argument. "I'm right and you're wrong." That's some advanced logic and rhetoric, that is.

When even the law is ahead of you, you know that your ideas are outdated.

Finally. An attempt to support your position. Only - to make the claim that the laws of man are the standard by which ideas should be judged, one would have to prove that human law

Re:Good luck with that

[andymadigan]

Studies have shown that corruption is a major impediment to economic growth. Both of these countries have experienced huge economic growth in the past 50 years, but they've realized that corruption is holding them back.

China is fighting corruption in their civil service. India tried demonetizing their two largest currency notes to fight "dark money".

What I'm saying is, it's not just Amazon trying to "inject" these western values. If your Indian counterpart wants to improve his living conditions he's going to have to do it honestly, or watch as one rich multinational after another pulls out of his country or implements police-state level controls to keep their employees in line.

Corruption hurts these countries in other ways too, it diverts money from legitimate businesses and discourages entrepreneurship.

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[DNS-and-BIND]

It's that they don't have a trust based society like we do. We trust each other; they don't. We are finding out that Western values are not universal values, they are unique and special and likely only work for us. Our forcing them in others is the path to failure. What we call corruption is an aberration, in their societies it is the norm. The goal is not to fix corruption but to join it.

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[Pinky's Brain]

Corrupt always float to the top, fighting corruption can only happen bottom up. It requires a culture hostile to it, generally born from religion.

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[nanospook]

Actually we don't trust each other in the Western World, though I think I understand what you are saying that it's more likely we trust each other. But we have tons of oversight and "lesson's learned" laws and regulatuions in government and company culture. All because we don't trust people not to steal or do something unethical.

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[andymadigan]

Actually, I didn't bother trying to find the studies, because I figured the more important point was that the governments of both countries seem to take the problem seriously enough to have carried out major public policy initiatives to fight corruption. The science matters less than what people do with it.

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[mapkinase]

It is more useful to think of corruption without implying "government corruption". Corruption is affecting every single complex enough hierachic monolithic structure. It does not matter if it is a government or transnational corporation.

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[gtall]

I tend to take the term "corruption" a bit more broadly. Corruption = cheating. Cheating isn't easy to qualify or quantify, but the term still has meaning. Cheating is screwing your co-worker out of something s/he wants out of spite or because it helps you. Cheating is companies willfully polluting the environment when they know they are doing it. Cheating is gerrymandering voting districts.

And "the fish rots from the head"...to which I would add "cheating flows downhill within an organization."

CIA should work this

[AHuxley]

Want to buy some US "gov and "mil" "data" sets?
Create nice big fake date sets and see who wants to buy what.

Affiliate money laundering

[macraig]

Meanwhile, shady "affiliates" continue to launder money for crime lords through the site with impunity, and Amazon does nothing because they're getting a cut. As long as the police don't get involved, Amazon will happily let it slide.

Not a Scam

[Luthair]

If the employees are selling internal information from Amazon, no one is being 'scammed' since the buyers are getting what they paid for. Obviously Amazon could complain about industrial espionage or some such but that isn't a scam.

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[Luthair]

a confidence game or other fraudulent scheme, especially for making a quick profit; swindle.