Amazon.com sued what it referred to as a global ring of thieves who swiped hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in merchandise from the corporate by a sequence of refund scams that included shopping for merchandise on Amazon and searching for refunds with out returning the products.
A company referred to as REKK marketed its refund companies on social media websites, together with Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon mentioned in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Courtroom within the state of Washington. The lawsuit names REKK and almost 30 individuals from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants within the scheme, which concerned hacking into Amazon’s inside programs and bribing Amazon workers to approve reimbursements. REKK charged clients, who wished to get expensive objects like MacBook Professional laptops and automobile tires with out paying for them, a fee based mostly on the worth of the acquisition.
“The defendants’ scheme tricks Amazon into processing refunds for products that are never returned; instead of returning the products as promised, defendants keep the product and the refund,” Amazon mentioned in its lawsuit.
The lawsuit lists greater than a dozen transactions from June 2022 to Could 2023 as resulting in fraudulent refunds. Gadgets bought embody gaming consoles, smartphones, laptops and even a pure gold coin. The corporate identifies no less than seven former Amazon workers that participated within the theft as “insiders” by allegedly taking bribes of hundreds of {dollars} to approve refunds regardless that merchandise weren’t returned.
Buyers all over the world will spend $678 billion on Amazon websites this 12 months, making it a giant goal for scams that generally result in felony indictments and contain Amazon insiders. In 2020, an Amazon worker in India was charged with taking $100,000 in bribes to provide choose retailers benefits over others promoting items on the location.
Amazon mentioned it spent $1.2 billion and employed 15,000 individuals in 2022 to struggle theft, fraud and abuse on its web site.
“When fraud is detected, as in this case, Amazon takes a variety of measures to stop the activity, including issuing warnings, closing accounts, and preventing individuals who engaged in refund fraud from opening new accounts,” Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vp accountable for vendor companies, mentioned in a LinkedIn post.
