Amazon invested over $700 million and employed more than 10,000 people in 2020 to protect its stores from fraud and abuse, the company said on Monday.

The company has released its 2020 Brand Protection Report in which it detailed measures taken to crack down on counterfeits and ensure authentic products on its stores.

Amazon has been investing in “dedicated teams and industry-leading machine learning technology to proactively protect customers, brands and its selling partners from counterfeiters, and to hold them accountable if they attempt to sell fakes through Amazon,” the e-commerce giant said in an official release.

It has blocked over 10 billion suspected bad listings before they were published in its store

“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, Vice President, Customer Trust and Partner Support, Amazon.

“Our team's relentless innovation has helped us stop six million attempts to create a selling account and more than 10 billion suspect listings as we continue to drive counterfeits to zero,” added Mehta.

Apart from this, less than 0.01 per cent of all products sold on Amazon received a counterfeit complaint from customers, the company said. Those complaints were then investigated for accuracy, it said.

The tech giant seized more than two million products that were sent to its fulfilment centres 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,” it said.

Counterfeit crimes

Counterfeit crimes have been increasingly becoming an issue for the online retailer. Nike, for instance, had stopped selling direct products through the online retail platform, largely due to unlicensed and imposter sellers, the Verge had reported.

The US administration last year had placed five of the company’s foreign websites on its “notorious markets” list due to counterfeit sellers, the report added. Amazon in 2020 had also launched a Counterfeit Crimes Unit to combat counterfeit products on its website.

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