E-commerce company Amazon in its latest report on brand protection on Tuesday said it stopped more than 700,000 (7 lakh) ‘bad-actor attempts’ to create new seller accounts in 2023, stopping them before they were able to list a single product for sale in the online store. Highlighting key areas helping the company to reduce counterfeits to zero, Amazon said innovations in seller vetting are deterring bad actors from attempting to create new selling accounts.
“Our robust seller verification uses document forgery detection, advanced image and video verification, and other technologies to quickly confirm the authenticity of government-issued identity documents and whether they match the individual applying to sell in our store,” Dharmesh Mehta, Vice President, Worldwide Selling Partner Services, Amazon said in a blog post.
The company said it invested over $1.2 billion and employed more than 15,000 people—including machine learning scientists, software developers, and expert investigators— to protect customers, brands, selling partners, and its store from counterfeit, fraud, and other forms of abuse.
A Juniper Research study in October 2022 had noted that the total cost of e-commerce fraud to merchants will exceed $48 billion globally in 2023, from just over $41 billion in 2022, on the back of growing use of alternative payment methods, such as digital wallets and BNPL (Buy-Now-Pay-Later), which are creating new fraud risks.
Amazon said its Counterfeit Crimes Unit since 2020 has pursued more than 21,000 bad actors through litigation and criminal referrals to law enforcement. In 2023, it identified, seized, and appropriately disposed of more than 7 million counterfeit products worldwide, preventing them from harming customers or being resold elsewhere in the retail supply chain.
Post Covid, security breaches continue to take a heavy toll on the e-commerce industry, whose losses from online payment fraud totalled more than $40 billion dollars in 2022, as per Statista. As a result, the e-commerce fraud detection and prevention market is expected to grow over 2X between 2023 and 2027, surpassing $100 billion dollars.